This article engages the debate about Aztec cannibalism principally through the analysis of three accounts of cannibalism by trickery set in the Valley of Mexico. These three tales are practically the only form in which cannibalism appears in the major Nahua (indigenous Nahuatl-speaking) writings of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The stories portray cannibalism as shocking, even abhorrent, to Aztecs—rather than as customary—and as a stratagem for humiliating an enemy or provoking a community to war. The contemporaneous Spanish writings, in contrast, are replete with allegations of customary cannibalism, while the major mestizo (Nahua mother and Spanish father) authors are divided in their treatment of the subject. The three-way critical comparison (Nahua, mestizo, Spanish) raises the possibility that the idea of customary cannibalism originated in Spanish culture and was then transmitted to the indigenous population during post-Conquest religious conversion and Hispanicization.

We describe tombs and ceramic collections in Zapotec style excavated in central Mexico, outside Oaxaca. The most notable are 13 ceramic vessels and objects from the Xoo complex (a.d. 500–800) excavated by José García Payón in Calixtlahuaca (near the city of Toluca), and three Zapotec-style tombs excavated in Los Teteles (near the city of Puebla). We also mention Zapotec remains excavated near Tula, Hidalgo, and tombs in other parts of central Mexico. We briefly explore the implications of these data for our understanding of central Mexico after the fall of Teotihuacan.

Abstracto

Con base en dos textos “proféticos” para el katun 13 Ahau contenidos en el Chilam Balam de Maní y en la concordancia hecha por Barrera Vásquez y Rendón para los textos paralelos que aparecen en el Chumayel, Kaua, y Maní, exploro símbolos, significados y saberes construídos por los mayas yucatecos respecto a uno de los más graves y recurrentes problemas de su historia: la plaga de langosta (Schistocerca piceifrons piceifrons). Los pronósticos van más allá del hambre y la enfermedad previsibles. Saak' aparece con el potencial destructivo suficiente para poner en crisis el ecosistema, la sociedad y hasta el orden cósmico. Los sabios que escribieron las profecías revelan un amplio conocimiento de la plaga, de los alcances de su impacto y, desde lo profundo de su cultura, hacen una propuesta para evitar que la crisis lleve a la ruptura social y a mayor sufrimiento y mortandad.

Archaeological investigations in southern Veracruz, Mexico, have traditionally focused on the impressive achievements of the Early Formative Olmec, one of Mesoamerica's earliest complex societies. Fewer studies have investigated post-Olmec cultural developments. Research in parts of the middle San Juan and lower Coatzacoalcos drainages of southern Veracruz provides new data on the Epiclassic period, when population levels exceeded the Olmec period. This paper examines settlement patterns and architectural complexes to interpret the political organization extant during the Epiclassic. Two largely polarized political models are examined, one segmentary and the other centralized. Perhaps not surprisingly, the data are consistent with aspects of both models. Finally, data are compared to other nearby regions to place the study area in a larger regional context. Traditionally conceived as a monolithic region, the southern Gulf lowlands are better characterized by cultural variation, population discontinuities, and intra- and interregional interaction.

The Classic Maya esteemed jadeite not only for its preciousness and beauty but also as stone of great symbolic import. This paper examines the religious significance of jade and certain types of jade artifacts among the Classic Maya. In this study, I note that the Classic Maya ascribed a number of meanings to jade, including maize, centrality, and rulership, as well as a material embodiment of wind and the vitalizing breath soul. Because of its close relationship to the breath spirit, jade was an important component of funerary rites and the ritual conjuring of gods and ancestors. Carved in floral form, jade earspools were considered supernatural sources or passageways for the breath spirit, frequently portrayed as a bead or a serpent emerging from the center of the jade flare. A common Classic Maya death expression, och b'ih, pertains directly to resurrection of the soul through the symbolism of earspools. Many of the symbolic meanings and imagery found with Classic Maya jade also appears with other cultures of ancient Mesoamerica, including Teotihuacan, Xochicalco, and the contact-period Aztec. Rather than being wholly of Classic Maya origin, many aspects of this jade symbolism and related artifacts can be also found among the earlier Middle Formative Olmec.

