Maya: Classic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicaela Cartagena. Sheldon Skaggs. Mike Lawrence. Terry Powis.

The archaeological site of Pacbitun is one of the ancient sites that was inhabited by the Maya for approximately two thousand years. It is located in west central Belize near the modern Maya village of San Antonio. In 2011, investigations in the periphery of the site core revealed a small group of mounds, of which one contained evidence of groundstone production. This group, designated as the Tzib Group, was targeted because one of the mounds, labelled Mano Mound, yielded numerous mano fragments...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fernando Véliz Corado.

This is an abstract from the "La Cuernavilla, Guatemala: A Maya Fortress and Its Environs" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya center La Cuernavilla is well known for its defensive features and its role as a fortress located between the Classic Maya cities of Tikal and El Zotz in the Buenavista Valley of modern-day Guatemala. Excavations of the defensive features as well as the analysis of the artifacts collected during excavations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaylee Spencer. Maline Werness-Rude.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Narratives featuring the Maize God are well represented on Classic Maya ceramics. Appearing with numerous other characters and plants in underworld settings, this deity is abundantly documented in scholarly literature. Despite his ubiquity in ancient imagery, the Maize God remains a slippery creature, with an identity that overlaps with other supernaturals. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Watson. Joshua Schnell. Shanti Morell-Hart. Andrew Scherer.

This is an abstract from the "Medicine and Healing in the Americas: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Botanical residues recovered from the proposed marketplace area of Piedras Negras have revealed rich information about healing and medicinal activities of Classic Period inhabitants. Excavations in this sector yielded a high quantity of identifiable plant remains in the same contexts as human dental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Moles.

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. Human remains are found in a variety of contexts at Aventura: as primary burials below the floors of houses, as secondary burials or caches also below the floors, and even in middens. The preservation of the bone is very poor and therefore the recovery of individuals is often less than 25%. This sometimes makes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynneth Lowe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of correspondence, field notes, catalogs and other archival documents has contributed important information to understand the history of some of the first Maya archaeological collections in the United States and Europe. The field and lab work developed by pioneering explorers and researchers, such as Hermann Berendt (1817-1878) and Charles Rau...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Ringle. Tomás Gallareta Negrón. Ken Seligson. David Vlcek.

LiDAR imagery is revolutionizing interpretations of ancient Maya demography, land use, and community organization, among other concerns. This paper provides preliminary observations on LiDAR coverage of 200 km2 of the Puuc region of northern Yucatan, Mexico, collected in 2017 by NCALM. The Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project has been working in this area since 2000,and although we have intensively studied settlement at both the urban and intersite level, LiDAR provides the opportunity to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mallory Matsumoto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The area stretching from the Usumacinta River basin in western Guatemala into the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, hosted key centers of Classic Maya political and cultural life (ca. 250–850 CE). Scribes and sculptors active across the region produced hundreds of stone monuments inscribed with texts in a common hieroglyphic script. Yet little is known about how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Spenard. Terry Powis.

On an isolated, steep-sided hill in the otherwise undifferentiated foothills of the northern Maya Mountains is the site of Sak Pol Pak, a secondary center of the pre-Hispanic (900 BC – AD 900/1000) Maya site, Pacbitun. Sak Pol Pak is a small site encompassing the entire hilltop, with no room for agriculture and is difficult to access, yet it contains the largest pyramid-temple outside of Pacbitun’s epicenter. At the foot of the hill is the deepest, and most complex cave system in the Pacbitun...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Whitaker.

This paper summarizes recent archaeological investigations at the San Lorenzo settlement cluster in the Mopan River Valley of Western Belize. Current research at this ancient hinterland settlement is concerned with better understanding household economic organization and integration during the Late and Terminal Classic (A.D. 670-890) occupations of this site. Households are fundamental units of economic organization in both past and present societies. The examination of ancient household...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Esteban Miron Marvan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Modern Maya peoples have been denied of their right to appropriate their own history and archaeological heritage. After almost three decades of multiculturalism in Mexican laws and state rhetoric there is still a lot of colonial ideas, practices, and laws that prevent the participation of indigenous communities in the heritage discourses and their involvement...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fred Valdez.

