Ancient West Mexicos

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Christopher S. Beekman ◽  
Joshua D. Englehardt ◽  
Verenice Y. Heredia Espinoza
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Short Discussion ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of Research ◽  
West Mexico ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sociocultural Processes ◽  
Vast Area

This introductory chapter provides a brief history of research on ancient west Mexico and outlines traditional archaeological conceptions of the region as exotic, unique, or “other.” It also provides a preliminary definition and spatial delimitation of the vast area known as “the west,” and a short discussion of regional chronology. In doing so, it contextualizes the constituent chapters of the volume within broader archaeological debates regarding the nature of pre-Hispanic societies in west Mexico and their role in larger, pan-Mesoamerican sociocultural processes. Like the volume itself, the introduction highlights the spatial, temporal, and cultural diversity evident throughout the region’s history. Finally, the introduction provides brief summaries of the chapters that comprise the volume, foregrounding the dialogue among the contributions and foreshadowing the synthesis presented in the conclusions, thus aiding in binding a diverse collection into a coherent whole.

Conclusions

2020 ◽  
pp. 349-366
Author(s):  
Stephen A. Kowalewski
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The West ◽  
Critical Data ◽  
West Mexico ◽  
Individual Contributions ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
The Individual

This concluding chapter seeks to tie the individual contributions to this volume into a coherent whole. Drawing on points raised in the various chapters, it summarizes critical data and provides a synthesis of the current research presented in constituent chapters that highlight spatial, temporal, and cultural diversity in ancient west Mexico. The author offers comments and observations on all chapters, highlighting common threads and lines of thought or evidence that bind the individual chapters together into a complete dialogue. It emphasizes the significance of the evidence from the west—presented in the volume—in crafting a more complex and nuanced understanding of both the west in particular and Mesoamerica as a whole. The chapter concludes by offering thoughts and suggestions for how future research may enhance archaeological understanding of this vast and understudied region.

scholarly journals INTRODUCTION

2008 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
William R. Fowler ◽  
Geoffrey G. McCafferty ◽  
Amy J. Hirshman
Keyword(s):  
Special Section ◽  
World System ◽  
Central Mexico ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Research Programs ◽  
History Of Research ◽  
West Mexico ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mexican Archaeology

One of the healthiest trends in Mesoamerican studies in the past two or thee decades has been the recognition that the pre-Columbian cultures of west Mexico were full participants in the Mesoamerican world-system. Long past are the days when west Mexico was excluded from consideration as part of Mesoamerica because of seemingly exotic features such as shaft tombs and round pyramids. Another problem that distanced west Mexico conceptually from greater Mesoamerica was the lack of good chronologies which precluded an understanding of interaction between west and central Mexico. In the introduction to another recent special section, more extensive comments were offered on the history of research in west Mexican archaeology and especially the tension between the fascination with the exotic and the need to develop archaeological research programs based on both chronological and anthropological concerns (Fowler et al. 2006).

Ancient West Mexicos

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Sociopolitical Complexity ◽  
The West ◽  
Alternative Pathways ◽  
West Mexico ◽  
Sociocultural Processes

Ancient west Mexico has often been viewed as an isolated mishmash of cultures, separated from Mesoamerica “proper,” a region that lacked “civilization.” This volume argues against this vision by highlighting current archaeological research on the diverse and complex pre-Hispanic societies that developed in this area. Through the presentation of original data and interpretations, contributions provoke debate and advance understanding of regional complexity, chronology, and diversity, as well as the role of the west in broader, pan-Mesoamerican sociocultural processes. The volume illustrates the ways in which research and areal data from western Mesoamerica can meaningfully contribute to the construction of theoretical models applicable in multiple contexts and capable of enhancing archaeological descriptions and explanations of the dynamic diversity characteristic of all Mesoamerican societies. The volume also presents intriguing case studies from western Mesoamerica that illuminate alternative pathways to sociopolitical complexity in pre-Hispanic societies. In doing so, the volume seeks to contribute to contemporary anthropological and archaeological debates regarding the ways in which archaeologists describe and explain the material configurations that they encounter in the archaeological record, and how these configurations may explain, relate to, and enhance our understanding of the ancient lifeways of the diverse societies that inhabited the region.

Connecting the Dots

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-12
Author(s):  
Joe Kraus
Keyword(s):  
Organized Crime ◽  
Jewish Organization ◽  
The West ◽  
West Side ◽  
Personal Journey ◽  
Italian American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Connecting The Dots

This introductory chapter presents the author’s personal journey to study the history of Jewish organized crime. Its story begins with family lore before ballooning into a history of West Side Jewish gangsters, who sometimes allied and sometimes fought within a backdrop of organized crime largely dominated by the Italian and the Irish. From there, the West Side criminal world slowly coalesced from a series of gangs competing with each other into a final independent Jewish organization headed by Benjamin “Zukie the Bookie” Zuckerman. Then, during the early 1990s, Lenny Patrick became a household name, at least for a few months. Patrick was a gangster in his late seventies, described in many places as the head of the Jewish wing of the Syndicate. In a city notorious for Italian American gangsters, Patrick stood out as an anomaly. He was a Jew who had remained important in organized crime long after the crumbling of the West Side Jewish world.

