Contributors
PHILIP J. ARNOLD III received his PhD from the University of New Mexico and is currently professor of anthropology at Loyola University Chicago. His research interests include the origins of complex society, ancient technological systems, and economic behavior in pre-Columbian Mexico. These developments are assessed against a backdrop of approximately 3000 years of prehistory along Mexico’s southern Gulf lowlands. His most recent project at Teotepec explores the impact of foreign incursions and influence on the in situ cultural development in the Tuxtla Mountains. He is the author and editor of numerous publications; his most recent volume, coedited with Lourdes Budar, is Arqueología de Los Tuxtlas: Antiguos Paisajes, Nuevas Miradas (Universidad Veracruzana, 2016).
LOURDES BUDAR was trained as an archaeologist at the Universidad Veracruzana (UV). She earned a doctoral degree in Ciencias Humanas with a specialization in Estudios de la Tradición at El Colegio de Michoacán, A.C. She is a full-time professor in the UV Department of Anthropology. She is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores of the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, as well as a board member of the Los Tuxtlas Biosphere Reserve of the National Comission of Protected Natural Areas. She is chair of the Landscape Archaeology and Cosmovision academic group, where her research focuses on landscape archaeology, Mesoamerican cosmovision and representational systems, and crisis, collapse, and processes of social reorganization in the Gulf coast area of southern Veracruz. She is director of the Proyecto Arqueológico Piedra Labrada-Sierra de Santa Marta, as well as the Proyecto Arqueológico San Martín Pajapan, Los Tuxtlas. She has over fifty national and international publications, including Piedra Labrada, with Sara Ladrón de Guevara; Arqueología de Los Tuxtlas, with Philip J. Arnold III; and Arqueología de la Costa del Golfo, dinámicas de la interacción política, económica e ideológica, with Marcie L. Venter and Sara Ladrón de Guevara. She is currently the director of the UV Intercultural program.
MICHAEL D. CARRASCO (PhD art history, University of Texas, Austin, 2005) serves as associate professor of visual cultures of the Americas and cultural heritage studies in the Department of Art History. Drawing on a broad range of subjects— including poetics, iconography, image theory, and ecology—his principal areas of research include the origins of writing and indigenous aesthetics, theology, and epistemologies in Mesoamerica. The other main area of his scholarship lies in cultural heritage, particularly in digital humanities and the juncture between folk traditions and global art systems. His recent work has been supported by internal funding from FSU, an NEH Digital Humanities Level II Start-up Grant; an NEH Fellowship; the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT); and a Japan Council of Local Authorities for International Relations (CLAIR) Furusato Vision Project (for the project Oita’s Bamboo Art and Heritage). His publications include the edited volumes Parallel Worlds: Genre, Discourse, and Poetics in Contemporary, Colonial, and Classic Maya Literature (University Press of Colorado, 2012) and Pre-Columbian Foodways: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Food, Culture, and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica (Springer, 2010), and the exhibition catalogue Decolonizing Refinement: Contemporary Pursuits in the Art of Edouard Duval-Carrié. His articles have appeared in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, Mexicon, and The World Religious Cultures, among others.
JOSHUA D. ENGLEHARDT (PhD anthropology, Florida State University, 2011) is a profesor-investigador (research professor) at the Centro de Estudios Arqueológicos of El Colegio de Michoacán, Mexico, and a Level I National Investigator of the Mexican National Council on Science and Technology (CONACYT). He specializes in Mesoamerican archaeology and visual culture, with a research focus on the development of Mesoamerican writing systems in the Formative period and the correlation of emerging scripts with diachronic changes in material culture. He is the codirector of the Mesoamerican Corpus of Formative Period Art and Writing, an NEH-funded interdisciplinary project that is developing an online database and digital tools for the investigation and presentation of early Mesoamerican visual cultures. Developing out of his work on this project, he has a growing interest in the application of digital technologies in the humanities and the impact of new media on archaeological, art historical, and heritage studies. He is also currently a member of a multidisciplinary team currently exploring the cultural uses and significance of cycads and maize as part of the CONACYT-funded project Cícadas y la Domesticación de Maíz en el Paisaje Mesoamericano. Recent publications include Archaeological Paleography (Archaeopress, 2016), and the edited volumes Agency in Ancient Writing (University Press of Colorado, 2012), Diálogos sobre la relación entre arqueología, antropología, e historia (El Colegio de Michoacán, 2017), and These Thin Partitions: Bridging the Growing Divide between Cultural Anthropology and Archaeology (University Press of Colorado, 2017), as well as over twenty articles and book chapters that stem from his fieldwork throughout Mexico and twenty years of living, working, or studying in the Global South.
GARY M. FEINMAN is the MacArthur Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago. His research interests include the archaeology of urban societies and preindustrial economics. He has codirected long-term archaeological research programs for decades in both Oaxaca, Mexico and Shandong, China. His publications include Images of the Past, 7th edition (McGraw-Hill, 2012); coauthored with T. Douglas Price, Archaeological Perspectives on Political Economies (University of Utah Press, 2004), edited with Linda M. Nicholas; Ancient Oaxaca (Cambridge University Press, 1999), coauthored with Richard Blanton, Stephen Kowalewski, and Linda Nicholas; and Archaic States (School of American Research Press, 1998), coedited with Joyce Marcus. Feinman is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and received the Presidential Recognition Award from the Society for American Archaeology. He is the coeditor of the Journal of Archaeological Research.
