Early Mesoamerican Social Transformations

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Early Mesoamerican Social Transformations

Author : Richard G. Lesure
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2011-09-04
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780520268999

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Early Mesoamerican Social Transformations by Richard G. Lesure Pdf

"Data and interpretations generated from the Soconusco are critical but often fail to inform larger debates in Mesoamerica as frequently as they should. This book remedies that situation; it will be of interest to all Mesoamericanists who work on the Archaic and Formative periods."--Jeffrey P. Blomster, editor of After Monte Alban: Transformation and Negotiation in Oaxaca, Mexico "This volume will be crucial to our understanding of the origins of civilization in Mesoamerica. Its interpretations are innovative and present a wealth of new research on an early time period from a very important region. Its importance cannot be underestimated."--Terry G. Powis, Department of Anthropology, Kennesaw State University

Early Mesoamerican Social Transformations

Author : Richard G. Lesure
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2011-10-04
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780520950566

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Early Mesoamerican Social Transformations by Richard G. Lesure Pdf

Between 3500 and 500 bc, the social landscape of ancient Mesoamerica was completely transformed. At the beginning of this period, the mobile lifeways of a sparse population were oriented toward hunting and gathering. Three millennia later, protourban communities teemed with people. These essays by leading Mesoamerican archaeologists examine developments of the era as they unfolded in the Soconusco region along the Pacific coast of Mexico and Guatemala, a region that has emerged as crucial for understanding the rise of ancient civilizations in Mesoamerica. The contributors explore topics including the gendered division of labor, changes in subsistence, the character of ceremonialism, the emergence of social inequality, and large-scale patterns of population distribution and social change. Together, they demonstrate the contribution of Soconusco to cultural evolution in Mesoamerica and challenge what we thought we knew about the path toward social complexity.

Religion and Politics in the Ancient Americas

Author : Sarah B. Barber,Arthur A. Joyce
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 323 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2017-09-20
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781317440826

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Religion and Politics in the Ancient Americas by Sarah B. Barber,Arthur A. Joyce Pdf

This exciting collection explores the interplay of religion and politics in the precolumbian Americas. Each thought-provoking contribution positions religion as a primary factor influencing political innovations in this period, reinterpreting major changes through an examination of how religion both facilitated and constrained transformations in political organization and status relations. Offering unparalleled geographic and temporal coverage of this subject, Religion and Politics in the Ancient Americas spans the entire precolumbian period, from Preceramic Peru to the Contact period in eastern North America, with case studies from North, Middle, and South America. Religion and Politics in the Ancient Americas considers the ways in which religion itself generated political innovation and thus enabled political centralization to occur. It moves beyond a "Great Tradition" focus on elite religion to understand how local political authority was negotiated, contested, bolstered, and undermined within diverse constituencies, demonstrating how religion has transformed non-Western societies. As well as offering readers fresh perspectives on specific archaeological cases, this book breaks new ground in the archaeological examination of religion and society.

Identities, Experience, and Change in Early Mexican Villages

Author : Catharina E. Santasilia,Guy David Hepp,Richard A. Diehl
Publisher : University Press of Florida
Page : 349 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2022-05-03
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780813070148

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Identities, Experience, and Change in Early Mexican Villages by Catharina E. Santasilia,Guy David Hepp,Richard A. Diehl Pdf

New perspectives on an important era in Mesoamerican history This volume examines shifting social identities, lived experiences, and networks of interaction in Mexico during the Mesoamerican Formative period (2000 BCE–250 CE), an era that helped produce some of the world’s most renowned complex civilizations. The chapters offer significant data, innovative methodologies, and novel perspectives on Mexican archaeology. Using diverse and non-traditional theoretical approaches, contributors discuss interregional relationships and the exchange of ideas in contexts ranging from the Gulf Coast Olmec region to the site of Tlatilco in Central Mexico to the often-overlooked cultures of the far western states. Their essays explore identity formation, cosmological perspectives, the first hints of social complexity, the underpinnings of Formative period economies, and the sensorial implications of sociocultural change. Identities, Experience, and Change in Early Mexican Villages is one of the first volumes to address the entirety of this rich and complex era and region, offering a new and holistic view. Through a wealth of exciting interpretations from international senior and emerging scholars, this volume shows the strong influence of cultural exchange as well as the compelling individuality of local and regional contexts over two thousand years of history. Contributors: Catharina E. Santasilia | Guy D. Hepp | Richard A. Diehl | Jeffrey P. Blomster | Philip (Flip) J. Arnold III | Patricia Ochoa Castillo | Christopher Beekman | Tatsuya Murakami | Jeffrey S. Brzezinski | Vanessa Monson | Arthur A. Joyce | Sarah B. Barber | Henri Noel Bernard| Sara Ladrón de Guevara| Mayra Manrique| José Luis Ruvalcaba

