Peten (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)
151-175 (902 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chochkitam is a major ceremonial center in northeastern Petén, situated among sites with inscribed monuments such as Xultun, La Honradez, Río Azul in Guatemala, and La Milpa in Belize, giving us a few data points on the shifting political history of the Early and Late Classic periods. Since the discovery in 2021 of a carved frieze with a dedicatory...
The Chocholá Style: Expanding the Corpus, Part 2 (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chocholá style ceramics were part of a Late Classic northern Maya complex of luxury goods that identified the social status and political affiliation of their owners. Vessels in the style are distinguished by their deeply carved iconographic panels, distinctive formatting, and unique dedicatory formulae. Their recognizability—a necessary component of the...
Chocolate, Manioc, and Maize: Kante’t’u’ul and Chachaklu’um in Motul de San José’s Realm (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Embedded Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Between 2013 and 2015, the Periphery of Motul de San José Archaeological Project conducted fieldwork at two subsidiary sites, Kante’t’u’ul and Chachaklu’um, located within 5 km of Motul de San José, the primary Late Classic center in this zone along the northern shore of Lake Peten Itza. Paleoethnobotanical and chemical residue analyses have highlighted...
City of the Centipede, Part 1: Context, Boundaries, Community Organization, and Land-Use at El Peru-Waka', Peten, Guatemala (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Part I of II. The Waka’ Archaeological Project (PAW) has conducted over a decade of archaeological investigations documenting the modification, layout, use, and chronology of monumental and residential landscapes of the Classic lowland city of El Perú-Waka’. These papers will evaluate current theoretical and methodological perspectives of ancient Classic Maya...
City of the Centipede, Part 2: Urban Development and Construction Chronologies at El Perú-Waka’, Petén Guatemala (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Part II of II. The Waka’ Archaeological Project (PAW) has conducted over a decade of archaeological investigations documenting the modification, layout, use, and chronology of monumental and residential landscapes of the Classic lowland city of El Perú-Waka’. These papers will evaluate current theoretical and methodological perspectives of ancient Classic Maya...
Classic Maya Agriculture and Traditional Milpa-Cycle Practices in the Upper Belize River Valley (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Classic Maya polities of the Upper Belize River Valley were situated in an especially rich alluvial environment, which may have served as a breadbasket for surrounding regions. The region was also one of the most densely settled regions of the Maya lowlands, showing evidence of...
Classic Maya Cache Vessel Texts and the Stories They Tell (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient Maya artists fashioned ceramic cache vessels that bear a rich array of painted imagery and iconography, making them popular subjects for scholarly investigation. Themes focusing on bloodletting and burning rites are emphasized in many of these discussions, and these themes form the foundations for interpreting the meanings and uses of this class of...
Classic Maya Food Systems and the Sociality of Diet in the Usumacinta Region (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya utilized a range of landscape modifications for agricultural production, including terraces and raised fields. These agricultural strategies were tied into food systems that also included taxation and tribute, all significant components of a political economy that may have reflected autonomy, exploitation, or both. Using a paleoethnobotanical...
Classic Maya Household Inequality in Southern Belize (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Inequality is present in all forms of human societies, but the degree of inequality within a single city or region varies. Recently in archaeological contexts, inequality has been quantitatively evaluated based on house size using the Gini coefficient and Lorenz Curve, thus enabling the comparison of wealth measures and inequality between ancient cities of...
Classic Maya Population Densities as Seen from Río Bec, Campeche, Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican Population History: Demography, Social Complexity, and Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ideally every ancient Maya city should be characterized by its population density and its urban agricultural productivity, closely linked parameters that must be explored before tackling the issue of production/exchange relations with hinterlands. Río Bec can be characterized as a low-density urban...
Classic Maya Urban Settlement Dynamics: Planning and Mobility Introduced (2018)
Following decades of debate, most scholars accept Classic Maya cities as the hearts of spatially expansive, low-density urban settlements. This introductory paper will summarize past and current perceptions of Maya urbanism, emphasizing potentially overshadowed considerations of urban planning, mobility, and community dynamics – fundamental cross-cultural features of urbanization – and their detection in lowland settlement patterns. The recent florescence of research deriving insight from urban...
Classic through Postclassic in El Salvador (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Postclassic Mesoamerica: The View from the Southern Frontier" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beginning with the first formal archaeological studies nearly a century ago, findings in the territory of El Salvador have been recognized as attesting to the establishment of Nahua migrants. This has commonly been interpreted, in conjunction with ethnohistoric accounts, as resulting from a single episode of what has been...
A Closer Look at the Use of Cueva de Sangre through Skeletal Remains (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Studies in Mesoamerican Subterranean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of caves is a part of an essential role in Maya cosmology and ideology. The Petexbatún Regional Cave Survey identified 22 caves and over 11 kilometers of cave passages between 1990 through 1993 at Dos Pilas, Guatemala. This study reexamines 205 human remains collected from Cueva de Sangre. Previous studies (Minjares, 2003) of the...