DAVID FREIDEL is professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. He was principal investigator of three long-term archaeological research projects: the Cerros Project in Belize, the Selz Foundation Yaxuna Project in Mexico, and the El Peru-Waka’ Project in Guatemala. He coauthored A Forest of Kings and Maya Cosmos with Linda Schele. He recently coedited a book on Maya E Groups and coauthored a book on the human remains of Yaxuna.
GUY DAVID HEPP is an assistant professor of anthropology at California State University, San Bernardino. He holds a BA and a PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an MA from Florida State University. His research is focused on the early complex societies of Mesoamerica and his recent studies have considered the archaeology of La Consentida, an Early Formative period (2000–1000 cal BC) village in Oaxaca, Mexico. This project, funded by the NSF and the Fulbright Program, was awarded the Society for American Archaeology’s 2016 Dissertation Award. In related work, he has published several papers regarding the iconography, depositional context, technological characteristics, and cosmological implications of ancient ceramic figurines and musical instruments.
KERRY M. HULL is a professor in the Department of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University and formerly a professor at Reitaku University, Japan, and a lecturer at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and Hosei University, Japan. He earned a BA in Spanish and BA in French in 1992 from Utah State University. He received an MS in applied linguistics from Georgetown University in 1993. He completed a PhD in linguistic anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin in 2003. His research interests include Mesoamerican epigraphy, Mesoamerican languages, Maya oral traditions and narratives, sociolinguistics, ethnoornithology, ceremonialism, and Polynesian linguistics. He has conducted linguistic, ethnographic, and archaeological fieldwork in Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras. He specializes in the language and culture of the Ch’orti’ Maya of southern Guatemala. He has also carried out linguistic fieldwork on the Ua Pou dialect of Northern Marquesan and on the dialect used on the island of Raivavae in the Austral chain in French Polynesia. He most recently is the author of A Dictionary of Ch’orti’ Mayan-Spanish-English (2016), a coeditor of Parallel Worlds: Genre, Discourse, and Poetics in Contemporary, Colonial, and Classic Maya Literature (2012), and a coeditor of The Ch’orti’ Maya Area: Past and Present (2009).
ELIZABETH JIMÉNEZ GARCÍA is an investigadora (investigator) at the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. She received an undergraduate degree in archaeology at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia and a doctoral degree in Mesoamerican Studies from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her investigations and publications have centered on the archaeology and ethnohistory of the La Montaña region of eastern Guerrero, as well as on the sculptural iconography of Tula, Hidalgo. Her more recent interests are focused on the codices and colonial documents, housed in the Archivo General de la Nación, that speak to the history and lifeways of La Montaña cultural groups.
TIMOTHY J. KNAB is a full-time professor of anthropology, linguistics, and environmental studies at the Universidad de las Américas, Puebla, in Cholula, Puebla, Mexico. Dr. Knab has worked extensively with over a half dozen Mesoamerican languages and literatures. He is the author of numerous books and also a professional chef who works closely with the Slow Food movement. His students have achieved success in business, government, academia, and professional kitchens throughout the world.
CHARLES L. F. KNIGHT, PhD in anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh, has investigated issues relating to the production, distribution and consumption of Mesoamerican chipped-stone tools, especially those made from obsidian for twenty-five years. Initially, he focused on researching consumer-site economics in the southern Gulf lowlands at the Olmec center of Tres Zapotes, Veracruz, and its environs. In order to better understand the processes responsible for the obsidian consumed in the southern Gulf lowlands, and, quite frankly, just tired of the garrapatas, he moved his research focus to the Highlands in 2012. Since then, he has investigated the extraction and early stage production of obsidian commodities at the Zaragoza-Oyameles obsidian source area in Cuenca Oriental of Puebla, Mexico. Here his primary interests include the degree of technological variation across space and through time, the concept of resource control, and the intergenerational transfer of crafting knowledge. He is the assistant director of the Consulting Archaeology Program at the University of Vermont.
BLANCA E. MALDONADO is an archaeologist specializing in ancient metallurgy and production processes. Specific areas of interest include pre-Columbian copper metallurgy in the New World, preindustrial nonferrous metallurgy, and the cultural dynamics of technological practices. Her research has focused mainly on Mesoamerica and the South Central Andes. Maldonado holds a PhD in anthropology from the Pennsylvania State University, with a specialization in archaeology. Her doctoral studies included training in archaeological science and archaeometallurgy at the University of Oxford and University College London. She has received several research grants and awards, including a DAAD Research Grant (for an Academic Stay at the University of Bonn, Germany) and a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, also in Germany (Curt-Engelhorn-Zentrum Archäometrie Mannheim). She is currently professor and researcher in the Centre for Archaeological Studies at El Colegio de Michoacán, AC, in Mexico.
