Archaeology Chapter 21 Test Review

Front 1

Temple of the Inscriptions?

Back 1

Palenque

Front 2

Village Farmers:

Back 2

Ancient Mesoamericans (Mayans, etc.) practiced slash & burn (aka swidden) farming & gardening; their primary crops were maize & beans.
-S&B farming involves cutting down vegetation & burning it so that ash & charcoal act as fertilizer for the soil.
-S&B gardens called milpas
-Remained fertile & productive for about 2 years & have to lie fallow for 4-7 years.
-S&B adaptive for relatively small pop. but burden on landscape when pop. grew large.
-S&B not only technique; Mesoamericans also used raised fields, canals, drained swamps, & terraced slopes to water fields & to grow crops;; in Oaxaca, pot irrigation used; In Valley of Mexico floating gardens or chinampas used.

Front 3

Preclassic Mesoamerica:

Back 3

-By 2000B.C., sedentary farming villages had been well established in Mesoamerica
-By 1500B.C. or so, the first signs of social & political complexity emerge- preclassic period.
-Signs of emerging social ranking included differences in house size & design, the appearance of small shrines, differences in grave goods, & the appearance of prestige goods.
-This pattern of emerging social differentiation emerged throughout Mesoamerica from the Olmec Gulf Coast & Maya lowlands (e.g., the early Maya site of Cuello), to the Zapotec highlands of the Oaxaca & elsewhere.

Front 4

Where was the first evidence for public or ceremonial architecture?

Back 4

Oaxaca Valley

Front 5

The Middle Preclassic: The Olmec:

Back 5

-On the Gulf Coast lowlands, the Olmec thrived from ca. 1500-500 B.C.
-They are sometimes called the "Mother Culture" (erroneously) of Mesoamerica & built some of the earliest monumental architecture & developed an early form or writing wwhich appears to be antecedent to the Maya script
-had distinctive art style which commonly depicted "were-jaguar" figures of infants
-Carved jade, jadeite & serpentine and enormous blocks of volcanic stone into famous Olmec giant stone heads
-Major Olmec sites were located at San Lorenzo (1250-900 B.C.), La Venta (800-400 B.C.) and Tres Zapotes.

Front 6

Rise of Complexity in Oaxaca:

Back 6

-Olmec motifs shows up in the highlands of Mexico (e.g. Oaxaca) 1150-650 B.C. (there is some debate about whether the motifs originate in Olmecland or the highlands)
-By 1200-1150 B.C, San Jose Mogote emerges in the Valley of Oaxaca as the largest settlement in the valley.
-Longer established famiies or clans come to have greater prestige than more recent or younger families through spiritual connection to an ancestral figure; leading men of these prestigious families ome to be chiefs and eventually rulers or kings.