La Consentida

Author : Guy David Hepp
Publisher : University Press of Colorado
Page : 335 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2019-04-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781607328537

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La Consentida by Guy David Hepp Pdf

La Consentida explores Early Formative period transitions in residential mobility, subsistence, and social organization at the site of La Consentida in coastal Oaxaca, Mexico. Examining how this site transformed during one of the most fundamental moments of socioeconomic change in the ancient Americas, the book provides a new way of thinking about the social dynamics of Mesoamerican communities of the period. Guy David Hepp summarizes the results of several seasons of fieldwork and laboratory analysis under the aegis of the La Consentida Archaeological Project, drawing on various forms of evidence—ground stone tools, earthen architecture, faunal remains, human dental pathologies, isotopic indicators, ceramics, and more— to reveal how transitions in settlement, subsistence, and social organization at La Consentida were intimately linked. While Mesoamerica is too diverse for research at a single site to lay to rest ongoing debates about the Early Formative period, evidence from La Consentida should inform those debates because of the site’s unique ecological setting, its relative lack of disturbance by later occupations, and because it represents the only well-documented Early Formative period village in a 300-mile stretch of Mexico’s Pacific coast. One of the only studies to closely document multiple lines of evidence of the transition toward a sedentary, agricultural society at an individual settlement in Mesoamerica, La Consentida is a key resource for understanding the transition to settled life and social complexity in Mesoamerican societies.

Early Mesoamerican Cities

Author : Michael Love,Julia Guernsey
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2022-01-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9781108838511

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Early Mesoamerican Cities by Michael Love,Julia Guernsey Pdf

This study of early cities in Mesoamerica will contribute significantly to the world-wide discourse on early cities and urbanism.

Preceramic Mesoamerica

Author : Jon C. Lohse,Aleksander Borejsza,Arthur A. Joyce
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 713 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2021-05-30
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780429620096

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Preceramic Mesoamerica by Jon C. Lohse,Aleksander Borejsza,Arthur A. Joyce Pdf

Preceramic Mesoamerica delivers cutting-edge research on the Mesoamerican Paleoindian and Archaic periods. The chapters address a series of fundamental questions in American archaeology including the peopling of the Americas, human adaptations to late glacial landscapes, the Neolithic transition, and the origins of sedentism and early village life. This volume presents innovative and previously unpublished research on the Paleoindian and Archaic periods and evaluates current models in light of new findings. Examples include breakthroughs in dating Mesoamerica’s earliest sites and their implications for models of hemispheric colonization; the transition to postglacial patterns of settlement and subsistence; divergent pathways to initial sedentism; the possibility of Archaic-period monumentality; changing patterns of interregional exchange and interaction; and debates surrounding the origins of agriculture, ceramics, and full-time village life. The volume provides a new perspective on the Mesoamerican Preceramic for students and scholars in archaeology, anthropology, and history. Readers will come to understand how the Preceramic contributed to the emergence of the cultural traditions that anthropologists recognize as Mesoamerica.

Colonial and Postcolonial Change in Mesoamerica

Author : Rani T. Alexander,Susan Kepecs
Publisher : University of New Mexico Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2018-11-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780826359742

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Colonial and Postcolonial Change in Mesoamerica by Rani T. Alexander,Susan Kepecs Pdf

This book offers a new account of human interaction and culture change for Mesoamerica that connects the present to the past. Social histories that assess the cultural upheavals between the Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica and the ethnographic present overlook the archaeological record, with its unique capacity to link local practices to global processes. To fill this gap, the authors weigh the material manifestations of the colonial and postcolonial trajectory in light of local, regional, and global historical processes that have unfolded over the last five hundred years. Research on a suite of issues—economic history, production of commodities, agrarian change, resistance, religious shifts, and sociocultural identity—demonstrates that the often shocking patterns observed today are historically contingent and culturally mediated, and therefore explainable. This book belongs to a new wave of scholarship that renders the past immediately relevant to the present, which Alexander and Kepecs see as one of archaeology’s most crucial goals.