Coastal Hydrogeological Context of Potable Water Sources of the Vista Alegre Maya Port Site, Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico (2018)
Ongoing investigation at the ancient Maya port site of Vista Alegre has revealed a multi-phased and significant occupation spanning the Preclassic to Postclassic periods. However, the vital source of potable water that would have supported this coastal settlement remains unknown. We present a hydrogeological assessment of the region to understand changing water sources over the last 2 millennia. Potential groundwater foci at the intersections of conjugate fracture sets are presently either...
Coba's Periphery and Rethinking Site Boundaries (2018)
Time and again the application of new technologies has allowed archaeologists to rethink their understandings of ancient cultural landscapes. Lidar, in particular, is one technology that has rapidly transformed our analytical capabilities by simultaneously providing wide regional and finely localized views of archaeological sites. In this paper, we present new lidar data that is reshaping our understanding of the Northern Maya Lowland metropolis of Coba. In particular we discuss features on...
Colha, Northern Belize: A History and Record of Research (2018)
The northern Belize prehistoric Maya site of Colha was first archaeologically documented by the Corozal Project in the early 1970s. The most significant archaeological research at the site was conducted as The Colha Project (1979-1983), with subsequent projects of specialized interests (1994-2017). Though known primarily for its lithic dimension as a major production and distribution center of stone tools, many other aspects of Maya society have been identified from the numerous seasons of...
Collective Biographies: Ancient Maya Objects in Collections, Past and Present (2018)
This paper explores the collecting, repositioning, and separating of ancient Maya objects, both in the ancient past and the twentieth century. Archaeological context provides evidence of ancient Maya aggregation of disparate objects in tombs, caches, or sculptural tableaux as well as evidence of repositioning or separating things. These changes are fundamental aspects of objects’ life histories. Yet in the twentieth century, ancient monuments and object sets also have been divided -- and new...
Colonial and Caste War Continuities in the Beneficios Altos Province of Yucatán (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeologies of Contact, Colony, and Resistance" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Caste War of Yucatán has been referred to as "the most successful Indian revolt in New World history." Scholars have attributed the origins of this important conflict to a variety of causes, including circumstances that arose as Mexico established its independence from Spain; late colonial period political reforms; policies in...
The Colonial Peten: An Ethnohistory of Indigenous Sovereignty and a Failed Spanish Colonial Project (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Colonialism—to speak generally—can be characterized as endeavors that aim not just to entangle, but to wholly incorporate, disparate regions under the control of a foreign body. Indigenous disentanglement from these exploitative projects has taken many forms—daily negotiations, subtle refusals, outright rebellions....
Commemorating the Preclassic Monumental Construction at Tayasal, Guatemala (2018)
Research into the Main Group at Tayasal, Guatemala, revealed that the Postclassic inhabitants re-occupied areas and buildings that were constructed during the Preclassic period. Most of those buildings in the Main Group stand on a massive elevated platform, which was also constructed during the Preclassic period. The Preclassic period was the period during which the construction of monumental architecture such as E-groups and Triadic Group occurred at numerous sites including Tayasal. It was...
Communing with the Gods: The Paleoethnobotany of Fire Rituals (2018)
The importance of fire in Maya rituals is well-known, both archaeologically and ethnographically. Fire, which is symbolic of the life cycle in Maya ideology, has been used as a means of communicating with the supernatural world in order to manage specific aspects of everyday life, such as the success of the agricultural season. In the archaeological record, we find evidence for ancient fires as features consisting mostly of burnt plant remains, some of which resemble modern Maya fire altars both...
Community and Collaboration at Aventura (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With a five millennia history spanning forager-horticulturalist, precolumbian Maya, historic, and contemporary periods, Aventura is a community with a long history. The Aventura Archaeology Project addresses community at many levels, in its study of the past and in its collaboration with local cultural heritage...
Community Archaeology and (Post)Colonial Identities in Northernmost Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper investigates the "who/what" that constitutes "the local community" in engaged community archaeologies. It will do so by discussing community events organized by the Aventura Archaeology Project, as well as preliminary ethnographic and oral historical work I have conducted in the San Joaquin Village and Corozal Town areas of northernmost Belize. This...
Community Archaeology and the Production of Space at Punta Laguna, Yucatan, Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have considered the relationships between the production of space and the production of social inequality in past societies. Those practicing community and other forms of engaged archaeology have also examined the relationships between the production of space and inequality in the present, including at archaeological sites developed for tourism....
Community Building and Engagement through Maya Archaeology: Challenges, Successes, and Future Goals for the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance (BVAR) Project (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Community building through education and public outreach has been a central component of the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance (BVAR) Project since its inception over 30 years ago. One of our primary goals is to actively engage with local communities and students in archaeological heritage management in western Belize since they are the most impacted...