According to our reconstruction of the sociopolitics of tenth-century Chichen Itza, the polity was ruled by a paramount king who identified himself with the sun. A high priest, the second-ranking figure, stood by the king's side. A political and military elite, with an S-shaped serpent as its emblem, shared power with these top figures. Finally, the whole community of warriors was treated as a collective corps with important religious and political responsibilities. The iconography of the Temple of the Wall Panels depicts the initiation of jaguar knights by a warrior figure designated as Serpent Jaguar. The same individual, also represented and designated on the slab covering the cache buried in the upper temple, was assisted or controlled by personages who ranked above him. The panels illustrate the destiny of the jaguar-warriors after their glorious death, first as they accompany the rising sun and, later, as they transform themselves into birds. This interpretation appears very close to the destiny of the dead Aztec warriors as recounted by Sahagún and other chroniclers. The butterfly/bird theme, associated with warriors, indicates that similar beliefs were current at Teotihuacan. The Temple of the Wall Panels, too small to be a telpochcalli was probably a house used by warriors, as indicated by its images and its distinctive architecture, which are shared at the same site by the Temple of the Warriors.

Desecration of Punta de Chimino's ceremonial precinct around a.d. 430 was associated with the appearance of green Pachuca obsidian, pyrite mirror fragments, dart points, a Tikal-style vessel cache, and a peculiar grave with Mexican semblances. A structurally housed Protoclassic stela was removed in an apparent fire ritual and monumental masks adorning the E-Group range building were effaced in a termination rite involving large quantities of refuse. Disuse of the E-Group range building and unfinished refurbishment of the observatory pyramid suggest the site was promptly deserted. The forsaking of this time-honored ceremonial place coincided with reduced settlement in the Petexbatun region and abandonment of the nearby Pasión centers of Ceibal, Itzan, and Chaak Ak'al. Punta de Chimino's findings shed further light on these abandonments, suggesting that they were triggered by amplified central lowland involvement in Pasión River affairs by the end of the fourth century a.d.

During the 1970s, excavations at El Zapotal revealed a Late Classic period ossuary with multiple burials, sumptuous funerary offerings, and life-sized terracotta sculpture individually on a par with the Chinese national treasures from Xi'an. Less known are murals adorning a U-shaped banquette centering on the monumental clay sculpture of a skeletal Death God.

Wyllie, through the assistance of Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Veracruz, produced drawings of the now deteriorating paintings. The murals form part of a larger narrative program integrating sculpture, architectural elements, burial offerings, and human osteological remains connected with Mesoamerican underworld stories of creation.

In 1997, the Chan Chich Archaeological Project excavated a Terminal Preclassic/Early Classic period Maya tomb at Chan Chich, Belize. Tomb 2 represents the earliest royal tomb in the Three Rivers Region of the east-central Yucatan Peninsula and has striking similarities to Burial 85 at Tikal, the tomb of the dynastic founder Yax Ehb' Xook. This paper describes Tomb 2 and its contents and considers its significance within the context of the significant political and cultural changes that marked the transition from the Late Preclassic to the Early Classic period. We argue that the tomb is an early example of a regional expression of elite competition for status and power in the Central Lowlands that included the use of a subcomplex of ceramics and exotic artifacts to express prestige. Tomb 2 is also an example of an early royal burial pattern that may be more widespread than believed but has been overlooked due to excavation bias.

An important episode in Mesoamerican mythical narratives involves the abduction or impregnation of a tightly guarded maiden by a disguised god, against the will of her father or mother. This action precipitates major creational events that variously result in the origin of the sun, the moon, and human sustenance. Relying on a comparative analysis of versions recorded throughout Mesoamerica, this paper explores (a) representations of this episode in Maya art, where the suitor sometimes takes the shape of an insect; (b) the magical role of weaving and spinning, a recurrent theme in this mythical sequence; and (c) the relevance of Maya narratives for the interpretation of related passages in central Mexican mythology and ritual. Classic representations evidence the myth's antiquity, while its numerous versions pose methodological problems, addressed in this paper through the analysis of synonymies in narrative, art, and performance.

La reutilización de esculturas es un proceso que ha ocurrido en diversas culturas alrededor del mundo. Eso puede obedecer a motivos económicos, rituales o simbólicos diversos. En este trabajo se demuestra la reutilización de esculturas no sólo como una práctica de la cultura olmeca, sino particularmente durante finales del período clásico en el sur de Veracruz y a partir de monumentos originalmente olmecas. Este fenómeno corresponde también a un crecimiento poblacional que ocurrió durante la fase Villa Alta del clásico terminal y postclásico temprano sobre sitios que habían florecido durante el preclásico. La modificación de los monumentos erigidos sobre los sitios permitía a los nuevos pobladores integrar nuevos mensajes y darles coherencia dentro de su sistema de creencias.

