Situating Mobility: Local and Regional Connectivities in and beyond the Gulf of Fonseca (AD 800–1520)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Postclassic Mesoamerica: The View from the Southern Frontier" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In precolonial times, the social landscapes of Central America underwent numerous changes. While the impetus for those social changes are still under investigation, they are well documented, both on local and regional scales, in Greater Nicoya between the Bagaces and the Sapoá periods. In the Gulf of Fonseca, to the north, archaeological data remains too scarce to contribute to this debate. However, scholars have often situated this natural feature at the crossroads of regional mobility in Pacific Central America. This paper proposes to review evidence from central Honduras, eastern El Salvador, and northern Nicaragua for regional mobility and social change between AD 800 and 1520. This data will then be contrasted with evidence from known sites in the Gulf of Fonseca exploring how the agency of preexisting localized movements may have impacted regional dynamics in this period. Finally, this paper will propose future avenues of investigations, examining how this natural feature’s affordances facilitated connectivities and contributed to the emergence of new social landscapes in Central America.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Postclassic Mesoamerica: The View from the Southern Frontier

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32947