Territorial attachments and border formation in the Upper Usumacinta river Basin. Discussing ceramic mobility within a fractured political and geographical landscape.

Summary

To date, archaeologists working in the Northwestern Maya Lowlands, specifically in the Upper Usumacinta region have focused their attention to ceramic variability and regional distributions trying to "picture" the degree of variability in the role of local centers in regional ceramic exchange systems. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to territorial variability-for example, the distinction between contiguous and non contiguous territorial formations highlighted by recent regional archaeological studies for Piedras Negras, Yaxchilan and Palenque- and how the latter affects ceramic regional distributions. The existence of a fractured geographic and political landscape poses interesting questions for archaeological scholarship: what do the existence of political allegiance or tribute from noncontiguous populations imply for ceramic distributions? how does it differ from those among territorial contiguous populations? how are not only distributions of resources but also histories of migrations, genealogies, military conquest and alliance building implicated in these patterns?

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Circulation of People, Things & Ideas: Practices of Mobility in the Upper Usumacinta Basin

Keywords

Spatial Coverage