Excavations of the Mazapan phase at the Atetelco complex at Teotihuacan by Ruben Cabrera and colleagues produced a small human copper figurine. Studies of Mesoamerican metallurgy have indicated that metallurgy was introduced to western Mexico around a.d. 700 from Colombia, and Ecuador. This particular figurine is a remarkable find. The dates (a.d. 800–900) precede those of copper artifacts in the central Highlands. The manufacturing method (an open-backed casting) is rare in Mesoamerica but common in Colombia and Panama. Open-backed cast figurines that do appear in Mesoamerica come from the Cenote of Sacrifice, are made from copper-gold alloys, and were imported from lower Central America or Colombia. The Atetelco figurine is made from a copper-arsenic alloy. Copper-arsenic alloy objects are common in western Mexico (after a.d. 1150) and Ecuador and northern Peru (after about a.d. 300). The major question concerning the Atetelco figurine is whether it was fashioned in Ecuador or Colombia and imported, or whether it was produced in western Mexico. Our study of artifact chemistry, fabrication methods, and provenience indicate that the weight of the evidence points to western Mexico. We suggest that this fabrication technique (lost-wax castings of open-backed human figurines), while introduced from Colombia and lower Central America, never became a major component of the Mesoamerican metallurgical tradition.

In recent years the development of metallurgy in West Mexico has received increasing attention in the field of archaeological and technology studies. Considering that the latter already include excellent descriptions and analysis of the ritual and sumptuary functions of metal artifacts, the present article focuses on the sacred symbolism of the metal resources and the metalworking process itself according to several indigenous cosmogonical narratives and other additional pictorial and alphabetical sources from sixteenth-century Michoacan and adjacent cultural areas. The available documentation clearly shows that a crucial role was attributed to the native god Tlatlauhqui Tezcatlipoca.

The Izalcos Pipil were pre-Hispanic residents of the Río Ceniza Valley of western El Salvador and had clear linguistic ties to the Aztecs and other Nahuas of central Mexico. Both archaeological and documentary data are presented that show strong evidence that the Izalcos Pipil also maintained Nahua social and political institutions. The Izalcos Pipil emphasized characteristics of Nahua social practices that depend on dynamic mobility on the landscape to articulate discrete cultural elements, and these characteristics are observable in Izalcos inter- and intrasite settlement organization and the distribution of Nahua settlement in southern Mesoamerica. The degree of mobility on the landscape was shown in the internal organization of sites, architectural arrangements, and the relationships among sites and is indicated in historical documents. Pipil concepts, institutions, and boundaries provided the foundation for the Spanish colonial political economy. This region became a jewel in the Spanish Crown in part because of prodigious cacao production that the Izalcos Pipil established long before Spanish contact. The degree of nucleation before and after conquest did not change dramatically, but the analysis of mobility showed that even though some elements of patterning appeared superficially the same, underlying causes were fundamentally different. The most important conquest-induced change was the transition to capitalism, which created a static, disarticulated landscape of nucleated settlements, enclosures, and private property that discouraged human movement. The tensions between these two contrasting systems of landscape use heightened with the passage of time.

Many Tarascan settlements surrounded Lake Patzcuaro in Michoacan, Mexico, during the Late Postclassic period. A hierarchy of settlements existed from the capital of Tzintzuntzan to secondary administration sites and small tributary communities. Obsidian artifacts from the large site, Erongaricuaro, have been studied by the author. Analysis of the obsidian from this site highlighted particular patterns in the production and consumption of prismatic blades and large scrapers. Data from another site, Urichu, was collected and analyzed more recently. Urichu was a tributary center to Erongaricuaro during the Tarascan empire. Local and state elites inhabited both sites, and analysis of obsidian manufacture indicates that the sites may have had different functions. Obsidian from the sites also varies by source location. This too may indicate site function and the changing sociopolitical organization of obsidian production and use throughout the Tarascan empire.

Una revisión comparativa de los datos arqueológicos y etnohistóricos de tarascos y mexicas permite dar un panorama amplio de sus prácticas e ideas sobre la muerte. La contrastación de las diferentes clases de información al interior de un mismo caso ayuda tanto a corroborar las descripciones de los documentos antiguos como a complementarlas con datos sobre la composición y distribución de los restos funerarios. Estudiando paralelamente estas dos culturas, pudimos generar hipótesis interpretativas sobre aquellos funerales para los que no se cuenta con información escrita y aportamos elementos para comprender mejor la unidad de la cosmovisión mesoamericana. Hemos partido del análisis de las categorías rituales planteadas por los textos de la colonia temprana para después procurar entender la forma en que estos se reflejan arqueológicamente.

