This article reviews the most relevant data regarding evidence of stress and disease in native populations from Southern Patagonia and proposes future directions for paleopathological research. It focuses on the disease patterns in hunter-gatherer societies and the changes produced by contact and colonization. Studies of oral pathologies show a high frequency of dental attrition and low frequency of caries and antemortem tooth loss. Individuals with terrestrial dietary patterns show evidence of higher mechanical stress in the spine than those who participated in marine economies, based on the prevalence of Schmorl's nodes and vertebral osteophytosis. Porotic hyperostosis is more prevalent in individuals who had a marine diet and is probably related to nutritional impairment and parasitic infections. A higher frequency of metabolic stress was identified in individuals who lived in missions, perhaps because of declining quality in diet, hygiene, and living conditions. Paleoparasitological studies identified several species of parasites associated with human skeletons and terrestrial fauna. Moreover, recent studies suggested that treponematosis and tuberculosis were present in Patagonia since at least 1000 years BP. Future paleopathological research should increase the size and quality of studied samples and apply new methods and interpretive criteria. Detailed research into infections, degenerative joint diseases, and trauma (including violence episodes) has rarely been conducted.

A decade of public-works excavations on Flores Island—once Tayza, capital of the powerful Itza Maya confederacy in Postclassic- and contact-period Petén, Guatemala—has recovered large quantities of artifacts but without proper provenience controls. This important center is poorly understood in archaeological terms because of the dense modern construction that precludes systematic investigation. Thus, these excavated materials become critical despite their limitations for insights into the Itza settlement. Convenience samples of the slipped and decorated pottery from the salvage (and other) excavations were analyzed to interpret style and meaning through the combined perspectives of design structure analysis, information exchange, visual rhetoric, literary studies, and semiotechnology. Features examined include forms, types, colors, layouts, and motifs. The spatial distributions of these features over the island were assessed in terms of a quadripartite organization mentioned in Spanish accounts. It is proposed that the southeastern quadrant was the residential area of Itza royal elites, due to the presence of elaborate and innovative polychromes conveying messages of elite power. Pottery in the northern quadrants has more traditional decoration resembling that at mainland sites in the Lake Petén basin, and signals ordinary Itza identity. These differences, and the overall theoretical approach, might be testable on larger, better-excavated samples.

This paper assesses a set of ideological practices related to the growth and abandonment of ceremonial and administrative buildings from the southern Moche area of the north coast of Peru. The archaeological record at Huacas de Moche, El Brujo, and Guadalupito, three of the main settlements in the region, includes evidence for the deposition and manipulation of animal and human bodies, burning, and the alteration of wall iconography. These activities took place in the period between A.D. 300-750, and were related to either the construction and renovation of structures or the abandonment of monumental built spaces. The analysis of this data contributes to a better understanding of Moche ritual dedicatory behavior, contextualizing it in a broader perspective on place making and the marking of time in precolumbian South America.

In the semiarid environment of the Fuegian steppe (Argentina), shallow lakes were intensively exploited by hunter-gatherers throughout the Holocene. The archaeological record concentrated along their shoreline frequently reports the first stages of the lithic reduction sequence. In this article, we consider rock availability at different coastal sectors in Lake Amalia. The data focus on the size and weight of the cobbles used as raw material (in Lake Amalia and nearby locations), aiming to compare transported material and that which is spatially located. We analyze information regarding the role played by shallow lakes in the exploitation of steppe environments and their importance in hunter-gatherers’ mobility. We suggest that raw material frequency, size, and spatial distribution have conditioned space-use patterns in the Fuegian steppe. The Amalia locality study case sheds light on recurrent visits to specific places in these landscapes.

Surface clearing of small Ballcourt 2 at Nixtun-Ch'ich’, constructed atop a Middle Preclassic platform, revealed that the court was built and used in the Late and Terminal Classic periods and into the Postclassic, before and after apparent termination. Recovered artifacts suggest feasting and gambling.

