According to Purepecha oral tradition, the ancestors of the Uacusecha dynasty that ruled Michoacan at the beginning of the sixteenth century began their epic in the Zacapu region. The importance of this region also lies in the research carried out since the early 1980s that led to the elaboration of a regional sequence outlining the trajectory of pre-Hispanic societies centuries before the emergence of the Tarascan state.

New research carried out on the area since 2009 has clarified this reference framework and opened new perspectives. The research focused on the Malpaís volcanic flows and its immediate surroundings. It addressed the transformations experienced by pre-Hispanic societies between a.d. 500 and a.d. 1580, and their interactions with the volcanic environment with unprecedented analytical detail. The joint contributions of remote sensing, archaeological fieldwork, dating, and geological study participate in renewing a diachronic approach of this unique landscape of northern Michoacan.

Among the numerous archaeological remains that recent LiDAR flights revealed in Guatemala and Mexico, agrarian features are the most abundant. Archaeologists today are compelled to revise their paradigms in terms of methodology and assessment of environmental appropriation for agriculture. The Malpaís de Zacapu in west Mexico is one example. Besides the discovery of a substantial Epiclassic occupation near the well-documented Postclassic urban centers of the area, LiDAR imagery brought to light a deeply modified agrarian landscape and thereby dramatically changed our understanding of human settlement in this lava flows complex.

Focusing on the northern part of the Malpaís, this study uses archaeogeographical and soil science methods to assess ancient farming systems and their evolution. We updated the archaeological and soil maps of the area, combining traditional field survey techniques and LiDAR-derived data interpretation. This allowed us to identify residential zones and a wide range of associated agrarian features adapted to the variety and agronomic challenges of volcanic soils. We further implemented a production-consumption model to reconstruct agricultural strategies from the Epiclassic to the Middle Postclassic period, from self-reliance to the necessity of supra-local agricultural inputs, possibly foreshadowing the Tarascan state tribute system.

Ancestral Maya engineered wetland fields and canals in floodplains for plant cultivation and water management. Canals and reservoirs, however, also provide aquatic resources to supplement agriculture. Maya created multi-trophic ecological aquaculture by modifying the waterscape to increase the amounts of foods and useful materials, such as fish, turtles, waterfowl, and reeds. While archaeological and ethnographic investigations across the Maya area explore aquatic constructions, technology, and foodstuffs, they have not focused on aquaculture. In the western Maya lowlands, including the site of Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico, ancestral Maya modified floodplains around lakes and rivers for farming fish and aquatic resources near their settlements and fields. These extensive modifications for ecological aquaculture enhanced the productivity and resiliency of natural ecosystems. The domesticated waterscapes near the ritually important Mirador Mountain at Mensabak also followed pan-Mesoamerican beliefs in origin mountains that generated water, plants, and fish for humans. Importantly, Maya integrated subsistence is illuminated by research on domesticated landscapes and ecological aquaculture that examines a range of resources rather than just plants. Certainly across Mesoamerica, ecological aquaculture allowed people to intensify production of “farms” of aquatic species, particularly fish.

Pre-hispanic ballgames have an extensive temporal depth and geographical breadth across Mesoamerica, with over 1,500 ball courts recorded on 1,200 archaeological sites in Mexico alone. It is likely that ballgames played critical but variable roles in how communities related to each other. Most interpretations emphasize ballgames as cosmological rituals and legitimation practices exclusive to elites, perhaps often overlooking the more mundane sociopolitical processes and reasons why they carried such critical meaning for people of all classes and statuses. Ethnographic research on modern ballgames played by Indigenous and mestizo communities today can helpfully provide some insights or maybe deeper understandings into ancient ballgame practices and their relation to Mesoamerican communities. While modern games are not isomorphic with the ancient games, the duration of these traditions underscores their continuing importance and their relativity to current research. In this article I present the results of an ethnographic study of the modern ballgame pelota mixteca de hule (Mixtec rubber ballgame) in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Considering the results from the ethnographic data, I then discuss an archaeological case study in the Nejapa Valley of southeastern Oaxaca where numerous ballcourts were recently documented over the past decade.

This article discusses a category of conch-shell gorgets, mainly semielliptical in shape, which were produced during the Terminal Classic period in central Mexico and/or the Maya lowlands. We describe the iconography and style of these ornaments, seek precedents in other media for their themes, and use stylistic and epigraphic data to connect them to long-distance economic and political interactions between the Maya region and central Mexico. Although the portraits on most of the gorgets diverge from earlier Classic Maya conventions, neither do they conform to central Mexican canons. Further discoveries of such pendants in archaeological context may clarify their origins and social uses.

