Introduction to the Matacanela Archaeological Project: Collapse and Political Reorganization in a Lowland Mesoamerican Society

Summary

The Matacanela Archaeological Project is a two season effort to more fully understand the transformation of lowland Mesoamerican society at the end of the Classic period. Our particular focus is Classic collapse and Postclassic reorganization in the Tuxtla Mountains of the southern Gulf lowlands. Like other lowland regions (e.g., the southern Maya lowlands) that experienced political decentralization, demographic upheaval, environmental, and climatic change, collapse was not complete or uniformly experienced. This project interrogates differential cultural response to collapse and the creative adaptations that characterized transformations in this lowland society. In this opening presentation, I highlight some of the challenges to understanding this period of transformation in the southern Gulf lowlands, layout the interpretive framework that informs the study, discuss the hypotheses that our work is testing, and consider what we have learned from this first season of fieldwork. I conclude by anticipating what we hope to learn from subsequent research at the site.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The Matacanela Archaeological Project 2014

Keywords

Spatial Coverage