The Aztecs


Book Description

The Aztecs brings to life one of the best-known indigenous civilizations of the Americas in a vivid, comprehensive account of the ancient Aztecs. A thorough examination of Aztec origins and civilization including religion, science, and thought Incorporates the latest archaeological excavations and research into explanations of the Spanish conquest and the continuity of Aztec culture in Central Mexico Expanded coverage includes key topics such as writing, music, royal tombs, and Aztec predictions of the end of the world




Archaeology of Native North America


Book Description

This comprehensive text is intended for the junior-senior level course in North American Archaeology. Written by accomplished scholar Dean Snow, this new text approaches native North America from the perspective of evolutionary ecology. Succinct, streamlined chapters present an extensive groundwork for supplementary material, or serve as a core text.The narrative covers all of Mesoamerica, and explicates the links between the part of North America covered by the United States and Canada and the portions covered by Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and the Greater Antilles. Additionally, book is extensively illustrated with the author's own research and findings.




The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico


Book Description

This volume celebrates the continuing impact of the most notable contributions from The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization by William T. Sanders, Jeffrey R. Parsons, and Robert S. Santley. In 1979, this influential work synthesized the results of the Basin of Mexico survey projects and follow-up excavations at several sites, while providing theoretical and methodological lines of research in central Mexico and generally in Mesoamerica. More than four decades after that book’s publication, the fourteen contributions in this volume review and analyze its theoretical and methodological influence in light of recent research across disciplines. Among a spectrum of authors representing several generations are those who participated directly in the Basin of Mexico surveys—including the late Jeffrey R. Parsons—as well as those who have been actively working on recent projects in the basin and neighboring regions. Providing a broad and multidisciplinary perspective of the present and future state of research in the area, The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico will be of interest to Mesoamerican and Latin American archaeologists as well as geographers, geologists, historians, and specialists in the study of past environments. Contributors: Guillermo Acosta Ochoa, Aleksander Borejsza, Destiny Crider, Charles Frederick, Raúl García-Chávez, Larry Gorenflo, Angela Huster, Georgina Ibarra Arzave, Charles Kolb, Frank Lehmkuhl, Abigail Meza Peñaloza, Emily McClung de Tapia, John K. Millhauser, Deborah Nichols, Jeffrey R. Parsons, Serafin Sánchez Pérez, Philipp Schulte, Sergey Sedov, Elizabeth Solleiro Rebolledo, Daisy Valera Fenández, Federico Zertuche




Settlement, Subsistence, and Social Complexity


Book Description

This volume brings together the work of some of the most prominent archaeologists to document the impact of Jeffrey R. Parsons on contemporary archaeological method and theory. Parsons is a central figure in the development of settlement pattern archaeology, in which the goal is the study of whole social systems at the scale of regions. In recent decades, regional archaeology has revolutionized how we understand the past, contributing new data and theoretical insights on topics such as early urbanism, social interactions among cities, towns and villages, and long-term population and agricultural change, among many other topics relevant to the study of early civilizations and the evolution of social complexity. Over the past 40 years, the application of these methods by Parsons and others has profoundly changed how we understand the evolution of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican civilization, and now similar methods are being applied in other world areas. The book's emphasis is on the contribution of settlement pattern archaeology to research in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, but its authors also point to the value of regional research in South America, South Asia, and China. Topics addressed include early urbanism, household and gender, agricultural and craft production, migration, ethnogenesis, the evolution of early chiefdoms, and the emergence of pre-modern world-systems.




Remembering Archaeological Fieldwork in Mexico and Peru, 1961-2003


Book Description

Half a century ago, when archaeologist Jeffrey R. Parsons began fieldwork in Mexico and Peru, he could not know that many of the sites he studied were on the brink of destruction. The rural landscapes through which he traveled were, in many cases, destined to be plowed under and paved over. In Remembering Archaeological Fieldwork in Mexico and Peru, 1961–2003, Parsons offers readers a chance to see archaeological sites that were hundreds or thousands of years old and have since vanished or been irrevocably altered. Hundreds of photographs, accompanied by descriptions, illustrate the sites, the people, and the landscapes that Parsons encountered during four decades of research in these regions. Parsons is now emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and has published many archaeological monographs as well as ethnographic research on salt, fish, and other items used for traditional subsistence in Mexico. Foreword by Richard I. Ford.