Site E19 (19:N1W5), near Tlailotlacan, the “Zapotec Barrio” of Teotihuacan, contains evidence of both Tlailotlacan and Michoacan affiliation. To verify and better understand the Michoacan relationship, 22 enamel and 19 bone samples from five E19-affiliated burials were analyzed to determine their oxygen isotope compositions, which provide an indication of an individual's area of residence when that particular tissue was forming. Because prismatic blades and Thin Orange ceramics from Teotihuacan occur widely in the Lakes Region of north central Michoacan we obtained samples from several sites there for comparative purposes. The results show that most of the E19 people had passed their later years in the Patzcuaro Basin of the Lakes Region. Although in E19 the archaeological evidence of this relationship declined over time, the isotopic evidence indicates that Patzcuaro ties continued to the end of E19's occupation. It seems that the people of E19, originally Michoacanos, gradually adopted a core identity as Teotihuacanos while continuing to deploy their Michoacan ancestry during their stays in Michoacan.

Across many decades of Maya archaeology, the study of war has typically been focused on its geopolitical, systemic, evolutionary, and structural implications. We argue these approaches stand to benefit from deeper interrogations of practice. Such a perspective shifts scholarly attention toward the ways in which Maya peoples prepared for and engaged in combat, and how they administered the outcomes of war. Deploying this approach requires the study of tactics, strategy, fortifications, materiel, landscape, embodiment, and a host of other related factors. With the issue of practice at the forefront of our analysis, we demonstrate how the study of war has been “blackboxed” in Maya archaeology, then undertake a comparative analysis to highlight how digging into the details of past martial practice enriches debates in Mesoamerican studies regarding the role of war in the rise and disintegration of states.

Archaeological studies worldwide have revealed a wide range of cultural contexts within which practices of violence and warfare have occurred. In Mesoamerica, ongoing studies have enriched our understanding of social contexts of violence and warfare in Maya societies. This expanding body of field data allows deeper exploration of the ways violence was intricately linked to different aspects of cultural life for many Maya communities. In this article, we contemplate the culturally embedded nature of violence and warfare with a specific focus on the Classic period and questions related to political strategy, ritual practices, and total warfare. We provide empirical frameworks for the study of war to address issues of ritual warfare and societal impact, and we emphasize a regional scale of analysis.

Although studies of warfare are now common in Maya archaeology, much remains to be learned about strategy, tactics, and various other practical factors in the process of making war. An emphasis on the concrete and practical is necessary to both acknowledge agency and understand how conflict relates to the human experience. Through an examination of documentary and archaeological data in a comparative framework, I elaborate on practices of Maya fortification construction and how the creation of a martial landscape ties into relations of power during the Late Postclassic/Early Spanish Colonial period (a.d. 1200–1600). During this period, in the region of Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico, Maya peoples fortified a peninsula according to principles of defense-in-depth. In other words, they created layers of fortification to slow and stall an attack. My analysis reveals how the creation of a martial landscape shaped local culture by incorporating elements of sacred geography and ritual landscape to perpetuate social inequality.

Durante la época prehispánica, la obsidiana se caracterizó por ser una materia prima de primera necesidad para la elaboración de gran variedad de objetos. La tecnología de talla para la extracción de diversos artefactos fue una importante actividad económica. En el occidente de México, la obsidiana resultó un recurso fundamental debido a su abundancia y a la diversidad de yacimientos presentes. Sin embargo, no todos los vidrios volcánicos disponibles tienen las características idóneas para la talla especializada. En la región Valles, dentro de las cuencas centrales del estado de Jalisco, se encuentran dispersos nódulos de obsidiana, con un alto grado de inclusiones, que ha sido referida meramente como “obsidiana de baja calidad”. Hasta ahora, en pocas ocasiones se le ha dado la importancia debida en cuanto al estudio de su composición geoquímica, a pesar de que este sirva para contrastarlo con aquellas que sí fueron empleadas como materia prima. El siguiente trabajo busca establecer las características de la obsidiana disponible en el sitio Atitlán, ubicado en la antigua Cuenca de Magdalena, para compararla con los desechos de un espacio en el que son evidentes talleres especializados de talla intensiva para la extracción de láminas que sirvieron para elaborar piezas útiles. Entre los objetivos primordiales del artículo, es comparar sus particularidades con las de la obsidiana empleada en el proceso productivo proveniente del sitio La Joya. Gracias a esta investigación, demostramos que la obsidiana disponible en la isla no fue aprovechada debido al tamaño de los nódulos disponibles y al alto grado de porosidad e inclusiones.