The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization

Author : Tamar Hodos
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 995 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2016-11-18
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781315448992

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The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization by Tamar Hodos Pdf

This unique collection applies globalization concepts to the discipline of archaeology, using a wide range of global case studies from a group of international specialists. The volume spans from as early as 10,000 cal. BP to the modern era, analysing the relationship between material culture, complex connectivities between communities and groups, and cultural change. Each contributor considers globalization ideas explicitly to explore the socio-cultural connectivities of the past. In considering social practices shared between different historic groups, and also the expression of their respective identities, the papers in this volume illustrate the potential of globalization thinking to bridge the local and global in material culture analysis. The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization is the first such volume to take a world archaeology approach, on a multi-period basis, in order to bring together the scope of evidence for the significance of material culture in the processes of globalization. This work thus also provides a means to understand how material culture can be used to assess the impact of global engagement in our contemporary world. As such, it will appeal to archaeologists and historians as well as social science researchers interested in the origins of globalization.

Formative Lifeways in Central Tlaxcala, Volume 1

Author : Richard G. Lesure
Publisher : Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press
Page : 445 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2014-12-31
Category : History
ISBN : 9781938770548

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Formative Lifeways in Central Tlaxcala, Volume 1 by Richard G. Lesure Pdf

This book, the first of a projected three, reports on excavations at Formative-period sites in the state of Tlaxcala, Mexico. The transition to the Formative in the relatively high-altitude study region is later than in choice regions for early agriculture elsewhere in Mesoamerica. From 900 BC, however, population growth and sociopolitical development were rapid. A central claim in the research presented here is that a macroregional perspective is essential for understanding the local Formative sequence. In this volume, excavations at three village sites (Amomoloc, Tetel, and Las Mesitas) and one modest regional center (La Laguna) are reported. Ceramics are described in detail. An innovative approach to the classification of figurines is presented, and a Formative chronology for the region is proposed based on seriation of refuse contexts and radiocarbon dates. The work concludes with a macroregional framework to be used in the analysis of subsistence, social relations, and political economy in forthcoming volumes 2 and 3.

Routes, Interaction and Exchange in the Southern Maya Area

Author : Eugenia Robinson,Gavin Davies
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 516 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2023-07-31
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000918892

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Routes, Interaction and Exchange in the Southern Maya Area by Eugenia Robinson,Gavin Davies Pdf

This book explores routes of interaction and exchange in the Southern Maya Area, a zone that had both short- and long-distance trade and whose natural resources were exploited by merchants and rulers, colonists and entrepreneurs during Olmec, Teotihuacan, Maya, Aztec, colonial and modern times. The book presents the research of both archaeologists and art historians to identify routes of interconnection, to demonstrate the strategic importance of settlements and ritual locations, and to assess the significance of modes and mediums of exchange. The contributors employ innovative approaches, making use of state-of-the art technologies to reproduce and analyze the archaeological landscape (e.g. LiDAR, GIS, and least-cost path analysis) and to source and characterize archaeological materials (e.g. neutron activation analysis (NAA), X-ray fluorescence analysis [XRF] and strontium analysis). The book combines these innovative approaches with earlier data sources and past analyses to develop a new, synthetic analysis of interaction. Routes, Interaction and Exchange in the Southern Maya Area will appeal to professional academics, students, and interested lay readers from a broad range of social science fields including anthropology, archaeology, geography, economics, history, and art history and is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate courses in Mesoamerican archaeology.