Archaeological spaces can be viewed as material manifestations of human drama—sites for the production, expression, and manipulation of social life, power, and history. By viewing such spaces as stages for the enactment of processes of social memory, we may further enrich considerations of the interplay of materiality and history. Here I address the insights archaeologists may gain from engaging with theories of social memory by exploring their application to the analysis of settlements occupied during the Late to Terminal Classic period transition (a.d. 650–900) in pre-Columbian southeastern Mesoamerica. I also consider their relevance to community initiatives engaged by archaeologists today. Ultimately, I argue that processes of making, altering, and remaking place are one among many ways that memory may have served as a tool for political strategies and discourses about power.

Modeling Olmec participation in Early Horizon interaction networks requires better understanding of the relations of Gulf Olmec communities with one another as well as with contemporaries elsewhere in Mesoamerica. We compare pottery, figurines, and obsidian assemblages from a recently isolated Early Formative component at Tres Zapotes with contemporary assemblages from San Lorenzo and Macayal, both in the Coatzacoalcos basin. Our analysis indicates that village inhabitants at Tres Zapotes interacted with populations in eastern Olman but also forged their own economic and social ties with central Veracruz and the Mexican highlands. This evidence suggests a heterogeneous politico-economic landscape in which multiple polities of varying complexity participated in overlapping networks of interaction, alliance, and competition within and beyond Olman.

The idea of collective or social memory is explored in this paper as a way to understand ancient Maya ritual behavior. The theoretical characteristics of collective memory are defined and a strategy to operationalize the theory of collective memory using archaeological remains is presented. Two archaeological examples from the sites of Minanha and Zubin in west central Belize are discussed in terms of how they fit this new model. Finally, the social motivations that underlie this behavior are examined.

While scholars actively search for material and symbolic indications of Olmec influence outside the Gulf Coast, few have taken a close look at the variation and intricacies of Early Formative period material culture within the Gulf Coast region. The increasing body of data on houses in the Olmec heartland is beginning to allow comparisons and new kinds of analyses not previously possible in Olmec studies. Excavated materials from San Lorenzo phase (1200–900 b.c., radiocarbon years; 1400–1000 b.c.) households at El Remolino in the San Lorenzo region are analyzed in a preliminary attempt to evaluate the particulars of a San Lorenzo Olmec domestic assemblage in order to provide a baseline for future research. I compare quantities of different artifact classes, vessel forms, vessel orifice diameters, and pottery decoration to arrive at an understanding of a modest Olmec household inventory. Through this analysis, I argue that several of the San Lorenzo horizon markers cited as evidence of Olmec influence or migration elsewhere in Mesoamerica are quite rare in the Olmec heartland itself. Both Calzadas Carved and Limón Carved-Incised pottery decorations1 occur only in minute quantities (<1%) in the Remolino (and San Lorenzo) assemblage, and hollow white-ware figurines are entirely absent at this nonelite context. Except for its location 5 km from San Lorenzo, El Remolino would not qualify as an Olmec site based on the lack of artifact markers emphasized by archaeologists working outside of the Gulf Coast. I argue that we need a better idea of the range of Gulf Coast Olmec variation before we delve too far into discussions of Gulf Coast influence.

Reconstruction of foodways at the Lowland Maya center of Xunantunich, Belize, illustrates how commensality is fundamental to the construction of multilayered identities. Collective memory and linear histories form the foundation of identities because they are the mental frameworks people use to construct shared pasts. At Xunantunich, community identity was expressed though pottery and practices associated with the preparation of foods for domestic consumption and public offerings. In a world of natural cycles centered on family reproduction, horticultural activities, and yearly ceremonies, these symbols and rituals structured the lives of all people and embodied within them a collective memory of community. Linear histories were recorded in images and texts on drinking paraphernalia that were likely used for toasting honored individuals, ancestors, or gods during commemorative rites. These inscriptions and bodily practices marked individuals and their houses as people and places of prominence with separate identities.

The earliest uses of Olmec greenstone (jadeite, greenstone, schist, green quartz, and others) accelerated the interregional exchange of technology and raw materials. These relationships provoked asymmetry between polities of different parts of Mesoamerica and within Olmec sites. There were stronger relationships between the Gulf Coast and Chiapas. In general terms, greenstone artifacts display an evolutionary process similar to ceramics and basalt sculpture in the emergence of complex society during terminal Early Formative times. This paper focuses on the exchange of technological choices and asymmetry between Gulf Coast of Mexico and the rest of Mesoamerica.