Several studies over the past 20 years have argued for an explicit connection between a hieroglyphic record of war, the so-called star war, and the observation of Venus. To the last, these studies have relied on statistical treatments or simple numerical coincidence to substantiate their claims. In this paper I challenge the results of these studies on two levels. First, I demonstrate that the iconographic evidence that inspired the association between Venus and the “star war” verb is itself unstable; then I appeal to the historical contexts of the rulers engaged in this warfare to see if, as individuals, there is evidence that they held such a belief. In both cases, I show that the evidence does not support a ritual timing of Classic Maya warfare by the phases of Venus. At end, I turn to philological consideration to propose a new reading for the “star war” verb.

Maya Blue is an unusual blue pigment used on pottery, sculpture, and murals from the Preclassic to the Colonial period. Until the late 1960s, its composition was unknown, but chemists working in Spain, Belgium, Mexico, and the United States identified Maya Blue as a combination of indigo and the unusual clay mineral palygorskite (also called attapulgite). A source of palygorskite in the Maya area was unknown for years; then ethnoarchaeological research in the mid-1960s demonstrated that the contemporary Maya recognized the unique physical properties of palygorskite and used it as an additive for pottery temper and for curing certain types of illnesses. Because of its importance in Maya Blue, pre-Hispanic sources of the mineral were then suggested based on ethnoarchaeological data. One of these sources was the cenote in the town of Sacalum, Yucatan. This paper briefly reviews the history of the Maya Blue research from an anthropological perspective and presents evidence of a second possible pre-Hispanic mining site for palygorskite at Yo' Sah Kab near Ticul, Yucatan. Archaeological and technological approaches have demonstrated the use, distribution, composition, and characteristics of Maya Blue, but ethnoarchaeology has related it to Maya language and culture and to possible pre-Hispanic sources of one of its constituents, palygorskite.

In Classic Maya society, the stela was an important medium through which historical information was conveyed. Stelae are free-standing stone slabs carved in low relief that usually depict portraits of rulers, which are accompanied by hieroglyphic texts recording the rulers' identity and actions. Recent research has focused on the stela not only as a carrier of information but also as an important cultural symbol in its own right. In 1985, Linda Schele and David Stuart proposed that the Classic Maya called the stela a te'-tun, or stone-tree. This identification led to the recognition of cultural continuities among the Highland Maya in Chiapas who, on occasion, substitute trees for individual crosses on their cross shrines. In 1996, Stuart suggested that the ancient Maya word for stela was lakamtun, or big stone, emphasizing that the stela was an embodiment of the royal self in the sense that it shared some of the divine essence of the ruler. Drawing on epigraphic research, anthropological theory, the ethnographic literature, as well as personal field observations, I propose that certain spiritual and symbolic concepts of the stela continue to live in the crosses among the Maya today and that these concepts should be considered when we evaluate ancient contexts of meaning for the Maya stela.

This paper examines various lines of evidence for the classification and linguistic affiliation of writing at Late Preclassic Kaminaljuyu. The linguistic evidence for the ethnic composition of the Maya highlands and Pacific slopes during the Late Preclassic period points to contact among Ch'olan-Tzeltalan, Greater K'iche'an, and other non-Mayan languages, and to a dominant political economic role of Ch'olan-Tzeltalan. The epigraphic evidence supports classifying the script together with the Lowland Mayan script, and separately from the Epi-Olmec script, and hints at the presence of uniquely Ch'olan traits, some of which have been pointed out by other authors. A comparison with contemporaneous texts of unambiguous Lowland Mayan (Ch'olan or Yukatekan) affiliation suggests an overlap of orthographic, calligraphic, and semantic traits. Both lines of evidence support the hypotheses that Ch'olan-Tzeltalan speakers were the innovators of the Maya script, and that such a development perhaps took place in the Maya highlands. At the very least, the evidence points to a much closer relationship between the Maya highlands and lowlands during the Late Preclassic than previously thought.

Ancient Maya monumental art was designed to enact the physical, social, and ritual hierarchy. Physically, sculpture created barriers and access patterns that altered movement through sites. Monumental architecture separated ritual participants in buildings from audiences in the plazas below. Access to monuments and portrayals on monuments in part defined social and power hierarchies. Motifs were altered to communicate various forms of power appropriate to each context and audience. Complex supernatural themes and ritual roles demonstrated hierarchical differences among the ruler and other nobles, while more simplistic representations of a powerful ruler demonstrated the separation of the ruler from commoners.

