The River Suchil Valley project, Zacatecas and Durango 10 years of its inception

Summary

This project pretends to understand the process of social complexity by studying the strategies of landscape use and prehispanic resource management throughout the first millennium AD in a territory occupied today by the municipalities of Sombrerete and Chalchihuites, in the state of Zacatecas and Suchil, in the state of Durango.

In our presentation we are going to evaluate and define the results of our research on topics as bioarchaeology of the ancient inhabitants, hierarchy and complexity of settlements, mining, the importance of the lapidary industry, funerary patterns over time, and so on. The information generated so far allows us to consider the Chalchihuites culture a highly dynamic social development which established settlements with public areas for the performance of agricultural and funeral rituals that were in the need of imported raw materials such as the American Southwest turquoise for the production of jewelry used by their governing elites offered as grave goods in burials and perhaps exported to western and central Mexico as well.

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)   •
• Advances on the investigation of Chalchihuites culture

Keywords

Spatial Coverage