Since 2004, archaeological, ethnographic, and archival investigations at the ex-hacienda San Miguel Acocotla in Atlixco, Puebla, Mexico, have explored the lives of indigenous workers who toiled at the hacienda from 1577 through the twentieth-century Mexican Revolution. The aim of this project is to understand the ways in which incorporation into an industrial capitalist system impacted individual and community identity. This report presents a summary of the archaeological components of the project. Research focused on the area of worker housing, the calpanería, in an effort to expand our understandings of the conditions of daily life of the hacienda's indigenous workers. I describe the completed fieldwork and summarize the results of studies of nineteenth-century domestic architecture andfoodways. These data challenge assumptions about the quotidian experiences of hacienda laborers, often made using incomplete historical records, and allow us to connect the ethnographic present with the prehispanic past by illuminating the transformative processes at work in rural Mexico during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

What kind of times are these when a talk about trees is almost a crime? Among other things, they are times of forgetfulness. Forgetting does not mean that reminiscences just vanish as time goes by. It is, on the contrary, a major cultural force grounded in a politics of anti-memory. One needs to forget in order to keep repeating oneself. In this article, I argue that the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro did not burn to the ground merely because of the lack of resources, but because being burned to the ground has always been a virtual feature of the existence of the museum since it was created in 1818. It burned as part of a long-term politics of anti-memory in Brazilian history.

Essential to quipu analysis is identification of the logical structure of the quipu and the internal relationships of the data within that structure. The identification process relies on examining, in detail, the colors, placement, and spacing of the quipu cords, and the knot types and positions on the cords. Spin, ply, and knot directionality have recently become available for 59 otherwise well-described quipus. Here, I examine this additional information in the context of the logic of the quipus. Analysis shows that for these quipus, except for three in which the main cord differs from the other cords, spin and ply are uniform for all the cords on a quipu. For the large majority of the quipus (about 81 percent), knot directionality is also uniform throughout. The 19 percent for which knot directionality is mixed are presented and discussed individually. On them, knot directionality conforms to, and plays a role in, the overall logic of the quipu. It is clear that spin, ply, and knot directionality are not chosen by the quipu-maker on a cord-by-cord basis and they do not serve to distinguish between quantitative and non-quantitative data.

The Peruvian south coast between the Tambo and Ilo rivers is a deserted wasteland. Yet tracts of abandoned farmland and expanses of desiccated lomas vegetation indicate that it was once vibrant and productive. Scattered habitations and cemeteries also indicate a pronounced resident Chiribaya population between A.D. 1200 and 1400. While river drainages of the western Andes and their canalized extensions are often treated as primary analytical units of study, our investigation of so-called peripheral intervalley regions points to a highly engineered and intensively managed landscape. When compared to the Ilo Valley, intervalley Chiribaya were organized into smaller communities and managed smaller spring-fed irrigation systems but were also heavily invested in adjacent maritime and lomas resource bases. Utilizing a mixed economic strategy, we argue, these intervalley populations were anything but marginal to the Chiribaya señorío of the Ilo region; rather, they were fully engaged in the social, political, and economic spheres of the late Intermediate period Peruvian south coast and formed a significant component of the Chiribaya cultural landscape. Our results hold implications for other similarly marginalized areas of the Andean coast, where distinct microenvironmental parameters and human ingenuity intersected to significantly transform the western Andes.

Ceremonial architecture of late precontact (A.D. 600-1500) societies of Puerto Rico consists of stone-lined plazas and ball courts (bateys,). Archaeologists use these structures to signify the onset of hierarchical “chiefly” polities and to interpret their regional organization. Problematically, little consideration is given to the costs of their physical construction and the associated organizational implications at local and regional scales. In this paper, we use data gathered through geoarchaeological field investigations to develop labor estimates for the plaza and bateys at the site of Tibes—one of the largest precolumbian ceremonial centers in Puerto Rico. The estimates provide a basis for addressing how these features were constructed at the site and are considered within the broader organizational contexts of incipient polities in the island's south-central region between A.D. 600 and A.D. 1200.

Shrines were a regular component of ceremonial architecture in the public plazas of Postclassic Maya centers. Small shrines and natural landmarks such as caves and outcrops at the borders of settlements or in wilderness locations also served, and in some cases continue to serve, as important ritual loci for Maya peoples. These more peripheral locales were not only critical access points to the supernatural, but also served to delineate places. Because these border features, which represent only a given moment in a constantly shifting social and political landscape, are sometimes unmodified or are inconspicuous, they are relatively ephemeral and difficult to identify in the archaeological record. This paper documents a Late Postclassic shrine paired with a natural feature, a small hill, from the site of Tayasal in Petén, Guatemala. We argue that it served as a border shrine. Paired with the small hill, the two embodied a liminal frontier, not only between earthly and spiritual realms but also between settled and unsettled space.

