Maya: Classic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maline Werness-Rude.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kitty Emery. Antonia Foias. Elizabeth Webb. Lisa Duffy. Sophie Reilly.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Damien Marken. Keith Eppich. Olivia Navarro-Farr. Juan Carlos Perez.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Eppich. Damien Marken. Olivia Navarro-Farr. Juan Carlos Pérez.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Walden. Olivia Ellis. Claire Ebert. Julie Hoggarth. Jaime Awe.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaylee Spencer.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Harper Dine.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Thompson. Gary Feinman. Keith Prufer.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only M. Charlotte Arnauld. Eva Lemonnier. Julien Hiquet.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Damien Marken. Charlotte Arnauld.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Miller. Aline Magnoni. Traci Ardren. Travis Stanton.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan E. O'Neil.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arturo Pascual Soto.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La historia de los primeros años del Epiclásico (ca. 750-850 dC) en El Tajín, Veracruz, no es sólo la historia de esta antigua ciudad. Hay toda una serie de factores que participan de ella en distintos momentos de su desarrollo cultural. Varios de ellos se...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Friedel. M. Kathryn Brown.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sylvia Batty. Josue Ramos. Antonio Beardall. Debra Wilkes Gray. Cynthia Robin.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Nissen.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Ebert. Antonio Beardall. Tia Watkins. Julie Hoggarth. Jaime Awe.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Forward.

The city-state of Minanha, located in west central Belize, reached its zenith and most culturally complex stage by the Late Classic period, 675-810 AD. Only a century later, its royal court had "collapsed". Contreras Valley is a small farming community in the settlement region of Minanha. Decades of research at Minanha and the analysis of artifact frequencies from commoner households allows for a better understanding of the the intra- and inter-community social practices occurring at the site of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Julia Paredes. Olivia Navarro-Farr. Mary Kate Kelly.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Photogrammetry is a rapidly-evolving technology that is applicable to a wide array of archaeological contexts and reconstructions. Researchers affiliated with the Proyecto Arqueológico Waka’ (PAW) at the site of El Perú-Waka’, Petén, Guatemala, initiated a program of photogrammetric recording of stelae during the 2018 season. In this process, a series of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Ingalls.

This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Movement is often implicitly assumed when exploring the ancient makeup of communities. We conceptualize movement at different scales of interaction – at the hyperlocal through households, as well as between and across communities, polities, and landscapes. Here, I will explore how movement to/from focal nodes on a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Richards-Rissetto. Ellis Codd.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades, many archaeologists did not consider ancient Maya centers such as Tikal, Palenque, and Copan to be cities. While today most archaeologists would agree that large Maya centers were cities, the nature of Maya urbanism is still little understood. Maya cities seem different, and in attempt to explain these differences, they have been termed "Garden...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allan Ortega. Vera Tiesler.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. he so-called Maya collapse has been seen as an entelechy of the depopulation and emigration of the great Maya cities of the lowlands during the ninth and tenth centuries AD. However, proper paleodemographic and archaeodemographic works that support this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Hruby. Jaime Awe. Christina Halperin. Catharina Santasilia.

This is an abstract from the "Ceremonial Lithics of Mesoamerica: New Understandings of Technology, Distribution, and Symbolism of Eccentrics and Ritual Caches in the Maya World and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Two recently discovered ritual deposits from the eastern Maya Lowlands seem to reveal similarities in the kinds of eccentrics used in Late Classic Maya caches from different political centers. Upon closer examination, however, they...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine C. Dixon. Payson Sheets.

The Loma Caldera eruption of c. AD 660 dramatically buried a sophisticated community built by craftspeople, architects, religious specialists, political leaders, and agriculturalists. As people fled for their lives, they left behind belongings and buildings. Results from decades of archaeological research at Cerén, El Salvador and in the surrounding Zapotitán Valley challenges an ethnocentric, over-simplified reconstruction of ancient socio-political organization. Cerén was not in the middle of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Miller.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster offers an introduction to the Proyecto Sacbe Yaxuna-Coba, which is concerned with understanding how social and material life changed for people living along the longest causeway in the ancient Maya world. Up until now, much of the research on Maya sacbeob has focused on the morphology and spatial layout of these monumental features. This project,...