Recent epigraphic decipherments suggest that the child of a Teotihuacan ruler was installed as the ruler of Tikal in a.d. 379. This paper reviews the excavation and osteology of the tomb of this king, Yax Nuun Ayiin I. Estimating the age at death of the skeletons, I found that the skeletons surrounding the principal occupant include at least one adult, who was distinguished by a rare style of dental decoration. I report strontium isotope ratios obtained from the teeth of four of these skeletons. Comparison with a larger data set of strontium isotope ratios on Tikal burials indicates that none of the sampled skeletons from Burial PTP-010 were foreigners to the Maya Lowlands. Although native Tikal children cannot be distinguished from the skeletons of children who lived at nearby Peten sites using strontium isotopes, these results do not support epigraphic readings that identify Yax Nuun Ayiin as a child of Teotihuacan.

The Pakbeh Regional Economy Program is studying the vexing questions of economic life among the ancient Maya in northwestern Yucatan, Mexico. The region constitutes an ideal laboratory in which to investigate these questions, as it has very limited agricultural potential and fewer options for intensification than are found in the southern and central lowlands, yet many times more people lived here during the Classic period than can eke out a living today, and it has abundant evidence of market trade. Because crop yields in outfields are very low, and known intensification techniques are possibly incapable of sufficient yield enhancement, we anticipated that it would be an easy task to demonstrate that this population was dependent on imports of food and other necessities of life from beyond the region and therefore had a complex exchange economy. Twelve years later, we report on how wrong we were. We are still struggling with an evaluation of agricultural insufficiency. We explore the many and varied lines of evidence we have pursued and the confounding factors inherent in them, including problems with reconstructing ancient population size, equating contemporary and historical crop yields and farming practices, as well as ancient with modern environmental conditions, and hypothesizing potential forms of agricultural intensification, including intensive fertilization and other yield enhancement techniques, and reliance on alternative crops. The best that we can say at this juncture is that using contemporary production and consumption standards, the most conservative population estimates, and the most liberal estimates of available land in the surrounding region, we can conclude only that regional agricultural self-sufficiency remains unlikely but not proved. What initially seemed like an archaeological “no-brainer” has required us to delve into the realm of archaeological epistemology that we would like to share with our colleagues.

In 1931 and 1932, George Vaillant and Sigvald Linné excavated 34 burials and 17 offerings dating to the Early Postclassic period (a.d. 900–1150). The features were located on the ruins of the Classic-period site of Teotihuacan and within the boundaries of a roughly 25–50 ha zone identified by the Teotihuacan Mapping Project as having a dense Early Postclassic-period occupation. The results of Vaillant's excavations have not been published. An examination of the Vaillant–Linné data sheds new light on Early Postclassic-period mortuary ritual and social organization. The identification of several types of burials shows that local people conducted primary and secondary mortuary rituals and indicates the presence of at least two social strata at the site. The content of the burials and offerings supports a division of the Early Postclassic period into two local phases, Mazapan (ca. a.d. 900–1000) and Atlatongo (ca. a.d. 1000–1100/1150), with these features dating to the earlier phase.

This study provides a synthetic review of the Terminal Classic collapse of the Maya site of Colha, Belize, based on new data drawn from recent lithic and osteological studies and previously reported information. The well-known Colha skull pit has figured prominently in previous hypotheses of the site's collapse, which focus on either warfare or ritual termination. In this review, these two hypotheses are reexamined using data from: (1) shifts in settlement patterns; (2) transitions in lithic production; and (3) the death en masse of at least 55 individuals coincident with the site's abandonment. Based on the evidence presented here, we argue that warfare precipitated Colha's collapse. In light of Colha's role as a secondary site that functioned primarily as a lithic-production locality, the Terminal Classic destruction of the site illustrates the significance of material motivations in Maya warfare and accents the diversity of collapse processes in the Maya Lowlands.

In this paper we present the results of our analysis of the contents and context of a Terminal Classic “problematical deposit” at Blue Creek, in northwestern Belize, and consider the kinds of behaviors, ritual and otherwise, that may have been responsible for it. We argue that the deposit is secondary, and not the result of a termination ritual in which whole vessels are smashed in situ on the front of a monumental structure in the site center. Based on analysis of the ceramics found in the deposit, specifically the number of whole pots and the forms of vessels represented, as well as a careful consideration of the stratigraphic evidence, we hypothesize that this problematical deposit may represent the transported remains of feasting events that occurred elsewhere at Blue Creek. The research that we present here has important implications for understanding the behaviors and events that occurred prior to the abandonment of Maya sites during the Terminal Classic period (a.d. 830/850–1000). Furthermore, we offer a methodology for the interpretation of problematical deposits that too often go unanalyzed and demonstrate that detailed investigation of such deposits contributes to a greater understanding of Maya ritual behavior.

