Figure 29 - uploaded by Robert M. Rosenswig
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5 Late Postclassic Aztec-style tripod vessels, zoomorphic supports (mostly avian) from the Gonzalo Hernandez site in the Suchiate zone of the Soconusco.
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The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology provides a current guide to the recent and on-going archaeology of Mesoamerica. Though the emphasis is on prehispanic societies, this text 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 sin...
Similar publications
The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology provides a current guide to the recent and on-going archaeology of Mesoamerica. Though the emphasis is on prehispanic societies, this text 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 sin...
The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology provides a current guide to the recent and on-going archaeology of Mesoamerica. Though the emphasis is on prehispanic societies, this text 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 sin...
Citations
... In contrast, La Venta is located on the Tonal� a River (Rust and Sharer, 1988) that extends toward the Central Depression of Chiapas. Conventional wisdom has held that Early Formative period travel followed the Coatzacoalcos River towards the isthmus and then down to the Pacific Coast whereas during the Middle Formative period it went up through the Central Depression and descending to the coast through mountainous passes further south (e.g., Agrinier, 1991;Clark and Lee, 1984;Clark and Pye, 2000;Navarrete, 1978;Rosenswig, 2012). These authors assume that the change from late Early to Middle Formative-period routes can be explained in terms of travel efficiency based on the different locations of the two Gulf Coast Olmec centers. ...
This paper uses Least Cost Path (LCP) analysis to explore travel routes between the Gulf Coast and Soconusco regions of Mexico. LCP results are compared between the two regions during the late Early Formative period (1400-1000 cal BC) when San Lorenzo was the largest Olmec center on the Gulf Coast and the Middle Formative period (1000-400 cal BC) when La Venta replaced it. We contrast the well-known Tobler Hiking Function and the less well known Anaya Hernandez method to determine the LCP routes for each period as well as to calculate changes required to make the voyage as one Gulf Coast center eclipsed the other. We compare LCP models with changing locations of political centers and with colonial-period accounts of actual travel through the region that allows us to infer the logic of Olmec era trade networks. Methodologically, we show how the Anaya Hernandez friction values for LCP analysis are more appropriate for mountainous environments as they more reliably model the importance of slope than the Tobler Function does. Substantively, we demonstrate how important population centers were located along LPC routes. Further, that beginning during the Middle Formative period there were more connections to the highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala than in earlier times.
... These connections likely extended southward to Oaxaca, the Greater Nicoya region, and beyond to South America. These predominantly Pacific coastal routes probably expanded on interaction corridors that operated among maritime-adapted societies during the Preclassic and Classic periods (Anawalt 1992(Anawalt , 1998Ball and Brockington 1978;Hosler 1994;Mathiowetz 2011;Pohl 2001;Pye and Gutiérrez 2007;Rosenswig 2012;Stark and Voorhies 1978). Scarlet macaws and other prestige goods such as copper ornaments likely moved along the same Pacific coastal trade corridors and social networks into the Southwest as those that facilitated the northward movement of cacao. ...
Cacao economies in far western Mexico developed between AD 850/900 and 1350+ along with the adoption of a political–religious complex centered on the solar deity Xochipilli as the Aztatlán culture became integrated into expanding political, economic, and information networks of highland and southern Mesoamerica. The Xochipilli complex significantly transformed societies in the Aztatlán core zone of coastal Nayarit and Sinaloa and parts of Jalisco, Durango, Zacatecas, and Michoacán. West Mexican cacao was acquired in the U.S. Southwest by Chaco Canyon elites in New Mexico through macroregional prestige goods economies as Ancestral Pueblo societies became integrated into the Postclassic Mesoamerican world.
... Izapa was the northernmost center of a string of large urban sites that extended down the Pacific from Chiapas to El Salvador (Love 2007(Love , 2011Lowe et al. 1982;Rosenswig 2012a). The IRSP was designed to document regional settlement patterns and better understand changing demographic and land-use patterns associated with the Izapa polity . ...
... c Aerial photo (1/2/2012, ©Digital Globe via Google Earth). d Ground cover depicted as the vegetation height above ground (HAG) classified in five height intervals banana plantations to provide reliable estimates of the number of hectares of occupation for each Prehispanic phase (Rosenswig 2008(Rosenswig , 2010(Rosenswig , 2012b. During the winter of 2011, the IRSP augmented this survey so that we now have 70 km 2 of 100 % coverage survey from the coastal plain with sites documented as the number of hectares over which temporally diagnostic artifacts were recorded. ...
Light detection and ranging (lidar) and pedestrian survey are employed to document regional settlement patterns associated with the well-known center of Izapa in Chiapas, Mexico. Within an area of 47.5 km2, we located 413 previously undocumented mounds with associated time diagnostic artifacts. These mounds are the remains of both monumental architecture defining regional centers as well as domestic house mounds. This paper presents new data of overall occupation levels from the low hills zone that complements previously published patterns from the piedmont surrounding Izapa as well as eight newly documented Middle and Late Formative period (850 cal. bc–ad 100) monumental centers of various sizes that are coeval with Izapa. In addition to these substantive archaeological findings, the efficacy of lidar data acquired from two environmental zones (low hills and piedmont) are compared to evaluate how well Prehispanic mounds were detected under different vegetation covers. We conclude that the lower density of lidar collection from the low hills zone was as effective at detecting archaeological mounds as the higher density collection campaign used in the piedmont zone. The implication of these findings is that higher-density collection strategies may not always improve the documentation of archaeological features.
We present new regional settlement pattern data from the eastern Soconusco region, Chiapas, Mexico, including a detailed reconstruction of the first millennium A.D. occupation of the site of Izapa. Results from an initial campaign of light detection and ranging (lidar) data acquisition and analysis of systematically collected surface remains document the full extent of the Classic-period occupation of Izapa. These lidar and pedestrian survey data also illustrate how people were distributed across the landscape from 100 B.C. to A.D. 1000 (Hato to Remanso phases). Survey results indicate significant population increase during the Terminal Formative (A.D. 100–300) and initial Early Classic (A.D. 300–400) periods, followed by a virtual abandonment of both piedmont and low-hills survey zones from A.D. 400 to A.D. 700. The population increased in both survey zones during the Late and Terminal Classic periods (A.D. 700–1000) coinciding with the presence of a large regional center in the low-hills zone and 46 secondary centers recorded within the 400-km2 area covered by the lidar survey. These secondary centers consist of numerous small mounds around circular or square plazas. Together, the results of the lidar study and systematic pedestrian survey offer the first glimpse of population dynamics and political organization in the area around Izapa during the first millennium A.D.
