Maya: Classic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Brady. Melanie Saldana.

This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Indigenous Culture and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology has had an ambivalent relationship with the constructed subterranean dating back more than a half century. In the late 1960s, Good and Obermeyer investigated the cave at Oxtotipac, recognized it as man-made, and documented the fact that the material removed in the creation of the cave was used to construct a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Payson Sheets. Christine C. Dixon.

Volcanic preservation allows for detailed reconstructions of a variety of social relationships and material boundaries at Ceren. Service relationships are inferred from proximity of households associated with special-function structures, such as the religious complex, the sauna and the community governance center. These data show a social function of providing service relationships from each household to the community. Socioeconomic functions are also evident in the form of other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dylan Clark.

This is an abstract from the "Place-Making in Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities Past and Present" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mesoamerican ports were not only settings for exchange but also communities with residential populations and dynamic shared identities that contributed to both coastal and inland cultural landscapes. Ancient ports commonly incorporated a variety of sacred architecture and symbolism to accommodate visitors from distant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miriam Judith Gallegos Gomora. Ricardo Armijo Torres.

This is an abstract from the "Mesoamerican Figurines in Context. New Insights on Tridimensional Representations from Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En territorio tabasqueño se han identificado tres tradiciones de figurillas desarrolladas a lo largo del período prehispánico. A partir de las colecciones de sitios excavados en las llanuras aluviales tales como Jonuta o Comalcalco y sus alrededores, la evidencia sugiere que durante el...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diane Slocum. Jaime Awe.

Xunantunich, an ancient Maya site in the Belize Valley, rose rapidly from a minor political center to a powerful regional polity during the Late Classic period (AD 600-900). Previous researchers suggested that this rapid rise was influenced by Xunantunich’s relationship with the more powerful polity of Naranjo in the nearby Petén Province of Guatemala. Their argument was based in part on a Late Classic period building program at Xunantunich resulting in a site layout that resembles that of sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Jackson. Joshua Wright. Linda A. Brown.

Archaeologists routinely engage with concepts of space and materiality as we inscribe meanings onto the architecture and objects left behind by past peoples. However, in doing so, we bring explicitly modern sensibilities to our interpretations. In this paper, we consider alternative interpretations of space and materiality as described by Classic Maya people (250-900 CE). We ask: In what ways do categorizations and interpretations of space at Maya archaeological sites change when traditional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia McAnany.

This is an abstract from the "Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Theory—the workhorse of evidence—is a powerful engine that can revolutionize understanding or create a huge misstep. To theorize the past is to generalize principles and processes of human practice that surpass cultural boundaries. By participating in these larger networks of meaning,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Halperin. Jose Luis Garrido Lopez. Miriam Salas. Jean Baptiste LeMoine.

This is an abstract from the "Making and Breaking Boundaries in the Maya Lowlands: Alliance and Conflict across the Guatemala–Belize Border" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maya archaeological site of Ucanal is located in Peten, Guatemala, close to the contemporary border with Belize. In Pre-Columbian times, the site also sat at the borders of some of the largest political centers, such as Caracol (Belize) and Naranjo (Peten, Guatemala)....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Novotny.

This is an abstract from the "Cooperative Bodies: Bioarchaeology and Non-ranked Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In ancient complex societies, unique social strata had differential access to food resources and likely relied on different food procurement strategies to meet their needs. This paper explores the extent to which cooperation was part of that strategy for the ancient Maya farmers of the Chan site, located in the Belize River...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David McCormick.

Procurement, production, and distribution of raw materials loom large in discussions of prehistoric economies. Over the past three decades surface survey and excavations in and around the Late Classic polity of Cotzumalguapa revealed the presence of several obsidian dumps, the result of a large-scale lithic industry. These deposits contain production debitage from most phases of blade-core reduction but no nodules and relatively very little cortex, suggesting that obsidian came into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edy Barrios. Cameron L. McNeil. Mauricio Díaz. Walter Burgos. Antolín Velásquez.

Cities and the communities in their hinterlands are inextricably linked, and yet the objectives of their inhabitants can be starkly different. The archaeological sites of Río Amarillo and Quebrada Piedras Negras shared a fertile plain along the Río Amarillo and Río Blanco Rivers. Several scholars have suggested that the arable fields here may have acted as a bread basket for the urban center to their west. Research at Rio Amarillo has yielded evidence of strong ties to Copan including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cady Rutherford. Marisol Cortes-Rincon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Economic integration in hinterland communities has often been under theorized in Maya studies. Here I explore the evidence of craft production in several hinterland households as well as the implications for connections with social, political, and economic institutions. Households make decisions about crafting activities and respond to risks and stressors both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Sullivan. Kenichiro Tsukamoto. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dispersed urban landscapes are mosaics of individual interactions generated through a range of social and economic processes. Large-scale lithic production provides a lens for understanding the interconnected nature of economies between hinterland communities and central polities, yet it remains relatively underexplored in Classic period Maya society (AD...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Gregory Smith. Alejandra Alonso Olvera.

