Long-Term Regional Landscape Change in the Northern Tequila Region of Jalisco,Mexico

The Tequila Valleys, in Jalisco, Mexico, are well-known in archaeology for an early complex society known as the Teuchitlán tradition (350 b.c.–a.d. 450/500), but later developments have received little attention. Here I report on the first systematic, full-coverage survey of the Tequila region north of the Tequila volcano. I explore the ways in which the societies that occupied this territory experienced sociopolitical change diachronically by investigating settlement scale, integration, complexity, and boundedness. Through the use of these core features, I analyze how each changed in varying ways, resulting in patterns that do not conform to static societal categories. Interestingly, there is no evidence that a large polity controlled the entire region at any point in the sequence. Results indicate a dynamic sociopolitical landscape that did not develop along any predetermined pathway.     

Chicanas in Charge: Texas Women in the Public Arena

Chicanas in Charge is a collection of individual profiles ofsignificant women in Texas politics and activism from the 1940sto the present. The book is arranged in four parts—"Adelitas:Warrior Trailblazers," "The Chicano Movement Activists," "Puentesy Lazos: The Hispanic Connectors," and "Twenty-first CenturyEntorchas/Torchbearers." Each part features a short introductionthat identifies the period's historical zeitgeist, identifiessimilar themes in the women's stories, and points out uniqueaspects of the leaders followed by from five to eight individualprofiles. The profiles of each woman are somewhat concise: they includea sketch of the background     

Geochemical Variability in the Paredón Obsidian Source,Puebla and Hidalgo,Mexico: A Preliminary Assessment and Inter‐Laboratory Comparison

Chemical characterization reveals intra‐source variation in obsidian from the Paredón source area in Puebla and Hidalgo, Mexico. Two chemical sub‐sources of obsidian from Paredón are spatially discrete and cannot be distinguished by visual characteristics. To facilitate future investigations of the prehistoric exploitation of these sub‐sources, an inter‐laboratory comparison of elemental concentrations is presented based on neutron activation analysis and several XRF instruments.     

Alternative pathways to power in late Postclassic Highland Mesoamerica

In recent years, scholars have become dissatisfied with neoevolutionists’ view of social evolution as a series of step-like transformations leading to political centralization and have refocused attention away from traditional theory and toward issues of agency, power sharing, and alternative pathways to complexity. To build on this emerging theoretical orientation, we propose that collective action theory provides a useful path to explaining social change. To evaluate this idea, we make use of ethnohistoric and archaeological sources on the Postclassic (AD 1250–1521) of Highland Mesoamerica (Central Highlands of Mexico and the Mixteca Alta region of Oaxaca), to investigate the causes and consequences of key aspects of sociopolitical change. Of the study states, Tlaxcallan, Cholula, Texcoco, and other central Highlands polities relied extensively on internal revenues and, accordingly, implemented power sharing, control of political officials, and infrastructural power. Conversely, states in eastern Puebla and the Mixteca Alta focused on external revenues and, thus, exhibited greater degrees of despotic governance. These results suggest that collective action provides a useful starting point for understanding state-building in Highland Mesoamerica and merits further testing with other Mesoamerican cases as well as societies in other world areas.