Maya: Classic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dmitri Beliaev. Monica De Leon Antillon. Sergey Vepretskiy. Camilo Luin.

This is an abstract from the "At the Interface the Use of Archaeology and Texts in Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Encanto is a peripherical site (frequently classified as a 'minor center') northeast from the Ancient Maya metropolis of Tikal. It is famous because of the stela with hieroglyphic inscription dated to AD 305-308 and mentioning the king Siyaj Chan K'awil I. Previously Simon Martin suggested that the stela originally stood...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Huchim.

This is an abstract from the "La Restauración de Monumentos Prehispánicos en México: Principios, Práctica, y Visión al Futuro" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sin lugar a duda Uxmal fue el sitio más importante de la región Puuc desde el siglo VIII hasta el X. Cuenta con un área amurallada de 2.6 km2, en los que se distribuyen 11 grupos de arquitectura monumental. A principios del siglo XX la lógica de conservación fue intervenir los edificios que...

DOCUMENT Citation Only 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. Urban households anchor the first decade of research at the Maya site of Aventura, Belize, situating the daily lives of the city’s heterogenous residents. They also illuminate social, political, economic, and environmental factors that enhanced life in the community. Summarizing research results of the Aventura...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cynthia Robin.

This is an abstract from the "Advancing Public Perceptions of Sustainability through Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As over half of the world lives in cities today, there is perhaps no more pressing question than: how can people create cities that are sustainable? Archaeology is uniquely suited to answer questions about the longevity of cities, because archaeologists excavate long expanses of human history. The social, political,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Hoover. Maria Cunningham. Erin Niles. 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. Household archaeology provides a powerful lens to understand people, their daily lives, and the myriad social, political, economic, and environmental relations that link people, households, and communities to broader societies. For its first decade of research, the Aventura Archaeology Project conducted a study...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kacey Grauer.

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. Water was essential for the longevity of ancient Maya cities, and Aventura was no exception. The site’s watery landscape consists of pocket bajos, defined as karstic depressions less than 2 km2 in area. While they are seasonally inundated today, this paper presents data from excavation, oral histories, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bernadette Cap. M. Kathryn Brown. Whitney Lytle.

The ancient Maya formalized avenues of movement between and within urban centers through the construction of sacbeob that both defined space and connected places on the landscape. In this paper, we discuss the ways in which a formally constructed sacbe at Xunantunich functioned as an axis connecting economic and ritual activities. The architectural arrangement of Classic Xunantunich emphasizes a north/south directionality. The site’s sacbe, however, was constructed on an east/west alignment....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorraine Williams-Beck.

In the geographic heartlands of the Yucatan Peninsula, academic literature describes the Chenes region as an "archaeological province" with a particular regional cultural character, in which sculpted monuments with glyphs or ballcourts are scarce components in urban systems, and even less frequent in most monumental cores. To date only three ballcourts had been recorded. After field seasons in 2016 and 2017 I confirm another example in Tabasqueño, the only site also to exhibit a free-standing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dmitri Beliaev. Alexandre Tokovinine. Milan Kovác.

During the 2017 field season of the Uaxactun Archaeological project new monument was excavated at Buena Vista, a minor center at Uaxactun urban periphery. It is a small carved altar or ballcourt marker, which according to its style dates to the Early Classic. High quality of the carving and the hieroglyphic inscription indicates that the altar/marker itself was a part of the monumental corpus of Uaxactun urban core; uncomplete text provides important new information on the dynastic history of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Traci Ardren.

This is an abstract from the "Textile Tools and Technologies as Evidence for the Fiber Arts in Precolumbian Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While bark cloth and paper are well known in the ethnographic and artistic records of Pacific and African cultures, due to preservation concerns these important plant based products have been challenging to investigate in the precolumbian cultures of the New World. Often our only proxy for bark...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandre Tokovinine.

This is an abstract from the "Heat, Steam, and Health: The Archaeology of the Mesoamerican Pib Naah (Sweat Baths)" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maya hieroglyphs are an invaluable source of data about the Classic period religion. However, when it comes to sweat baths, only a small subset of archaeologically investigated structures contains inscriptions. Therefore, any attempt to study this particular aspect of Maya ritual life should consider a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Webster.

BECAN RECONSIDERED -- Joe Ball’s early career centered strongly on Becan, which during the early 1970’s figured prominently in many interpretations of Classic Maya society and culture history. The initial Becan research predated our effective understanding of Maya inscriptions, the large-scale conflicts and alliances that affected the southern lowlands, and also the now-widespread data for climate change and the Classic "collapse". Because of its lack of inscriptions Becan has been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Newman.

