Athapaskan migration to the North American Sout

The arrival of the ancestors of the Apaches and Navajo to the North American Southwest, the so-called Apachean migra-tion is one of the most widely discussed issues in American archeology. Since the 19th century, after connections were disco-vered between the Athabaskan language family, potential routes and directions of migration between the Arctic and Subarctic region (inhabited by the Northern Athabaskans) and the Southwest (inhabited by the Southern Athabaskans) began to be con-sidered. During the 1930s, the Edward Sapir’s linguistic research made it possible to determine that the migration flowed from north to south, but this conclusion merely sowed the seed of research on Apachean migration, which has since blossomed with archaeological discoveries from the last 20 or 30 years. Today, we are able to pinpoint what prompted the Athabaskans’ journey; we also know of cultures such as Promontory (around the Great Salt Lake) or Dismal River (Great Plains), which we associate with the presence of the Apachean people on both sides of the Rocky Mountains. Still, many questions remain unanswered, and previous hypotheses are being verified in the light of new discoveries. No less interesting proved the results of research into some auxiliary sciences of archeology: genetics and linguistics, and the analysis of historical sources and oral tradition.The following article aims to introduce the reader to the most important and recent discoveries related to the issue of Apachean migration, and present hypotheses that have recently emerged in the scientific community, both in the context of the migration route itself and arrival in the Southwest, as well as the dates associated with them.

La “personeidad” de la caguama: arte rupestre, paisaje y agencia en la costa central de Sonora, México

Not all societies identify themselves and the others in the same way nor do so invariably over time. At the same time, not all of them conceptualize the same notion of being and relating, nor do we have to expect that different social collectives in time and space understand objects, animals, stars, rocks, dead or places in the same way we do. Therefore, the main interest of this work is not so much discovering the function or meaning of the archaeological remains we study but trying to understand them in their own ontological parameters.Based on that, we propose starting our study from 1) the critical review of our categories in order to deconstruct their sen-ses, and 2) the reading of ethnographic information which introduce us to other forms of Being-in-the-world. From this point, we can propose and apply methodological tools in order to analyze the information from a closer ontological position to that of the groups we study. In this case, I will analyze the way in which certain images painted on the rock would have affected the transformation of the body and the identity of those who painted them. This analysis will be addressed from the relational approach through the landscape archaeology and the agency theory as analytical tools.

The lay of the land: a political geography of an ancient Maya kingdom in West-Central Belize

The Belize Valley figures prominently in the history of Maya archaeology as the birthplace of settlement pattern surveys, where Gordon R. Willey and his colleagues conducted their pioneering research project, from 1954 to 1956. Six decades on, settlement surveys are an integral part of archaeological research strategies not only across the Maya area, but globally. With the advent of LiDAR technology, settlement surveys enter a new developmental phase, and we take this opportunity to review the history and progress of these surveys in the Belize Valley. We focus on one particular archaeological site, Baking Pot, so as to better illustrate the methods and technological advances that have been brought to bear in the mapping of one ancient Maya city-state. Now that the survey of this ancient settlement is nearing completion, we veer from traditional settlement surveys that in principle focus on unbounded central places and centroids, in an attempt to tackle an important question, which to date has remained conspicuously understudied, that of borders and boundaries. Using a series of geospatial analyses, we investigate the potential of these approaches for reconstructing ancient polity boundaries and as lessons learned we explore which methods are of greater utility and can be applied to other surveys in the Maya lowlands.

The origins and development of the cartographic tradition in the central Mexican highlands

More than four decades ago H.B. Nicholson compared the so-called Palace Stone from Xochicalco to a page in a Mesoamerican codex. Showing numerous calendrical dates and toponymic signs connected by a path marked by footprints the monument readily recalls the cartographic tradition that is well-known for the central Mexican highlands at the time of the Spanish conquest. In this paper we explore the Epiclassic evidence of this tradition, discussing not only central features of the Palace Stone, but also additional monuments from Xochicalco and sites in the vicinity, such as the recently discovered Tetlama stela, that belong to the same genre. Thus, we provide a preliminary analysis of the formal features and contents of these fascinating monuments that record an important narrative history and founding myth of Xochicalco and some of its satellite communities. Furthermore, we shall also introduce evidence that suggests that the conventions of this tradition can ultimately be traced back to Teotihuacan in the Early Classic.

The Role of Maize and the Theoretical Approaches of Archaeology to the Food Resources in the Ancient Maya Culture

Several theoretical approaches exist for the study of ancient Maya cultures. In the beginning, only limited information was available for these cultures and the early portrayals were greatly influenced by European concepts of antiquity. After this period of Early Maya archaeology, however, the newly-developed processual archaeology was applied. Processualist theory focused on understanding the process of cultural change and relating it to environmental adaptation. Soon after its inception, criticism of this approach led to the emergence of post-processual archaeology, which stressed the importance of pre-Columbian Maya symbolism. In this case, the popularity of post-processualism was spearheaded by the decipherment of Maya glyphs and new information supporting cultural continuities between ancient and past Maya groups.Problems related to both approaches are well exemplified by the meaning of maize in the ancient Maya culture. Processual archaeology treats maize as merely a food source, while post-processualism regards maize as one of the most important sym-bols of the ancient Maya, a plant with a special status. Thus, research on ancient Maya subsistence and the meaning of maize in ancient belief systems have been based on interpretations that were constructed from a single perspective. However, to fully understand the role of maize in the Maya culture, we must integrate and apply different perspectives, multidisciplinary appro-aches and methodological dialectics. It is postulated that, in the future, past approaches will be complimented by newly retrieved information thanks to a new paradigm called symmetric anthropology.