Assumptions concerning the late dating of Middle Formative ceramics in the northern Maya lowlands and similarities between this region and areas to the south underlie mainstream interpretations that the northern Maya lowlands was slower to develop cultural complexity. This paper is a re-evaluation of these assumptions and their impact on interpretations of Formative interaction. Recent research at Yaxuna, Yucatan, Mexico is discussed in light of alternative approaches to the study of sociopolitical interaction among early complex societies.

Evidence from the Tuxtla Mountains in southern Veracruz suggests that Teotihuacan established a base at Matacapan, the region's top-ranking center, sometime during the Early Classic period. This development in Tuxtlas's prehistory was associated with the founding of Matacapan, a major shift in settlement pattern, and the presence of substantial amounts of Fine Buff, a lower fired variant of Fine Orange that resembles Copa ware, a common Middle Classic-period ceramic service ware at Teotihuacan. Teotihuacan's influence at Matacapan, as monitored ratios of candelero- and tripod support to rim sherds, increased markedly in the succeeding early Middle Classic period but declined in the late Middle Classic and early Late Classic periods. At the same time, Teotihuacan's influence extended well into the countryside, where it was present not only at other large sites, but also at small villages and hamlets. These developments were associated with changes in the amount and kind of obsidian traded to the Tuxtlas. The total volume of obsidian traded to the Tuxtlas in the Middle and Late Classic periods was huge: from 7.5 to 19.6 metric tons per year. Matacapan had preferred status as far as the consumption of green obsidian was concerned, and in general, pre-Hispanic settlements in the Tuxtlas consumed more of this material than neighboring areas such as La Mixtequilla and the Hueyapan region. When Teotihuacan declined in importance and its influence throughout Mesoamerica waned, a much smaller amount of obsidian—in particular, material from Pachuca—was traded to the Tuxtlas. This is precisely what we would expect if the Central Mexican city was no longer the conveyor of obsidian over long distances, and some other center—perhaps Cantona or El Tajin—replaced Teotihuacan as the primary distributor of obsidian to southern Veracruz.

The Santa Isabel Project (Nicaragua) is investigating domestic remains from a supposed Postclassic/Ometepe-period regional center on the shore of Lake Nicaragua. However, a suite of twelve C-14 dates from the site suggests that the occupation predates the currently accepted time range for the Ometepe period by several hundred years, calling into question the periodization and associated cultural processes. This paper reports and contextualizes those dates.

Both the accidental as well as the purposeful discovery of a large number of anthropomorphic peg-based sculptures in the Banderas Valley in the states of Jalisco and Nayarit during the 1990s have provided a corpus of contextual and iconographic data that, along with conquest-period ethnographic data, allow for an assessment of the date and function of such figures. In addition, because of the similarity of these sculptural figures to ones of comparable dates in Central America, the case for significant pre-Hispanic coastal contacts between the two areas is reinforced.

The challenge in summing up the active life and productive career of any famous person is to put the important facts on record while steering a respectful path between hagiography and recitation of his curriculum vitae. We attempt to do this for our esteemed colleague and mentor, one of Mesoamerica's last originals, Gareth W. Lowe (Figure 1). With his death on March 8, 2004, in Tucson, Arizona, at age 82, Gareth left behind a legacy that reaches far beyond his well-deserved international reputation. Gareth spent 50 years of his life working in Mesoamerica, principally on the Formative period in Chiapas, Mexico. He first went to southern Mexico in 1953 as a crew member of the newly organized New World Archaeological Foundation (NWAF). Two years later, the NWAF was rescued by the sponsorship of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and much later (in 1976) it became part of Brigham Young University. Gareth served two stints as NWAF field director (1956–1959, 1961–1975), basically as de facto director, and finally served officially as director from 1975 to 1987. In a real sense, Gareth was the NWAF, and its successes and agenda were largely his. The story of one cannot be understood without the other.