Refining the Regional Ceramic Chronology of the Postclassic Basin of Mexico to account for Spatial-Temporal Variability

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The archaeology of the Postclassic (c. AD 900-1520) Basin of Mexico (BOM) is among the most intensively studied in the New World. In spite of this, longstanding questions about population dynamics and social change remain unresolved due to the persistent gaps and coarse resolution of its regional-scale ceramic chronology. Ongoing fieldwork and methodological advances since the 1980s have led scholars to propose refined chronologies for particular sites/subregions. Yet these refined local chronologies are often strikingly different in terms of chronological markers and their relative abundance through time. This has led to the recognition of considerable spatial and temporal variability in the BOM’s Postclassic ceramic sequence—only the broad contours of which have been outlined. To overcome the data gaps, this study analyzes an integrated database of over 3000 excavation and survey collections (and associated radiocarbon dates) from over 500 sites across the region. The resulting regional chronology models the changing geographical contours of ceramic assemblages through time by incorporating established chronological methods into a spatially-explicit Bayesian analysis anchored to dated/excavated ceramic sequences. Not only does the model more than double the regional-scale chronological resolution, analysis of the database offers strong evidence on key issues such as post-Toltec northern population collapse.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36426.0