This is an abstract from the "An Exchange of Ideas: Recent Research on Maya Commodities" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses chert crafting at the site of Santa Cruz in northern Yucatan. Santa Cruz was a small town located only about 25 km from both Chichen Itza and Ek Balam and occupied almost exclusively during the Late/Terminal Classic period when both these cities were at their height. Surface collections in 2017 and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Jackson.

This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of Classic Maya hieroglyphic writing (ca. AD 250-900, Mexico and Central America) has yielded rich understandings of texts in recent years through increasingly nuanced ways of reading, contextualizing, and interpreting hieroglyphs. Beyond examining hieroglyphic texts as culturally contextualized documentary sources, however,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Crawford.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Holtun, in the central lakes region of the Maya lowlands, was occupied from the Preclassic through the Postclassic. Over 30 residential groups make up the northern settlement area on the periphery of Holtun where most of these surface residential structures date to the Late Classic and Terminal Classic periods. The non-elite household...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Céline Lamb.

As Maya archaeology has shifted away from urban-centric perspectives, recent research demonstrates that hinterland populations, like urbanites, were involved in diverse and shifting practices enabling them to build and negotiate complex relationships. Using a community approach, this paper examines non-agrarian activities practiced during the late Early and Late Classic (ca. 500 – 850 AD) by residents of Chunhuayum, a small yet socioeconomically diverse farming settlement located in northwest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia Ochoa-Winemiller. Terance L. Winemiller. William J. Folan. Lynda Florey Folan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Three-dimensional multi-line laser scanning reproduces highly accurate models that preserve measurable characteristics of portable artifacts such as figurines, whistles, stamps, and molds. Metrological analyses are revealing valuable information about manufacturing techniques, the crafter’s tool kit, the function of these artifacts, and the extent of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George J. Micheletti.

The Late Classic period (AD 550 – 800) at Pacbitun, Belize brought about heightened prosperity evinced in a surge of architectural development and an increase in precious exotic materials. However, despite continued growth, by the close of the Late Classic Pacbitun’s affluence appears to have diminished considerably. To the north, settlements of the Belize River Valley also seemingly undergo a concomitant florescence and economic decline. Research suggests the pecuniary instability of the Belize...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Mixter.

This is an abstract from the "The Vibrancy of Ruins: Ruination Studies in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The precolonial Maya city of Actuncan was occupied as a monumental center, then a city, for approximately 2,000 years from its establishment prior to 1000 BC until its abandonment around AD 900. As at any long-occupied urban center, the city grew when it thrived economically and politically, while it contracted and became...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenichiro Tsukamoto.

This is an abstract from the "Regimes of the Ancient Maya" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Spatial and temporal heterogeneity of office titles and architectural styles in the Maya lowlands suggest that there existed diverse material, textual, and symbolic expressions that created, maintained, and modified regimes during the Classic period (ca. AD 250–900). The variation also signals that authority, power relations, legitimacy, and ideologies were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Freiwald.

This is an abstract from the "Making and Breaking Boundaries in the Maya Lowlands: Alliance and Conflict across the Guatemala–Belize Border" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Present day conversations about migration focus on borders and limiting population movement with the presence of police, harsh regulations, and walls. This paper examines the concept of migration in the Maya region and what the past decade of isotope geochemistry research tells...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mario Borrero. Luke Stroth. Chad Rankle. Geoffrey Braswell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will present a synthetic review of the Terminal Classic collapse of the Maya site of Nim li Punit, Belize, based on new data from recent architectural excavations and artifact analysis. These lines of evidence show that around A.D. 800 the site saw the cessation of elite activities, the halting of new constructions, the disrepair of existing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cristina Vidal-Lorenzo. Gaspar Muñoz Cosme.

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. In the Late Preclassic, certain buildings in the Petén region began to incorporate complex iconographic programs on their façades. The friezes with central masks, carved in limestone and covered with layers of stucco, are particularly striking examples of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Balanzario Granados.

This is an abstract from the "New Light on Dzibanché and on the Rise of the Snake Kingdom’s Hegemony in the Maya Lowlands" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El asentamiento prehispánico de Dzibanché, se localiza en el Sur de Quintana Roo, tiene una extensión aproximada de 60 km2, superficie que incluye las áreas destinadas a la producción de alimentos y áreas habitacionales. Dzibanché fue el asiento de la dinastía Kaanu’l, durante el periodo del...