Violence and Veneration at the Edges: Mortuary Traditions and Social Order along the Northern and Southern Frontiers of Mesoamerica

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Journeying to the South, from Mimbres (New Mexico) to Malpaso (Zacatecas) and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Ben A. Nelson" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The northern and southern frontiers of Mesoamerica are about 2000 km apart and are separated by an incredible diversity of peoples and environments. Yet, these frontier spaces appear to be developmentally similar in many ways during the period ca. AD 500-1000, including the scale and complexity of social forms, the types of regional interactions among multiple ethnic groups, and the prominent use of human skeletal material to mark ritual displays in living spaces and ceremonial centers. This presentation compares both areas, focusing on northwest Mexico and northwest Honduras, to consider how the multiethnic character of these frontier settings may have been conducive to the development of mortuary practices that emphasized a particular mix of violence and veneration for negotiating interethnic social dynamics. To what extent did different communities deploy imagistic (involving sensory arousal) and doctrinal (involving patterned repetition) modes of mortuary religiosity to structure social relations? What might the activation of these alternate modes of religiosity tell us about attempts to resolve ethnic conflict? We address these questions using bio/archaeological data from northwest Mexico published by Ben Nelson and colleagues along with new mortuary data from northwest Honduras.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Journeying to the South, from Mimbres (New Mexico) to Malpaso (Zacatecas) and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Ben A. Nelson   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23014