At La Venta, Mexico, the Middle Formative Olmec regional center, the existence of individual leaders is interpreted from the evidence of monumental stone portraiture and several tombs believed to house the bodies of a sequence of kings late in La Venta's history. The status of these latter features as graves, however, has been debated since soon after they were excavated in the 1940s, especially because they generally lacked osteological material. What remained was arrangements of costume items as if adorning a body, usually associated with a stone container. Most archaeologists have advanced the reasonable explanation that bones and teeth would not have survived in tropical environments and accepted both the tomb attribution and their function as individual funerary monuments. A detailed review of available information from the La Venta excavations reveals these assumptions are not warranted. Field data indicate the absence of expected taphonomic evidence of bodily decay. Analysis of the stratigraphy of Mound A-2, aided, by computer-enhanced imaging of field drawings, demonstrates its tomb-like features were erected in a single, short construction phase, not over a span of decades as individual kings died. These conclusions call for alternative explanations of these “surrogate burials,” absent bodies materially evoked by ritual officiants.

LiDAR coverage of a large contiguous area within the Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin (MCKB) of northern Guatemala has identified a concentration of Preclassic Maya sites (ca. 1000 b.c.–a.d. 150) connected by causeways, forming a web of implied social, political, and economic interactions. This article is an introduction to one of the largest, contiguous, regional LiDAR studies published to date in the Maya Lowlands. More than 775 ancient Maya settlements are identified within the MCKB, and 189 more in the surrounding karstic ridge, which we condensed into 417 ancient cities, towns, and villages of at least six preliminary tiers based on surface area, volumetrics, and architectural configurations. Many tiered sites date to the Middle and Late Preclassic periods, as determined by archaeological testing, and volumetrics of contemporaneously constructed and/or occupied architecture with similar morphological characteristics. Monumental architecture, consistent architectural formats, specific site boundaries, water management/collection facilities, and 177 km of elevated Preclassic causeways suggest labor investments that defy organizational capabilities of lesser polities and potentially portray the strategies of governance in the Preclassic period. Settlement distributions, architectural continuities, chronological contemporaneity, and volumetric considerations of sites provide evidence for early centralized administrative and socio-economic strategies within a defined geographical region.

Los resultados de investigaciones arqueológicas recientes llevadas a cabo en el sitio Nakum, ubicado en el noreste de Guatemala, indican que este centro experimentó una importante evolución cultural, sociopolítica y arquitectónica entre los horizontes pre-Mamom y Mamom (1000–300 a.C.). Las excavaciones arqueológicas permitieron documentar varios edificios y complejos fechados para este periodo, incluyendo un grupo tipo E, una cancha de juego de pelota y un baño de vapor. Asimismo, producto de las excavaciones, se obtuvo una gran colección cerámica de dicha temporalidad, la cual permite—gracias a estudios estilísticos, modales, petrográficos y fisicoquímicos—conocer con mayor detalle los cambios culturales y sociales que tuvieron lugar en el sitio durante el preclásico medio.

Evidence of complex and widespread occupations during the Middle Preclassic (1000–350 b.c.) have been identified throughout the Northern Maya Lowlands and are associated with both Mamom and pre-Mamom ceramics. Beyond typological information based on the visual examination of paste, slip, and surface treatment, archaeologists know little about the technology or economics of pottery production and exchange of this period. In this study, we analyze Middle Preclassic ceramics from four sites in northwest Yucatan, using laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) to determine the chemical variation that exists between and within different ceramic production areas. The analysis indicates that production occurred locally by the late Middle Preclassic (700–350 b.c.), and that the earliest pottery produced in the Northern Maya Lowlands, at the sites of Komchen and Kiuic, was compositionally linked to later phases of production. This means that the first ceramic complexes of the Northern Lowlands were locally produced and not the result of migrants bringing pottery from elsewhere. The study reveals it is possible to identify the origin of Middle Preclassic ceramics by their chemical signature and that compositional variation existed at the site level over time.

