Reassessing Chupícuaro–Cuicuilco Relationships in Light of Ceramic Production (Formative Mesoamerica)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Reassessing Chupícuaro–Cuicuilco Relationships in Light of Ceramic Production (Formative Mesoamerica)" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This session focuses on the relationships between two Formative cultural cores: Chupícuaro in the Lerma valley and Cuicuilco in the Basin of Mexico, exploring the ceramic materials. In order to clarify the nature and intensity of these relationships, this symposium presents the first results of an interdisciplinary research project (CHUPICERAM) that focuses on the ceramic production processes, from the raw materials acquisition strategy to the finished product. A range of complementary tools used by archaeology, geology, and physico-chemical sciences are mobilized in order to identify the raw material provenance, define the manufacturing methods and recipes, and retrace the possible circulation networks. The methodical comparative approach is based on a representative sampling and integrating recent archaeological assemblages from the Chupícuaro region, and museum collections built up during excavations carried out in the first half of the twentieth century, both in Chupícuaro and Cuicuilco. These collections are evaluated with high-performance instrumentation adapted to sherds and/or complete objects: techno-stylistic study based on the analytical tool of chaîne opératoire, petrographic and mineralogical characterization, a wide range of chemical analyses, and a full set of noninvasive techniques. The crossing of all these data will make it possible to overcome the limits induced by stylistic analogies.