Introduction

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel St. John
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Rio Grande ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
History Of ◽  
Southern Border ◽  
New Space ◽  
The U.S

This introductory chapter provides a history of the U.S.–Mexico border. Long before the border existed as a physical or legal reality it began to take form in the minds of Mexicans and Americans who looked to maps of North America to think about what their republics were and what they might someday become. Their competing territorial visions brought the United States and Mexico to war in 1846. Less than two years later, the border emerged from the crucible of that war. With U.S. soldiers occupying the Mexican capital, a group of Mexican and American diplomats redrew the map of North America. In the east, they chose the Rio Grande, settling a decade-old debate about Texas's southern border and dividing the communities that had long lived along the river. In the west, they did something different; they drew a line across a map and conjured up an entirely new space where there had not been one before.

General Introduction

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Tolan ◽  
Gilles Veinstein ◽  
Henry Laurens
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Near East ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
General Introduction ◽  
The West ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
Common Heritage ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
History Of

This introductory chapter argues that, far from being a “clash” of two rival civilizations, the Muslim world and Europe (or the West) were in reality two branches of a single “Islamo-Christian” civilization, with deep roots in a common religious, cultural, and intellectual heritage: the civilization of the ancient Mediterranean and the Near East, biblical revelation, and Greek and Hellenistic science and philosophy. This common heritage had grown stronger over fifteen centuries, thanks to the uninterrupted exchange of goods, persons, and ideas. The forms of contact were continuous and extremely varied: wars, conquests, reconquests, diplomacy, alliances, commerce, marriages, the slave trade, translations, technological exchanges, and imitation and emulation in art and culture. Far from marginal curiosities within the history of the European and Muslim peoples, these contacts have profoundly marked them both.

Connecting Modernities

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Maddanu ◽  
Hatem N. Akil
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Global Awareness ◽  
Global Ethics ◽  
History Of Research ◽  
Global Modernity ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Problem Solving Strategies ◽  
Nature And Society

Editors’ introductory chapter delineates common threads among the volume’s cross-disciplinary contributions and connects these to the history of research on modernity as well as the most compelling issues confronting us today. The introduction discusses how the pandemic carries on the possibility (threat?) of a tabula rasa condition, a civilizational detour based on a foundation of global awareness of nature and society. The authors support the need for global problem-solving strategies, new global ethics, and a global resource management paradigm solidly cognizant of the commons and redistribution. The introduction explores the main hiatuses in today’s modernity and provides an update to the necessary assertion of a global modernity in the midst of political, ecological, and health crises.

Introduction

2001 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Shmuel Feiner ◽  
David Sorkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
The West ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
The North ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. The Haskalah provides an interesting example of one of the Enlightenments of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Europe which also constituted a unique chapter in the social history of European Jewry. It encompasses over 120 years (from around the 1770s to the 1890s), and a large number of Jewish communities, from London in the west, to Copenhagen in the north, to Vilna and St Petersburg in the east. Much scholarship in the past concentrated on the Haskalah's intimate relationship to Jewish modernization: scholars examined the role of the Haskalah in the processes of political emancipation and the integration of Jews into the larger society. A different approach became possible once the modernization of European Jewry came to be viewed as a series of processes that awaited adequate analysis and explanation, the Haskalah being one of the foremost among them.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
P. H. Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of ◽  
Partial Description ◽  
The Way

This introductory chapter provides a background of Graeco-Roman grammar. The Roman Empire was different from that of the European Middle Ages, and from the way it came itself to be perceived in the Renaissance. Therefore, part of the history of grammar in the west is of its adaptation to new circumstances and new pressures. Any grammar is a partial description of a language, which identifies certain kinds of unit and relations of certain kinds between them. Those established in antiquity in analyses of Greek and Latin were later taken as a model for the description of languages whose structure was in one way or another different. However, other units and relations came in time to be identified, which have since been taken up by scholars generally. A central aim then of this book is to make clear what the ancient model was.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Hubert Treiber
Keyword(s):  
Max Weber ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Sociology Of Law ◽  
The West ◽  
Rational Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law ◽  
Developmental Conditions ◽  
Shed Light

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Max Weber's works. Taking a comparative approach that spans legal systems both inside and outside Western societal formations, Weber pursues above all the developmental conditions which ultimately led to the rational form of law in the West, conceiving this development as a process of rationalization. Before using Weber's Rechtssoziologie (Sociology of Law)—or, following the new edition of the text in the Max Weber complete works, the Entwicklungsbedingungen des Rechts (Developmental Conditions of the Law)—as the basis for a detailed consideration of the process of legal rationalization, it is necessary to explore what Weber understood by the law and the legal system and how he defined these terms. It is also important to clarify his distinction between juristic and sociological conceptions of law and validity. The chapter then considers the date when Weber is presumed to have written his texts. The precise identification and collation of groups of texts shed light not only on Weber's methods, but also on the history of his oeuvre.

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