In this article, we argue that landesque capital was integral to the development of complexity in the Maya Lowlands. Such features involved permanent investments in the landscape that supported material and ideological practices, resulting in increased sustainability and well-being. We contend that these developments stemmed from accretional modifications to soils in the Preceramic/Early Preclassic, as well as intentional investments of labor in agricultural features, large public works, and select civic complexes during the Middle Preclassic. Capital improvements were particularly important during the Middle Preclassic, when sedentary occupations and civic life were established. The timing and location of the investments strongly correlate with other aspects of Middle Preclassic lifeways, such as the transition to sedentism, acquisition and control of resources, changes in lithic production, and the emergence of an elite class. We note that some of the largest investments in landscape management during the Middle Preclassic occurred in the Central Karstic Uplands, where substantial cities rose in the Late Preclassic. We conclude that during the Middle Preclassic an ontology of landesque capital developed, based on the synergistic fusing of daily and ritual practices with physical features, which provided a foundation for resilience, sustainability, and well-being in subsequent generations.

This article presents a compositional analysis of metal artifacts from the Postclassic period (a.d. 1100–1450) city of Mayapan, Yucatan, Mexico. We document metallurgical production at R-183, an elite residential group and one of the most significant archaeological contexts associated with metalworking at Mayapan. Salvage excavations in 1998 recovered a small cache containing 282 copper bells, two miniature ceramic vessels filled with metal, and production debris including loose casting sprues and miscast bells. Metallographic analysis of a small copper bell and wire fragments from the cache reveals lost-wax casting production techniques. X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) of metal artifacts provides insight into the range of metals used by the R-183 metalworkers, which included copper-lead, copper-tin, and copper-arsenic alloys, and how these alloys compare to assemblages recovered from other contexts at the city. Our findings strongly suggest the use of remelting and casting techniques, likely utilizing remelted metals of both West and central Mexican origin, together with the use of imported goods made from a range of copper alloys.

This study examines artifact production using lithic, animal bone, and shell materials at the lowland Maya site of Ceibal, Guatemala, to explore the emergence and societal role of early crafting specialists. During the Middle Preclassic period (1000–350 b.c.), ancient Maya society went through a critical transition to sedentary settlements, including the development of large-scale monumental construction endeavors for ceremonial activities, increasingly nucleated settlement patterns, and the differential control of prestigious objects. Excavations across Ceibal recovered one of the largest Middle Preclassic assemblages of lithic and faunal material to date. We examine these materials in order to understand the nature of their manufacturing processes, the association between lithic production and bone/shell processing for meat and artifact production, and compare these activities with evidence from other Middle Preclassic sites and from the later Classic period. We find that Middle Preclassic middens are often disturbed or incorporated into later construction episodes over many generations, making the identification of such activities difficult, although not impossible, to identify archaeologically. Evidence for crafting is often found near ceremonial structures where Ceibal's early elite would have been present, suggesting that they were closely involved in the production process.

This article investigates Classic Maya understandings of two particular animal species: the (gray) fox and the armadillo. We use these species as a point of entry into Classic Maya categorizations of the non-human animal world, examining the salient biological and physical characteristics of those animals that Classic-period artists and scribes chose to highlight. Rather than accepting the creatures depicted on painted pottery or referenced in hieroglyphic texts as generalized examples of particular kinds (i.e., simply “a fox” or “an armadillo”), however, we show how the evidence from ancient art, historical accounts, and contemporary ethnography points to an emphasis on specific beings, often named individuals, who engage in particular behaviors and relate to other entities (both human and non-human) in distinctive ways. Although this article focuses exclusively on the fox and the armadillo, those species serve as examples through which we consider the limitations of applying Western taxonomic categories to other systems of knowledge, as well as the possibilities for how we might catch glimpses of radically different ways of organizing the world.

Botanical residues recovered from excavations in the Southeast Marketplace of Piedras Negras provide information about the healing and medical activities of the site's Classic period (a.d. 350–900) inhabitants, and point towards the intersection between commerce and medicine for the ancient Maya. The plants were likely exchanged at the market then used on-site for the purposes of healing. The botanical remains are complemented by both architectural and bioarchaeological evidence for healing at this locus, including a high concentration of sweatbaths and evidence for palliative tooth extraction. With the aid of ethnohistory, we identify health care practices potentially associated with the plant remains. However, we expand on basic understandings of “healing” with a critical look at how some medicinal plants may have been ritually invoked, even when never directly ingested or applied topically.