The cultural tradition of stuccoed and polychromatic murals in central Mexico dates back to Early Classic Teotihuacan and continued into the subsequent Epiclassic period, with the stunning murals from Cacaxtla as the most famous and well-studied example. In this paper, we present three examples of stuccoed and richly painted benches or thrones from the mayor Epiclassic site of Xochicalco in the Mexican state of Morelos. A careful iconographic and epigraphic analysis of the imagery, as well as the associated hieroglyphic signs from one of the benches, leads us to suggest that these benches played a pivotal role in displaying the religious, mythological, and historical underpinnings of hierarchical power at Xochicalco. Based on comparisons with benches and seats from Classic Maya culture and, in particular, the contemporaneous Terminal Classic city of Chichen Itza, which was deeply involved in interregional relations with central Mexico, we also suggest that the Xochicalco benches may even have served as royal seats or thrones.

No abstract

This paper presents a solution to check referential integrity constraints and conjunctive global constraints in a relational multi database system. It also presents the experimental results obtained by implementing this solution over a PC cluster with Oracle9i DBMS. The goal of those experimentations is to measure the time spent to check global constraints in a distributed systems. The results show that the overhead induced by our distributed constraint checking is reduced by 50% compared to a centralized checking of constraints.

No abstract

No abstract