Christopher S. Beekman, Justin Jennings, and Michael Mathiowetz. Structure and History in the Americas: Closed and Interconnected? In Entangled Words: 600-1350, edited by Daniel Köning, pp. 41-172. Harvard University Press/C. H. Beck, Cambridge. (2025)

(2022) Our Mother the Sea: The Pacific Coastal Exchange Network of Postclassic Mexico (John M. D. Pohl and Michael D. Mathiowetz)

In Waves of Influence: Pacific Maritime Networks Connecting Mexico, Central America, and Northwestern South America, 2022

This chapter by John M. D. Pohl and Michael D. Mathiowetz appears in a Dumbarton Oaks volume edited by Christopher S. Beekman and Colin McEwan. Please cite the chapter and volume as follows: Pohl, John M.D. and Michael D. Mathiowetz 2022 Our Mother the Sea: The Pacific Coastal Exchange Network of Postclassic Mexico. In Waves of Influence: Pacific Maritime Networks Connecting Mexico, Central America, and Northwestern South America, Christopher S. Beekman and Colin McEwan, eds.: 167–201. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington D. C.

Con Iván Hernández, "The Forgotten Gods of Ixtapantongo (Estado de México): A Comparative Study of Rock Paintings at an Early Postclassic Site", Karl Taube et.al., in When east meets west, Oxford, 2023, pp.489-514.

2023

Perspectivas recientes sobre los análisis cerámicos de la temporada de campo 2019-2020 del Proyecto Chichen Itza .

Tracing the movement of ancient cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) in the Americas: new approaches.

2022

Waves of Influence: Revisiting Coastal Connections between Pre-Columbian Northwest South America and Mesoamerica

Ch. 01 The Enduring Vision

Native American nations known as the Iroquois, had engaged in a seemingly endless cycle of violence and revenge. Iroquois families, villages, and nations fought one another, and neighboring Indians attacked relentlessly. When Hiawatha tried to restore peace within his own Onondaga nation, an evil sorcerer caused the deaths of his seven beloved daughters. Griefstricken, Hiawatha wandered alone into the forest. After several days, he experienced a series of visions. First he saw a flock of wild ducks fly up from the lake, taking the water with them. Hiawatha walked onto the dry lakebed, gathering the beautiful purple-and-white shells that lay there. He saw the shells, called wampum, as symbolic "words" of condolence that, when properly strung into belts and ceremonially presented, would soothe anyone's grief, no matter how deep. Then he met a holy man named Deganawidah (the Peacemaker), who presented him with several wampum belts and spoke the appropriate words-one to dry his weeping eyes, another to open his ears to words of peace and reason, and a third to clear his throat so that he himself could once again speak peacefully and reasonably. Deganawidah and Hiawatha took the wampum to the five Iroquois nations. To each they introduced the ritual of condolence as a new message of peace. The Iroquois subsequently submerged their differences and created a council of chiefs

Practicas de excarnación post-sacrificial y exhibición de marionetas humanas en el contexto de la Mesoamericana pos-teotihuacana

East Meets West: Chichén Itzá, Tula, and Early Postclassic Mesoameric, edited by Travis Stanton, Karl Taube, Jeremy Coltman, and Nelda Marengo Camacho, pp. 725-752. British Archaeological Record, Volume 2, Universidad de Oxford, Inglaterra., 2023

Ancored around three bioarchaeological studies on excarnated bodies from Toniná, Champotón and Lagartero, this chapter provides a survey of ritual corpse excarnation across Mesoamerica past the collapse of Teotihuacan. Their joint discussion confirms the pan-regional protracted body treatments depicted in the iconography of skeletonized creatures and provides new points of departure for understanding some of the ritualized choreographies practiced in epiclassic and postclassic Mesoamerican strongholds.