Human Adaptation in Ancient Mesoamerica


Book Description

"This volume explores the dynamics of human adaptation to social, political, ideological, economic, and environmental factors in Mesoamerica and includes a wide array of topics, such as the hydrological engineering behind Teotihuacan’s layout, the complexities of agriculture and sustainability in the Maya lowlands, and the nuanced history of abandonment among different lineages and households in Maya centers.The authors aptly demonstrate how culture is the mechanism that allows people to adapt to a changing world, and they address how ecological factors, particularly land and water, intersect with nonmaterial and material manifestations of cultural complexity. Contributors further illustrate the continuing utility of the cultural ecological perspective in framing research on adaptations of ancient civilizations.This book celebrates the work of Dr. David Webster, an influential Penn State archaeologist and anthropologist of the Maya region, and highlights human adaptation in Mesoamerica through the scientific lenses of anthropological archaeology and cultural ecology."




Texcoco


Book Description

Texcoco: Prehispanic and Colonial Perspectives presents an in-depth, highly nuanced historical understanding of this major indigenous Mesoamerican city from the conquest through the present. The book argues for the need to revise conclusions of past scholarship on familiar topics, deals with current debates that derive from differences in the way scholars view abundant and diverse iconographic and alphabetic sources, and proposes a new look at Texcocan history and culture from different academic disciplines. Contributors address some of the most pressing issues in Texcocan studies and bring new ones to light: the role of Texcoco in the Aztec empire, the construction and transformation of Prehispanic history in the colonial period, the continuity and transformation of indigenous culture and politics after the conquest, and the nature and importance of iconographic and alphabetic texts that originated in this city-state, such as the Codex Xolotl, the Mapa Quinatzin, and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s chronicles. Multiple scholarly perspectives and methodological approaches offer alternative paradigms of research and open a needed dialogue among disciplines—social, political, literary, and art history, as well as the history of science. This comprehensive overview of Prehispanic and colonial Texcoco will be of interest to Mesoamerican scholars in the social sciences and humanities.




Urbanism in the Preindustrial World


Book Description

The growth of Greek cities in the first millennium BC / Ian Morris -- Did the population of imperial Rome reproduce itself? / Elio Lo Cascio -- Epidemics, age at death, and mortality in ancient Rome / Richard R. Paine and Glenn R. Storey -- Seasonal mortality in imperial Rome and the Mediterranean : three problem cases / Brent D. Shaw -- Population relationships in and around medieval Danish towns / Hans Christian Petersen, Jesper L. Boldsen, and Richard R. Paine -- Colonial and postcolonial New York : issues of size, scale, and structure / Nan A. Rothschild -- An urban population from Roman Upper Egypt / Roger S. Bagnall -- Precolonial African cities : size and density / Chapurukha Kusimba, Sibel Barut Kusimba, and Babatunde Agbaje-Williams -- Urbanization in China : Erlitou and its hinterland / Li Liu -- Population growth and change in the ancient city of Kyongju / Sarah M. Nelson -- Population dynamics and urbanism in premodern island Southeast Asia / Laura Lee Junker -- Identifying Tiwanaku urban populations : style, identity, and ceremony in Andean cities / John Wayne Janusek and Deborah E. Blom -- Late classic Maya population : characteristics and implications / Don S. Rice -- Mortality through time in an impoverished residence of the Precolumbian city of Teotihuacan : a paleodemographic view / Rebecca Storey -- The evolution of regional demography and settlement in the prehispanic Basin of Mexico / L.J. Gorenflo -- Factoring the countryside into urban populations / David B. Small -- Shining stars and black holes : population and preindustrial cities / Deborah L. Nichols.