The increasing use of massively parallel sequencing in the study of current and ancient human populations has enabled new approaches to bioanthropological and archaeological issues; however, its application to archaeological samples requires the use of technologies that are not easily accessible outside US and European research centers. To obtain an ancient mitogenome in Argentina, several institutions collaborated to apply massively parallel sequencing and bioinformatic methodologies on an enriched ancient DNA library of an individual from the Beagle Channel (dated 1504 ± 46 years BP), a region of particular interest for this line of inquiry. Phylogenetic reconstruction showed a close relationship with a Yamana from Navarino Island and an individual from Hoste Island (Chilean Antarctic Province): the three shared an ancestor who lived between 203 and 4,439 years ago. These three have mutations reported only for current and ancient individuals from the Beagle Channel, and their relationship with the rest of the D1g sub-haplogroups is unclear. The results obtained here are consistent with the reduction of mobility in the Fuegian archipelago around 4500 years BP that has been proposed based on archaeological evidence.

Though most archaeological sites studied in South Patagonia are caves and rockshelters, archaeologists have not discussed the function of these sites in the context of a regional settlement system. Research in two small rockshelters with cultural assemblages dating to the Magallanes IV phase allowed me to recognize that it was almost impossible to interpret rockshelter function by applying some settlement-system models. The models of Binford and of Borrero had failed to explain how, despite the small size of these sites and the small number of cultural materials recovered from them, there was evidence of multiple activities, well-made lithic and bone tools, and guanaco-bone specimens of different economic value. I discuss and interpret the function of small rockshelters in the settlement system of the Magallanes IV phase. I assume that Magallanes IV phase hunters developed foraging strategies and used portable tents the same as sixteenth-century southern Patagonian hunters did.

Reconstructing access patterns, in particular processional and liturgical movement in ceremonial architecture, can illuminate social processes within expansive states. Extensive excavations from 2010–2012 in the uniquely preserved Tiwanaku temple at the Omo M10 site in Moquegua, Peru (ca. AD 500–1100), shed new light on connectedness and access patterns of the temple. Extensive areal excavations confirm past interpretations of a central axial series of doorways and staircases presided over by stelae and U-shaped, altar-like structures leading from public plazas to the sunken court and a central shrine. However, new findings revealed separate lateral pathways through the structure, which suggest liturgical processions to walled patio groups that were isolated from the central axis. We posit that these small patios and their roofed chambers may have functioned as chapels for distinct groups or pluralistic cultic activities that were separate from those of the central axis. Implications for Tiwanaku social structure are studied in light of other examples of triple entryways in Tiwanaku monumental architecture, and Kolata's suggestion of “Taypi” as a structural amalgam of a center and complementary halves, with implications of mediation and bilateral complementarity between ethnicities, genders, moieties, or other pluralistic entities within Tiwanaku state and society.

Este trabajo busca profundizar el conocimiento sobre el rol de los sectores intermedios de las quebradas en el entramado social de la microrregión de Antofagasta de la Sierra (Puna meridional argentina) a lo largo del tiempo. A través del estudio de la tecnología cerámica desde una perspectiva diacrónica (ca. 2000-500 aP), haciendo énfasis en los estudios petrográficos de pastas, se investigan los cambios y continuidades en la producción alfarera de la microrregión. Para ello, se presentan los resultados de la investigación realizada sobre el material cerámico proveniente de los sitios de Las Escondidas y Corral Alto, en la quebrada del Río Miriguaca, y Cueva Salamanca 1, en la quebrada del Río Las Pitas. A partir de los análisis realizados, se pudo concluir que existieron cambios en los modos de hacer cerámica a lo largo del tiempo en la microrregión. Se observó que durante el Formativo (ca. 2000 aP) existió un modo de hacer compartido en un área amplia, mientras que durante el periodo Tardío (ca. 800 aP) se dio una fragmentación en las prácticas de producción cerámica en la microrregión. Estos cambios responden a profundas trasformaciones ocurridas en las sociedades puneñas que se comenzaron a gestar tiempo antes del comienzo del período Tardío en un proceso paulatino, complejo y heterogéneo.

The site of Tipon, Peru, located about 30 km east of Cuzco, provides an example of Inka knowledge of hydraulic engineering and the civil engineering practices used in the design and operation of the complex water system. The inhabitants of Tipon used river- and spring-sourced surface and subterranean channels to convey, distribute, and drain water to and from multiple agricultural platforms, reservoirs, and urban ceremonial centers. Intricate intersecting surface and subterranean channel systems that combined and regulated water flows from different sources controlled the water to and drainage from 13 terraced agricultural platforms. This design served to maintain different ground moisture levels to sustain specialty crops. Within the site are fountains and multiple water display features requiring sophisticated hydraulic engineering necessary for aesthetic displays. To understand the technology used by the Inka to design the water systems at Tipon, I used computational fluid dynamics methodology and modern hydraulic engineering theory. I made computer models of key elements of the Principal Fountain and the Main Aqueduct to reproduce water flow patterns in these features as intended by Inka engineers’ designs and calculations. The Inka hydraulic technology used complex engineering principles similar to those in modern civil engineering practice centuries ahead of their formal discovery in Western hydraulic science.

