No description available.

No description available.

When analyzing skeletal remains in bioarchaeology, the pelvis and skull provide the most accurate results for sex estimation; however, these are not always present or sufficiently preserved to provide quality data for this purpose. In addition, the amount of time spent analyzing human remains in field or museum collection contexts may be constrained. Therefore, alternate methods of sex estimation that also increase efficiency should be explored. This study aims to establish the minimum number of key measurements of the talus necessary to estimate biological sex with a level of accuracy comparable to published studies that are more time intensive in their data collection. Measures of talus width, length, height, and volume were collected on individuals from two ancient Egyptian (N=162) and three ancient Maya (N=98) archaeological populations. Set points and allocation ranges for these four measures were applied to individuals of known sex and indeterminate sex from these populations to test their accuracy and then compared with the accuracies achieved in existing research using the talus in sex estimation. The four measures used in this study resulted in comparably high accuracy in sex estimation when compared with prior research based on more extensive methods using the talus. The most significant limitation of this study was the small number of individuals available for data collection from three of the smaller site populations. Nevertheless, the method used in this study directly addresses logistical and ethical concerns surrounding the analysis of human remains as it requires less time spent handling the remains and less time spent on analysis out of the field while still providing comparable accuracy. This study also contributes population data for ancient Egyptians and ancient Maya which will facilitate further investigations of sexual dimorphism and sex estimation in these populations.

No description available.

Les pratiques funéraires sont, dans l’aire maya, étroitement associées aux ensembles résidentiels. La proximité entre les vivants et les morts y est donc maximale, l’espace quotidien étant tout à la fois un lieu d’habitat et un espace funéraire. Cela soulève un certain nombre de questions quant à la relation entre ces individus défunts et leurs descendants, interrogations encore renforcées par l’important degré de sélection qui semble s’exercer à l’endroit des morts. Les Groupes résidentiels sont, pour ces derniers, des lieux dont l’accès est restreint par un certain nombre de paramètres dont le plus important est sans nul doute le statut - situation complexité par l’existence de nombreuses nuances régionales.La présente étude comprend en premier lieu une discussion générale autour de la question des morts dans l’habitat, augmentée d’une discussion méthodologique approfondie concernant la fouille. Elle se poursuit avec la présentation des résultats de la fouille intensive de l’unité 5N6 de Naachtun (Guatemala), qui illustre concrètement le propos développé précédemment. Enfin, les données de différents sites sont confrontées pour mettre en évidence schémas récurrents et différences, puis discutées à la lumière de quelques exemples ethnographiques. / In the Maya area, funerary practices are tightly linked to residential spaces. The proximity between the living and the dead is, therefore, at its apex. This situation raises a number of questions regarding the relationship between these defunct and their living heirs, inter-rogations reinforced by the high selectivity that seems to affect the sample. The residential Groups appear to be restricted areas for the dead, places that only a selected few can access according to different parameters. Amongst these, status is certainly the most prominent. It is further complexified by the existence of regional variations.This study opens with a general approach that deals with the practice of burying the dead within the house, complete with an extensive methodological discussion. A presentation of the excavation results from Naachtun’s Unit 5N6 (Guatemala) follows to illustrate the foregoing. Finally, data from several sites are statistically compared to show similarities and differencies, then discussed in light of several ethnographical studies.

Ancient Maya inscription carvers at the city of Palenque in what is now Chiapas, Mexico worked in teams to complete large and complex stone tablets. Like artists everywhere, they each had developed idiosyncratic habits which the modern connoisseur can learn to discern, in order to identify which parts of a particular monument were sculpted by one or another artist. The author scrutinized several eighth-century CE inscriptions, panels in stucco and limestone, analyzing how many artists worked on each, to wit: the Temple XVIII Stuccos, the Temple XIX Platform, the Temple XIX Stuccos, the Temple XIX Panel, the Panel of the 96 Glyphs, the Lápida de la Creación and associated fragments, the Palace Tablet and its associated fragmentary panels, and the Tablet of the Slaves. The ensemble whose main components are the Panel of the 96 Glyphs and the Lápida de la Creación are all by one hand, and the Tablet of the Slaves was the work of four carvers, but the Temple XIX Platform surprisingly employed fourteen carvers, and the Palace Tablet over a score. Their territories were not divided textually, and display idiosyncratic spellings of glyph compounds as well as carving habits. The conclusion discusses possible reasons for these findings, relating them to the unusual Maya practice of never correcting mistakes in monumental inscriptions. A likely reason seems to be that the ancient Maya considered these texts not merely as a permanent record, but as ongoing, living repetitions of the ritual in question, and had to be completed in a very short time. / text

No description available.