JOYCE MARCUS is the Robert L. Carneiro Distinguished University Professor of Social Evolution at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Marcus’s research includes the origins of the village, the origins of writing, comparative chiefdoms and states, the emergence of social and political inequality, and the political economy of states and empires. Marcus has carried out fieldwork and excavations in Nevada (Lovelock Cave), southern California (the La Brea Tar Pit), Mexico (San José Mogote), Guatemala (El Mirador, Tres Islas, Naranjo, Tintal, Chunhuitz), and Peru (Cerro Azul). Her books include Emblem and State in the Classic Maya Lowlands: An Epigraphic Approach to Territorial Organization (Harvard University Press, 1976); Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Propaganda, Myth, and History in Four Ancient Civilizations (Princeton University Press, 1992); Archaic States (School for Advanced Research, 1998), with Gary M. Feinman; Women’s Ritual in Formative Oaxaca (University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology, 1998); Excavations at San José Mogote 1: The Household Archaeology (University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology, 2005), with Kent Flannery; Excavations at Cerro Azul, Peru (The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2008); The Ancient City (School for Advanced Research, 2008), with Jeremy A. Sabloff; Monte Albán (El Colegio de México, 2008); Andean Civilization (The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2009), with P. Ryan Williams; The Creation of Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2012), with Kent Flannery; Excavations at San José Mogote 2: The Cognitive Archaeology (University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology, 2015), with Kent Flannery; and Coastal Ecosystems and Economic Strategies at Cerro Azul, Peru (University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology, 2016).
JESPER NIELSEN is associate professor in the Section of American Indian Languages and Cultures at the University of Copenhagen. He received his MA (1998) and PhD (2003) from the Department of American Indian Languages and Cultures from the University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on Mesoamerican iconography, epigraphy, and religion, in particular in Teotihuacan, Maya, and Epiclassic cultures. He also has a strong interest in early colonial studies in central Mexico and the Maya region, as well as research history. Currently, he is co-directing the research project The Origins and Development of Calendars and Writing in Central Mexico together with Christophe Helmke. Jesper is also a member of the Proyecto La Pintura Mural Prehispánica en México at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and a member of the consejo de asesores of the journal Arqueología Mexicana. He has published numerous books, chapters, and articles in international peer-reviewed journals (including Ancient Mesoamerica, Antiquity, Latin American Antiquity, Mexicon, the PARI Journal, and Ancient America). Recent publications include Restless Blood: Frans Blom, Explorer and Maya Archaeologist, coauthored with Tore Leifer and Toke Reunert Sellner (2017) and “The Early Classic Murals of El Rosario, Mexico: Description and Iconographic Analysis,” Ancient America 14:1–74 (with Christope Helmke, Fiorella Fenoglio, and Juan Carlos Saint-Charles, 2019).
JOHN M. D. POHL is both adjunct professor in art history at UCLA and Lecturer in Anthropology at Cal State, LA. He has received numerous fellowships and grants for his research on the Nahua, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Aztec civilizations of southern Mexico. In addition to academic pursuits, Dr. Pohl has had a prolific career as a writer, designer, and curator for major museums and exhibitions around the country including the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, North Carolina; “Sorcerers of the Fifth Heaven: Art and Ritual in Ancient Southern Mexico,” for Princeton University; “The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire,” for the Getty Villa Museum; and “The Children of Plumed Serpent, the Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico,” for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Dallas Museum of Art.
JOSÉ LUIS PUNZO DÍAZ holds a PhD in archaeology from the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico City. He is a member of the National Research System (SNI) level 1 and has been a researcher for the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia since 2004. Previously, he served as director of the Museo de las Culturas del Norte in Paquimé, Chihuahua. His principal research interests are the relations between the US Southwest, Northern Mexico, and Mesoamerica; archeometallurgy; the Chalchihuites culture of northern Mexico; and the archaeology of Michoacán. His extensive archaeological fieldwork has focused on Durango and Michoacán, and he has been the director of the Ferrería archeological zone in Durango, as well as Tzintzuntzan and Tingambato in Michoacán. He has published more than thirty archeological research papers and five books.
ÁNGEL IVÁN RIVERA GUZMÁN is an archaeologist of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH). He has realized archaeological investigations in the states of Oaxaca and Guerrero, Mexico. He is a specialist in the iconography and writing systems of southeastern Mesoamerica. His recent fieldwork focuses on the study of the engraved monuments of western Oaxaca and eastern Guerrero.
D. BRYAN SCHAEFFER received his PhD in art history from Florida State University. He is currently a visiting assistant professor at Thomas More University.
NIKLAS SCHULZE has studied prehistory and prehispanic languages and cultures (Hamburg, Germany) and holds an MA in scientific methods in archaeology (Bradford, England) and a PhD in anthropology (Mexico City, Mexico). Currently he is professor-researcher in archaeology at the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí, Mexico. His research focus is on material culture (especially archaeometallurgy) and cultural heritage conservation.