Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hector Neff.

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Deborah Nichols explored the relationship between subsistence, especially agriculture, and changing modes of settlement and social organization throughout her career. For the most part, her contributions on these topics focused on the Basin of Mexico, where early inhabitants clustered along the shores of shallow lakes, taking advantage of resources...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Smith.

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fieldwork at Otumba, directed by Deborah Nichols and Thomas Charlton, producednumerous important findings on the Aztec economy and urbanism. Otumba has played anoutsized role in our understanding of Aztec craft production and economic organization inparticular. The site has been presented as both prototypical example and outlier. Wecompare...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik Otárola-Castillo.

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Deb Nichols' seminal work on agricultural risk mitigation demonstrates that food-security risk management has been crucial for human survival. This study builds on her legacy. Using a Human Behavioral Ecology perspective, we examine how pre-contact foraging and farming societies in the North American Great Plains navigated uncertainties brought by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dan Healan.

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Based on 45 years of field and laboratory research including participation in two projects co-directed by Deb Nichols, the author examines Mesoamerican prismatic core/blade technology from raw material acquisition through final product utilization and how it varied given the various contexts in which it functioned.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wesley Stoner.

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Deb Nichols has been integral in reconstructing ancient trade relationships in the Basin of Mexico and beyond. My work with her has greatly augmented the study of ceramic exchange for the earliest contexts in central Mexico. I will focus on our study of Early to Late Formative ceramic production systems and touch briefly on how ceramic exchanges...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Pool.

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper honors Deborah Nichols's legacy of research on craft production, exchange, and Formative period interregional interaction. In 2015 Stoner and Pool called for an “Archaeology of Disjuncture” to refocus attention on variation in intra- and interregional interaction, illustrating the approach with the case of the Classic period of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Carballo.

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over her distinguished career, exceptional in both service and scholarship, Deb Nichols made enduring contributions to the archaeology of three major eras of precolonial central Mexico—the Formative, Classic, and Postclassic periods. Her research within the Teotihuacan Valley in particular spanned the transition to early villages, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría.

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation introduces the session honoring Deborah Nichols and her many substantive contributions to archaeology. The presentation focuses on three of her last major projects, which exemplify her scholarship in a broad range of periods in Central Mexico and Mesoamerica. They include her field project at the Formative village of Altica in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Destiny Crider.

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Deborah Nichols’ profound impact on the study of Postclassic ceramic exchange and production in the Basin of Mexico is characterized by her extensive collaboration and mentorship of emerging researchers. Building on the Cerro Portezuelo Reanalysis Project’s established Neutron Activation Analysis program, led by Nichols (Dartmouth) and Cowgill...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily McClung De Tapia.

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recovery and analysis of macro- and microbotanical evidence for plant use carried out over several decades represents an occupational sequence of approximately 3,000 years (ca. 1500 BCE-1500 ACE) in the Teotihuacan Valley, Mexico. Well-known domesticates (e.g., maize, beans, squash) are contrasted with a broad array of gathered and, possibly,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Larry Gorenflo.

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Water control likely was essential for reliable agricultural production in much of the Basin of Mexico over centuries of Prehispanic occupation. Deborah Nichols recognized this throughout her remarkable career, beginning with her doctoral research in the late 1970s but continuing through several studies of irrigation and ancient economies in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Hirth.

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ritual celebrations and feasting were important components for the integration of pre-Columbian societies. Nevertheless, the frequency, scale, and effort expended in ritual events can be difficult to identify from archaeological remains. This paper reconstructs a large and synchronous site-wide ritual celebration at the site of Salitrón Viejo,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Watanabe.

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper reviews the fifty-year contribution of Deborah L. Nichols to Mesoamerican archaeology, highlighting her insistence that archaeology is indeed anthropology and how a fundamental anthropological perspective informed all her work. From her 1977 excavations of the earliest known Basin of Mexico irrigation canals at Santa Clara Coatitlán, to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrés Mejía Ramón.

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In one of her final SAA presentations, Professor Nichols and colleagues described demographic and chronological issues in current models of the Teotihuacan-period Basin of Mexico. They note that Teotihuacan’s population trajectory implies it was a major resource and demographic sink in the Basin, questioning the hinterland’s capacity to sustain the...