Comparison by Non-Metrical Traits of Xaltocan's Shrine vs. Teotihuacan in Mexico by Using a Non-Metric Multidimensional Scaling Method

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 2" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

There is little information about the biological diversity of the populations that inhabited the Basin of Mexico. In this work we focused on showing the phenotypic differences between 118 skulls of the Xaltocan sanctuary and 44 adult skulls from Teotihuacan. It is not clear how this variability relates to ethnic diversity because ethnicity and biology are not always correlated. However, given that the smaller settlements in the region during the Classic and Epiclassic periods had relatively low populations, the biological distances between individuals can help us to understand the population dynamics of the region. For phenotype differentiation, we use non-metrical traits (NMT) since they are well related with genotypes and are easiest to measure, even for incomplete skulls. We undertake an analysis by non-metric multidimensional scaling analysis (nMDS) for the Euclidean distances of the NMT.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 2   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25142