Soundscapes of the Everyday in Ancient Oaxaca, Mexico

In ancient Mexico, sensory engagement in the form of oratory, music, and performance were major components of state-sponsored festivals and noble feasts. We think far less, however, about the soundscapes associated with rituals and everyday life in household contexts. Drawing on contextual, iconographic, and acoustic analyses of flutes, whistles, bells, costume ornaments, and ceramic vessels with rattle supports from the site of Río Viejo in coastal Oaxaca, Mexico, we argue that sound-production created a shared spatial landscape that linked community members to one another. Even in the absence of visibility or participation, soundscapes were prominent, celebrated elements of everyday life that purposely blurred the boundaries between the natural, cultural, and spirit worlds.     

Small Community Organization During the Late Formative Period in Oaxaca,Mexico

Abstract

Late Formative (ca. 300–100 B.C.) cultural systems of highland Mesoamerica have been studied mostly at the regional level and at the tops of local settlement-system hierarchies. We know much less about the structure of small communities. Data from a minor Oaxacan site are used to identify two aspects of this community's internal and external organization: 1) a status-graded set of household units headed by an elite family, itself part of a valley-wide ruling stratum, and 2) workshop-level ceramic production for supra-community consumption.     

3400 years of agricultural engineering in Mesoamerica: lama-bordos of the Mixteca Alta,Oaxaca, Mexico

The origins of early Mesoamerican agricultural techniques are not well established. Our charcoal-derived radiocarbon chronology dates cross-valley check dams, or lama-bordos, buried by up to 11.5 m of sediment in arroyos near Coixtlahuaca, Oaxaca, Mexico. Now it is clear that people in highland Mexico built lama-bordos at least 3400–3500 years ago, several hundred years earlier than previously dated engineering systems in Mesoamerica. Lama-bordo systems evolved as intensively and extensively managed landscapes coeval with climate shifting to more arid conditions. They provide clear examples of human-produced stratigraphy and artificial landscapes (stair-stepped valleys). More importantly, these lama-bordo systems signal a major cultural tipping point toward sedentary agricultural life and solidify our understanding of the Neolithic transition in Mesoamerica.     

Geospatial modeling of pedestrian transportation networks: a case study from precolumbian Oaxaca,Mexico

Using accumulated cost surfaces and various pathfinding techniques within Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software, archaeologists and other spatial scientists have developed increasingly sophisticated models of human movement. Despite their utility, these approaches can be limited because standard GIS software cannot model movement (1) from many origins to many destinations or (2) without specific origins and destinations. Absent these capabilities, it is particularly difficult to model networks of movement over a given tract of land if you are interested in obtaining a more general sense of movement dynamics, not specific site-to-site patterns. In this paper, we present an innovative way of modeling past movement that generates both natural-looking networks and also indicates the degree of traffic that may have existed on any particular segment of those networks. The “From Everywhere to Everywhere” (FETE) model generates networks based on topography and landcover without requiring that origin and destination points be supplied in advance. We apply the FETE model to a case from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, a region that has extensive archaeological and ethnohistoric data sets that serve as a test of the efficacy of our technique. A comparison of the FETE output with known late precolumbian and early colonial movement corridors indicates that the method is effective and should be useful for modeling networks in other areas.     

Transportation corridors and political evolution in highland Mesoamerica: Settlement analyses incorporating GIS for northern Tlaxcala, Mexico

Investigations of the functional utility and social elaboration of natural transportation corridors contribute to generating more comprehensive understandings of complex macroregional phenomena such as political evolution. In this article, highland central Mexican transportation corridors are analyzed through GIS applications and a reconsideration of settlement data from an important corridor in northern Tlaxcala. The location of the study region, within the corridor connected to the northeastern Basin of Mexico, makes it particularly relevant for examining interregional exchanges and the transformation of a more rural landscape adjacent to core areas of urbanization and state political expansion. Conclusions drawn from the study are largely complementary to the interpretations made by the surveyors [Merino Carrión, B.L., 1989. La Cultura Tlaxco. Serie Arqueológica, Colección Científica 174, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City], but provide an updated assessment of prehispanic political evolution ca. 900 BC–AD 1519. Specifically, the study tracks the evolution of early ceremonial centers, Teotihuacan’s territorial expansion through the region, political balkanization following the collapse of Teotihuacan, and the establishment of small, independent polities encountered by the Spanish. New contributions include quantitative measures relevant to assessing the systemic integration of the region and the social value of the corridor during different chronological phases, elucidating the differing expansionary trajectories of Teotihuacan and the Aztec Empire.     

