Ternimal Classic Copper Production at El Coyote, Honduras

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Centralizing Central America: New Evidence, Fresh Perspectives, and Working on New Paradigms" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists have long speculated that western Honduras was one source of the copper artifacts found in southern Mesoamerica from the tenth century onward. Until now, there has been little field evidence to back up this claim. Work conducted at the major political center of El Coyote in 2002, 2004, 2013, and 2018 has yielded clear signs of copper processing up to the point of casting, signs of the last activity being more equivocal. The dates for the copper workshop, though not straightforward, strongly suggest that artisans worked here beginning in the ninth century. We describe in this paper the stages of copper working for which we have direct evidence at El Coyote, review the lines of evidence used to date these practices, and consider how copper working figured within the political formations that took shape at the center during the Terminal Classic (CE 800–1000). We close by considering the implications of these findings for our understanding of the tumultuous political and economic changes that characterized much of southeast Mesoamerica during the ninth through tenth centuries.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Centralizing Central America: New Evidence, Fresh Perspectives, and Working on New Paradigms   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37904.0