Shifting Patterns of Obsidian Procurement within a Distant Consumer Region

Summary

This is an abstract from the "El principio del fin, el inicio del principio: Arqueología de la transición del Formativo al Clásico en Los Tuxtlas, Veracruz, México" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

By the Formative period, prehispanic societies in southern Veracruz primarily relied on obsidian for numerous daily activities. However, as the geological sources of obsidian that were exploited occur in central Mexico and the Guatemalan and Honduran highlands, southern Veracruz represents a distant consumer macroregion of obsidian. The Eastern Lower Papaloapan Basin (ELPB) exists within this macroregion, located to the west of the base of the Tuxtla Mountains. Local communities within the ELPB necessarily forged interregional relationships that can be found underpinning the long-distance exchange networks facilitating the movement of obsidian raw material. In this paper, I endeavor to identify these dynamic exchange networks present in the ELPB during the Formative and Classic periods through a diachronic analysis of shifting obsidian procurement patterns. This transitional period also represents a time of sociopolitical and economic change at the local scale, as well as regional and macroregional scales; thus, the patterns of obsidian procurement must further be situated within these broader contexts. To facilitate this discussion, I draw on data generated from portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) and technological analyses of 5,022 samples of obsidian collected during a regional archaeological survey that targeted the ELPB.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• El principio del fin, el inicio del principio: Arqueología de la transición del Formativo al Clásico en Los Tuxtlas, Veracruz, México   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40099.0