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. The practice of human sacrifice is one of the defining traits of ancient Mesoamerica, at least according to the modern imagination. But painted objects, carvings, and codices reveal that nonhuman animals often served as sacrificial victims as well. Were some classes or species of animals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dorie Reents-Budet. Ronald Bishop.

This is an abstract from the "A Celebration and Critical Assessment of "The Maya Scribe and His World" on its Fiftieth Anniversary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The changing relationship of US art and natural history museums and other collections-holding institutions and the field of archaeology as anthropology is examined in this presentation. We assess the past 100+ years’ amassing of archaeological objects as cultural curios, aesthetic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Flavio Silva De La Mora.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation centers on the daily life of Maya commoners from the Classic Maya site of Chinikihá in Chiapas, Mexico. The excavations are part of a regional effort to understand rural communities and social complexity. The presentation will offer an intimate view of the materiality of the daily life of non-elite groups from a domestic context, offering a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Patterson.

Analysis of human skeletal remains has made significant contributions to the understanding of the history of La Corona and its interaction with the wider Maya world. The skeletal sample has now grown to include nearly thirty individuals, and includes single and multiples burials, non-burial deposits, and individuals from the site center and outlying sites. The study, one of the most comprehensive in northwest Peten, has focused on establishing demographic information and examining osteological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Hannigan. Shintaro Suzuki. Felipe Trabanino. Boris Beltran.

Micro and macroscopic bioarchaeological analyses enable archaeologists to generate biological profiles of past individuals, including characteristics such as diet, sex, age, occupational stress, pathologies, and social status, among others. In this paper, we discuss the significance of a Maya individual by constructing a biological profile from both micro and macroscopic analyses. The individual of interest was excavated during the 2012 field season at Xultún, Guatemala in a patio situated in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sterling Wright. Nihan Kilic. Karissa Hughes. Nawa Sugiyama. Courtney Hofman.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Classic Period (AD 1-550), thousands of people migrated to the ancient city of Teotihuacan. This population growth forged Teotihuacan into a center for economic, political, and religious activities for the Mesoamerican region. While archaeological evidence has provided a wealth of information about the state, little is known about its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Hyde.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster details the findings of a contextual analysis of portable material culture, commonly referred to as “small finds” artifacts, collected from 2004 to 2019 at the hinterland Maya community of Medicinal Trail, located in northwestern Belize. The collection from Medicinal Trail comes from a variety of contexts, such as middens, burials, caches, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Miller.

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. One might think that the 2013 publication of Miller and Brittenham on Bonampak would have closed discussion of these paintings for a few years. But the complexity and richness of the subject continues to yield both details and to add to the big picture of the three-room program of late 8th...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Fox. Jaime Awe.

Previous archaeological investigations of terminus groups in the Maya Lowlands concluded that these architectural complexes served either cosmological, ritual, or economic purposes. In an effort to test these models, we investigated causeway terminus groups at Cahal Pech and Baking Pot. Subsequent comparisons of the Cahal Pech and Baking Pot data with that from other sites in the Belize Valley, Caracol and Tikal, strongly suggest that while there was some regional diversity in the significance...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Mongelluzzo. Jose Garrido. Jean-Baptiste Le Moine.

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. An exploration of how modern borders of different kinds have influenced, and sometimes impeded, our understanding of ancient borders and territories. The Guatemala-Belize border has ramifications in terms of the ways in which scholars interact and how the archaeology is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Gregory Smith. Alejandra Alonso Olvera. Soledad Ortiz. Atasta Flores.

Social boundaries of the past and present are usually nebulous, contested, and fluid. In this paper we examine the ancient towns and villages between the two Maya kingdoms of Chichen Itza and Ek Balam in northern Yucatam. We hypothesize that the boundary area between these two cities in the 9th century AD was based on Classic Maya concepts of ruler-centered polities but changed dramatically in the 10th century as Chichen Itza became a fundamentally different kind of Maya city the likes of which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allan Cobb.

This is an abstract from the "Studies in Mesoamerican Subterranean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maya explored caves with torches and burned copal with wood fires during ceremonies. These activities, in a confined space such as a cave, used up oxygen and produced carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. The effects of high carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide on the human body are well studied by OSHA and documented in environmental and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Popovici.

Comalcalco displays a radical departure from traditional Maya building materials in its brick and seashell mortar construction instead of the paradigmatic Maya limestone. Incised animal, architecture, hieroglyph, and human forms adorn the brick slabs of principal buildings of Comalcalco’s ceremonial core. However, their inward-facing, or concealed, orientation rendered these markings invisible. Because monumental architecture benefited from the labor of non-elites, the purposeful placement of...