Edited via Michael E. Smith and Frances F. Berdan

Anthropology and Archaeology

The prior twenty years have obvious an explosion of study on Postclassic Mesoamerican societies. during this formidable new quantity, the editors and individuals search to give a whole photograph of the center and past due Postclassic interval (ca. advert 1100-1500) utilizing a brand new theoretical framework.

Mesoamerican societies after the cave in of the good city-states of Tula and Chichen Itza stand proud of prior societies in a variety of methods. that they had better neighborhood populations, smaller polities, the next quantity of long-distance alternate, better variety of alternate items, a extra commercialized economic climate, and new standardized varieties of pictorial writing and iconography. The rising archaeological list unearths greater amounts of imported items in Postclassic contexts, and ethnohistoric bills describe marketplaces, specialist retailers, and using funds all through Mesoamerica by the point of the Spanish conquest. the combination of this advertisement economic climate with new types of visible conversation produced a dynamic international approach that reached each nook of Mesoamerica.

Thirty-six centred articles by way of twelve authors describe and research the complexity of Postclassic Mesoamerica. After an preliminary theoretical part, chapters are geared up through key subject matters: polities, financial networks, details networks, case reports, and comparisons. protecting a area from western Mexico to Yucatan and the southwestern Maya highlands, this quantity could be within the library of an individual with a major curiosity in historical Mexico.