The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology

Author : Deborah L. Nichols,Christopher A. Pool
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 1000 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2012-09-24
Category : History
ISBN : 9780199996346

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The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology by Deborah L. Nichols,Christopher A. Pool Pdf

The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology provides a current and comprehensive guide to the recent and on-going archaeology of Mesoamerica. Though the emphasis is on prehispanic societies, this Handbook also includes coverage of important new work by archaeologists on the Colonial and Republican periods. Unique among recent works, the text brings together in a single volume article-length regional syntheses and topical overviews written by active scholars in the field of Mesoamerican archaeology. The first section of the Handbook provides an overview of recent history and trends of Mesoamerica and articles on national archaeology programs and practice in Central America and Mexico written by archaeologists from these countries. These are followed by regional syntheses organized by time period, beginning with early hunter-gatherer societies and the first farmers of Mesoamerica and concluding with a discussion of the Spanish Conquest and frontiers and peripheries of Mesoamerica. Topical and comparative articles comprise the remainder of Handbook. They cover important dimensions of prehispanic societies--from ecology, economy, and environment to social and political relations--and discuss significant methodological contributions, such as geo-chemical source studies, as well as new theories and diverse theoretical perspectives. The Handbook concludes with a section on the archaeology of the Spanish conquest and the Colonial and Republican periods to connect the prehispanic, proto-historic, and historic periods. This volume will be a must-read for students and professional archaeologists, as well as other scholars including historians, art historians, geographers, and ethnographers with an interest in Mesoamerica.

Human Figuration and Fragmentation in Preclassic Mesoamerica

Author : Julia Guernsey
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 285 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2020-02-27
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781108478991

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Human Figuration and Fragmentation in Preclassic Mesoamerica by Julia Guernsey Pdf

Explores the social significance of representation of the human body in Preclassic Mesoamerica.

Paso de la Amada

Author : Richard G Lesure
Publisher : Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press
Page : 672 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2021-08-29
Category : History
ISBN : 9781950446209

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Paso de la Amada by Richard G Lesure Pdf

Paso de la Amada, an archaeological site in the Soconusco region of the Pacific coast of Mexico, was among the earliest sedentary, ceramic-using villages of Mesoamerica. With an occupation that extended across 140 ha in 1600 BC, it was also one of the largest communities of its era. First settled around 1900 BC, the site was abandoned 600 years later during what appears to have been a period of local political turmoil. The decline of Paso de la Amada corresponded with a rupture in local traditions of material culture and local adoption of the Early Olmec style. Stylistically, the material culture of Paso de la Amada corresponds predominantly to the pre-Olmec Mokaya tradition. Excavations at the site have revealed significant earthen constructions from as early as 1700 BC. Those include the earliest known Mesoamerican ball court and traces of a series of high-status residences. This monograph reports on large-scale excavations in Mounds 1, 12, and 32, as well as soundings in other locations. The volume covers all aspects of excavations and artifacts and includes three lengthy interpretive chapters dealing with the main research questions, which concern subsistence, social inequality, and the organizational history of the site.

Mesoamerican Plazas

Author : Kenichiro Tsukamoto,Takeshi Inomata
Publisher : University of Arizona Press
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2014-04-10
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780816598793

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Mesoamerican Plazas by Kenichiro Tsukamoto,Takeshi Inomata Pdf

Until now, archaeological and historical studies of Mesoamerican plazas have been scarce compared to studies of the surrounding monumental architecture such as pyramidal temples and palaces. Many scholars have assumed that ancient Mesoamericans invested their labor, wealth, and symbolic value in pyramids and other prominent buildings, viewing plazas as by-products of these buildings. Even when researchers have recognized the potential significance of plazas, they have thought that plazas as vacant spaces could offer few clues about their cultural and political roles. Mesoamerican Plazas challenges both of these assumptions. The primary question that has motivated the contributors is how Mesoamerican plazas became arenas for the creation and negotiation of social relations and values in a community. The thirteen contributions stress the significance of interplay between power relations and embodied practices set in specific historical and material settings, as outlined by practice theory and performance theory. This approach allows the contributors to explore broader anthropological issues, such as the negotiation of power relations, community making, and the constitution of political authorities. Overall, the contributions establish that physical interactions among people in communal events were not the outcomes of political machinations held behind the scenes, but were the actual political processes through which people created, negotiated, and subverted social realities. If so, spacious plazas that were arguably designed for interactions among a large number of individuals must have also provided critical arenas for the constitution and transformation of society.