Latin American Antiquity

Excavations at La Sufricaya, a minor ritual group in the outskirts of the Lowland Maya city of Holmul, have documented two mural paintings inside an elite building of Early Classic date (A.D. 300–A.D. 600). One of the paintings is mythological in nature (Mural 9). The second bears an inscription with references to calendrical and historical events. It commemorates a notorious arrival date at Tikal on 11 Eb 15 (January 16, A.D. 378) on its first anniversary. The architecture and artifacts associated with the murals combine Maya and Teotihuacan decorative motifs, and offer several parallels with Tikal assemblages. The iconography, epigraphy, and archaeological associations of these murals are discussed in relation to the function of the palace complex. This important new evidence contributes to an understanding of which role relations with Teotihuacan may have played in regional politics in the Maya Lowlands during the Early Classic period from the point of view of a smaller site. The interpretations presented here focus on the concept of political intervention of Tikal in the affairs of secondary and tertiary sites.

Economic directness is a new model of socioeconomic organization for the Paracas culture (800–200 BC) in southern Peru, with wider implications for economic theory of the prehispanic Andean past. Using an archaeoeconomic approach to analyze settlement patterns, obsidian artifacts, malacological material, and camelid skeletal remains, this study reconstructs the Paracas economy by using primary archaeological data from the northern Nasca Drainage. Its results force reconsideration of existing socioeconomic models for the ancient Andes such as verticality, circuit mobility, llama caravan mobility, transhumance, and market concepts. Whereas components typical of these models are often absent in the case of the Paracas economy, our new proposal of economic directness integrates their relevant aspects. Economic directness is defined essentially by direct access to important resources from diverse ecological tiers, direct and down-the-line exchanges, reduced transaction costs, llama caravan transport, unbalanced commodity flows across the western Andes, and forces of supply and demand with major consumption on the coast. These features formed under conditions of population growth, generating a continuous and dense settlement pattern from the Pacific coast to the highland puna zone.

... La importancia de este debate para la investigación arqueológica en el área de Juli-Desaguadero es profunda. ... Francisco Pizarro envió a tres hombres para investigar la región del Titicaca después que sus fuerzas habían consolidado el control en el altiplano central. ...