Volcanic Glass and Iron Nails: Networks of Exchange and Material Entanglements at Late Prehispanic and Early Colonial Achiutla,Oaxaca, Mexico

In this paper, I examine how indigenous residents of the community of Achiutla—located in the Mixtec region of Oaxaca, Mexico—utilized long-distance trade routes between central Mexico and the Pacific coast, spanning the Postclassic (900–1521 CE) and Early Colonial (1522–1650 CE) periods. The maintenance of prehispanic interregional trade connections by native peoples allowed them to both continue traditional industries like those involving obsidian, while also facilitating their adoption of new types of material culture introduced from Europe. Over the long term, however, I suggest that entanglements in these economic networks had unintended consequences, which possibly included the demise of the prehispanic obsidian industry.     

Origin and Collapse of Complex Societies in Oaxaca (Mexico): Evaluating the Era from 1965 to the Present

I summarize recent archaeological work in Oaxaca, Mexico, with a focus on questions central to world prehistory: the origin and collapse of complex societies. Monte Albán was the capital of an emerging civilization in the southern highlands of Mexico during the second half of the first millennium B.C. Soon after the foundation of the ancient city, there is evidence for state formation and a political expansion into regions outside the Valley of Oaxaca. Centuries later, Monte Albán went into decline, giving way to the competing small polities found throughout Oaxaca at the time of the Spanish conquest. Since the late 1960s, our knowledge of these changes has been transformed by study of Oaxaca's pre–Monte Albán past, regional settlement surveys, and processual model building. Evolutionary and historical perspectives allow for significant refinement of current debates surrounding the rise and fall of complex societies in Oaxaca.     

瓦哈卡:多元文明的民间传承

瓦哈卡城是墨西哥瓦哈卡州的首府,不同时期的历史遗存在这里交相辉映、相得益彰,1987年,联合国教科文组织将瓦哈卡历史中心和阿尔班山考古遗址列入《世界遗产名录》,在此后不到三十年的时间里,瓦哈卡市建立起了完善的遗产管理体系,大量的博物馆和历史遗迹,由政府和民众共同保护着,在保留了殖民时期文化要素的基础上,通过博物馆和学校的传播,增强了当地土著族群对自身文化的自信心和认同感,     

墨西哥,仙人掌的王国

<正>仙人掌原产于美洲,从美国的北部到南美洲的南部,分布很广,种类也很多。墨西哥位于北美洲南部,绝大部分属热带高原、海洋水汽难以到达闭塞的内部,北部又在副热带高气压带控制范围,年降水量少,荒漠分布很广。严峻的环境似乎给人和植物的生存都带来巨大的挑战,干旱缺水永远都是不毛之地的代名词,可是恣意生长的仙人掌却装点了这片土地。     

墨西哥,仙人掌的王国

<正>仙人掌原产于美洲,从美国的北部到南美洲的南部,分布很广,种类也很多。墨西哥位于北美洲南部,绝大部分属热带高原、海洋水汽难以到达闭塞的内部,北部又在副热带高气压带控制范围,年降水量少,荒漠分布很广。严峻的环境似乎给人和植物的生存都带来巨大的挑战,干旱缺水永远都是不毛之地的代名词,可是恣意生长的仙人掌却装点了这片土地。     

Prehistory of Chihuahua and Sonora,Mexico

The North American Southwest includes much of Mexico as well as the southwestern United States. The area north of the international border has been studied intensively and its culture history is widely known; the portion south of the border has usually been ignored. This essay proposes a new term for the entire culture area, Northern Mexico, and provides a summary of local sequences for two states in the region, Chihuahua and Sonora. The general sequence in the U.S. Southwest (Paleo-Indian, Archaic, and Ceramic periods) also holds in northwest Mexico. Preceramic occupations are poorly known. The Ceramic period saw the rise of a number of local cultures, which varied greatly in adaptation and social complexity. The basic culture pattern of Northern Mexico is derived from that of central Mexico, but direct Mesoamerican intervention in the region was apparently limited. While the issue of Mesoamerican-Northern Mexican relationships has dominated scholarly debate for decades, the greater need is to define and explain cultural variability within and between local sequences.