Art and Science Collide: Investigating Demography, Population Circulation, and Cultural Change in the Aztatlán Region of West Mexico through Humanistic and Scientific Approaches

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In late 2024, the Getty in partnership with museums and scientific institutions across southern California launched the initiative “PST ART: Art & Science Collide” as part of their landmark Pacific Standard Time (PST) series. The program’s goal is to investigate the intersection of art and science in collaborative projects that address questions on human expressions of culture and biological relations to the environment in the past and present. In a separate endeavor but with a similar collaborative spirit, the present authors initiated a project funded in 2020 by the National Science Foundation that bridges the arts and sciences in examining pre-Hispanic demographics and population circulation in the Aztatlán region (AD 850/900–1350+) of west Mexico. This project engages legacy collections at the UCLA Fowler Museum derived from the Anthropology department’s past research in West Mexico. We focus on the Aztatlán sites of Amapa and Peñitas on the Nayarit coastal plain and Tizapán el Alto in highland Jalisco and provide some recent results on the scientific study of ancient DNA and the results of direct AMS dating together with insights from the study of art, symbolism, cosmology, and landscape ritualism in a step toward bridging scientific and humanistic approaches to the past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53850