Society for American Archaeology, 87th annual meeting, Symposium Abstracts. March 30-April 3, 2022.Chicago, IL

2022

Traveling Together and Keeping Apart: The Impact of Changes in Transportation Technology and Medical Policies on Human Mobility in the Indian Ocean during the Nineteenth Century This paper aims to illustrate the relationships between the indentured laborers’ diaspora, the progress in maritime technology, and the crises caused by the outbreak of epidemics in the British Indian Ocean colonies. Indeed, the improvement of shipping conditions and the advent of steamships made the voyage faster and safer on ships transporting laborers, reducing the mortality rate. Still, the negative side to the speed of transport was the increased transmission of diseases in the colonies, which imposed aggressive counter-measures. Among the various colonial reactions, the establishment of quarantine stations was an effective system extensively applied in the Indian Ocean during the second half of the nineteenth century. This system has also had reverberations on maritime routes and has caused serious environmental impacts on small islands or remote and uncontaminated places. The combination of land and maritime investigation has the potential to open a window onto otherwise opaque elements of life on board for indentured people, their negotiation for a better health system, and the way diseases were spread. Therefore, we would like to enhance the role of historical archaeology in bringing these material entanglements to the fore, suggesting greater correspondence to discussions on past and present mobilities.

(2018) Orienting West Mexico. The Mesoamerican World-System 200–1200 CE

https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/54584, 2018

As world-systems theory came to the fore in archaeology during the 1980s and 1990s, it became evident that the analysis of pre-capitalist core/periphery relations required modifications of this theory for its further use in the discipline. As a result, the comparative approach for world-systems analysis (Chase Dunn and Hall 1997) discerned four interaction networks that defined pre-capitalist world-systems. The appearance of the comparative approach coincided with archaeology’s detour into the diverse inquiries of postmodernism, for which conceptual advances in world-systems analysis went largely unnoticed by the discipline. The present study applies the nested network interaction framework of the comparative approach to examine material evidence for core/periphery relations between on the one hand two state level societies of central Mexico: Teotihuacan and Tula; and, on the other, West Mexico, one of the largest subareas of Mesoamerica. The operationalization of the nested networks as a material culture model for the Early Classic and Early Postclassic periods indicates that West Mexico was integrated into macroregional developments and change between 200-1200 CE. The present study represents one of the first comprehensive applications of the comparative approach in areal research undertaken in Mesoamerica.

(2019) A History of Cacao in West Mexico: Implications for Mesoamerica and U.S. Southwest Connections [in Journal of Archaeological Research]

Journal of Archaeological Research

Cacao economies in far west Mexico developed between AD 850/900–1350+ along with the adoption of a political–religious complex centered on the solar deity Xochipilli as the Aztatlán culture became integrated into expanding political, economic, and information networks of highland and southern Mesoamerica. The Xochipilli complex significantly transformed societies in the Aztatlán core zone of coastal Nayarit and Sinaloa and parts of Jalisco, Durango, Zacatecas, and Michoacán. West Mexican cacao was acquired in the U.S. Southwest by Chaco Canyon elites in New Mexico through macroregional prestige goods economies as Ancestral Pueblo societies became integrated into the Postclassic Mesoamerican world. To cite this article: Mathiowetz, Michael D. (2019). A History of Cacao in West Mexico: Implications for Mesoamerica and U.S. Southwest Connections. Journal of Archaeological Research 27(3):287-333

The First Civilizations of North America The First Civilizations of North America

(2019) "The Son of God who is in the Sun": Political Authority and the Personified Sun God in Ancient Northwest Mexico--------Spanish language text, with English translation appended

In Aztatlán: Interacción y cambio social en el Occidente de México ca. 850-1350 d.C, edited by Laura Solar Valverde and Ben A. Nelson, 2019

Please cite this publication as follows: 2019 Mathiowetz, Michael D. El hijo de Dios que está en el Sol: Autoridad política y personificación del Dios Sol en el antiguo Noroccidente de México.” In Aztatlán: Interacción y cambio social en el Occidente de México ca. 850-1350 d.C., Laura Solar Valverde and Ben A. Nelson, eds.:287-312. El Colegio de Michoacán and Arizona State University, Zamora, Michoacán, Mexico. The ideas in this article were first written for and presented at various conferences in Mexico and the United States in 2008 and 2009, including in the Primer Seminario-Taller Regional de la Arqueología Aztatlán in Guadalajara in September 2008 and also draws upon ideas published in my 2011 dissertation. I have included the published version of the chapter in the Spanish language and appended an unofficial/unpublished English translation of the text at the end of the PDF.