Spatial Analysis in Pre-Columbian Nicaragua

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This poster presents the result of a systematic spatial analysis of lithic and ceramic artifacts and how ratios thereof change over time in order to assess the applicability of the social-risk model originally proposed by Manuel Antonio Román Lacayo (2013) in explaining patterns of population aggregation observed during the Sapoá period (800-1350 CE) in Nicaragua. Regional systematic pedestrian survey has revealed an unprecedented change in demographic distribution, indicative of a change in pre-Columbian sociopolitical arrangement in Masaya, Nicaragua. He proposed a model focusing on social risk induced by deteriorating climate as the major factor driving social change in order to offer possible explanations of this demographic change. In this poster, I present expectations about spatial distributions of lithics and ceramics according to the social-risk model and test them against empirical archaeological evidence. These pertain to how humans interact with environmental change and how this interaction could have motivated social transformation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24012