El registro arqueológico de cazadores-recolectores localizado en ambientes de altura ha sido ampliamente debatido en la literatura mundial. Las discusiones se han centrado en su funcionalidad, cronología, complementariedad con ambientes bajos y significado en los procesos de poblamiento de distintas regiones. Los Andes meridionales cuentan con un amplio espacio cordillerano dentro del cual se emplazan una serie de sitios arqueológicos localizados a aproximadamente 3.000 m snm. Las duras condiciones climáticas de estos ambientes, así como la presencia de estructuras habitacionales, despertó el interés de los investigadores en relación con su funcionalidad, tiempo de permanencia y manejo de los recursos locales. En este trabajo se presenta la información zooarqueológica de cuatro sitios de altura localizados en un sector de los Andes meridionales, en el sur de la provincia de Mendoza, Argentina: El Indígeno, Los Peuquenes, Laguna del Diamante S-4 y Risco de los Indios. El material arqueofaunístico analizado es evaluado a la luz de las características ambientales, los costos de transporte y la funcionalidad de estas locaciones en relación con los circuitos de explotación anual. Los resultados muestran un uso de taxones restringido, con un fuerte énfasis en el guanaco, y un escaso transporte de fauna desde y hacia pisos ecológicos localizados a menor altitud. Todo esto sugiere el uso de los sitios de manera residencial y no como lugares de obtención de presas para su procesamiento y traslado hacia localizaciones más bajas.

In the Maya region scholars have long noted the connection between solar alignments and radial pyramids at sites such as Chickén Itzá, Dzibilchaltún, and Uaxactún. Just. 26.5 km west-southwest of Chichén Itzá, the site of Ikil also contains a massive radial pyramid, known as Structure 1. In May 2011 investigations at Ikil revealed that this pyramid also figures in a solar hierophany-the sunrise over the pyramid's summit on the days of the solar zenith transit. What is unique, however, is that the observation point for this event is situated inside of a cave to the west of the pyramid. In this paper, evidence is presented that suggests the location of Structure 1 was dictated by the orientation of the cave, and that the physical and ceremonial linkage of these two landscape features created the cosmic hub of Ikil. Furthermore, it is argued that ceremonies marking the solar zenith-a day largely ignored in Euro-Christian calendars-would have been enacted by the ruling class as a way to formalize and sanctify the annual rebirth of the agricultural cycle, while publicly displaying their connection to the divine and thus legitimizing their position of high religious and social status.

Both long-distance and localized chemical relationships in pottery and their implications for studies of Gulf lowland exchange can be examined with instrumental neutron activation. New pottery samples from Classic period (A.D. 300-900) contexts in the western lower Papaloapan basin were subjected to chemical compositional analysis. The sample represents three groups, coarse utility jars, common orange slipped serving bowls, and fine paste, higher-value white slipped serving bowls. At an intraregional scale, four localities in the western basin were sampled, but not all proved to be compositionally distinct. A mangrove zone pottery group contrasts compositionally with groups from riverine farmlands to the west. At a larger interregional scale, pottery from neighboring geomorphological areas as well as distant alluvial systems up and down the Gulf lowlands yielded chemically distinct groups. Considerable intraregional trade is suggested, but little is evident at the interregional scale. The interregional analysis is the first integrated overview of Gulf lowland ceramic chemical compositions, and the intraregional analysis begins assessment of Classic period pottery production and exchange within the western lower Papaloapan basin. Methodologically, we use sand sources in the region to determine if differences in tempering of pastes are likely to account for differences in compositional groups.

Long-term excavations at two large La Quemada hinterland habitation sites provide data for developing population estimates based on ethnographic studies. Calculations based in part on ratio constants of roofed floor area to excavated space are applied to 183 habitation sites in the valley measured in 1974. These data reveal not only the range of population in the immediate valley, but also in major population aggregates around La Quemada during the period of major occupation (ca. A.D. 700). The mean population within the La Quemada core area is estimated as 6,867 (between 4,578 and 9,155) individuals, with an average population density of 38 persons per km2. Population density within three of the largest nearby settlement aggregates ranges around a mean of 209, 136, and 117 individuals respectively per square kilometer.