Matacanela in Its Regional and Cultural Context

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Olmec Manifestations and Ongoing Societal Transformations in the Tuxtlas Uplands: A View from Matacanela" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this presentation I synthesize recent studies that the Matacanela Archaeological Project has produced as a way of situating the presentations in this session within their broader temporal and spatial contexts, both with the Tuxtlas and the broader Gulf lowlands. One notable aspect of Matacanela’s settlement history was its resilience from its Middle Formative Olmec occupation, through the Formative-to-Classic transition—a feature that differentiates it from several other Gulf lowland settlements, both within the volcanically active western Tuxtlas and beyond. That resilience continued through the Late Classic period. I review some of the creative strategies that occupants at the center employed as they negotiated and contributed to transforming physical, political, demographic, and economic landscapes, and introduce others that will be elaborated upon by individual session participants. Moreover, I examine evidence from Matacanela, which straddles a geographical boundary between the western Tuxtlas uplands and Eastern Olman, that speaks to the ways that Matacanela’s geographical boundary position is also reflected in different cultural interaction networks during both the Formative and Classic periods.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Olmec Manifestations and Ongoing Societal Transformations in the Tuxtlas Uplands: A View from Matacanela   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23710