The "hinterland" communities of northwest Belize are among the most diverse and complex across the Maya lowlands. The Rio Bravo Management and Conservation area of NW Belize serves as the region of interest with more than 25 seasons of Maya archaeological research. Utilizing survey and mapping strategies, material culture analyses, and theoretical concerns, the Programme for Belize Archaeological Project (PfBAP) defines new ways of looking at and interpreting ancient Maya interactions for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Gonlin. David Webster. David Reed.

This is an abstract from the "Innovations and Transformations in Mesoamerican Research: Recent and Revised Insights of Ancestral Lifeways" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A Classic Maya rural household, Site 34C-4-2, yielded two artifacts considered unusual for this nonurban context: a manopla (a 15-pound tuff ball with a handle used in a sport similar to boxing) and a miniature sculpture of a house or altar that resembles those found in Copan’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Thompson. Jillian Jordan. Keith M. Prufer.

This paper examines processes of low-density urban development through geospatial analyses of households at two Classic Period (AD 250-800) Maya communities, Uxbenká and Ix Kuku’il. Located in the southern foothills of the Maya Mountains, Toledo District, Belize, these centers were situated are similar landscapes yet exhibited distinctly different household distributions. Wherein Uxbenká had geospatially discrete districts and neighborhoods while Ix Kuku’il’s houses were more evenly distributed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Johnson. Lucas Johnson. Arianna Campiani. Rodrigo Liendo Stuardo. Rosemary Joyce.

This is an abstract from the "Dynamic Frontiers in the Archaeology of Chiapas" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Increasingly, archaeologists working in Classic period Maya cities have focused their attention on defining “neighborhoods” as a means to reconcile both a bottom-up and top-down approach. A consideration of Palenque’s urban form and patterns in the clustering of stone structures along built terraces makes the existence of neighborhoods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Traci Ardren.

Domestic gardens are a well-established aspect of Classic Maya residential settlement, and they are rightly considered important components of food security and even food sovereignty strategies utilized by the ninety-nine percent. Taking inspiration from the emerging field of human-plant studies, I argue daily interactions with household garden plants exerted a profound influence on not only the daily habits of ancient Maya populations, but also on their memories and sense of social identity. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Debra Walker.

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 pottery from recent excavations at Aventura informs our current understanding of life near Chetumal Bay, its resilient villagers situated within a larger boom-and-bust economy. Although Preclassic pottery has been found near bedrock in some household excavations, construction began in earnest about...

DOCUMENT Citation Only T. Manahan.

Across the Maya Lowlands, the Terminal Classic Period (AD 800-1000) represented a time of dramatic sociopolitical transformation. Investigation of the Northern Maya lowland site of Xuenkal, shows an abrupt break in the pattern of steady demographic growth during the Terminal Classic, associated with the center of Chichen Itza 45 km away. Xuenkal presents a unique case to evaluate this transition as it contains discrete households associated with the Late Classic zenith of local political...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cady Rutherford. Marisol Cortes-Rincon. Jonathan Roldan. Spencer Mitchell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hinterland households are an under-explored aspect of Maya area. Further research in this area will help to build our understanding of variation present within and between regions. This analysis looks at several households in northwestern Belize in order to better understand the variation that exists within this region. I analyze the construction methods, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julien Hiquet. Julien Sion. Divina Perla-Barrera.

At Naachtun, extensive excavation programs carried out in monumental Group B, a compact set of three large elite clusters of residential compounds located in the site epicenter, and intensive test-pitting programs applied to the residential zones which surround the monumental core, have enabled us to understand the site occupation development during the Classic phases. We identify contraction, dispersal and expansion where and when most households units were occupied. We compare these space-time...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Miller.

One of the distinctive features of one of the principal Maya solar deities, the Jaguar God of the Underworld, is the twisted cord—nicknamed "cruller" for the German doughnut over 100 years ago by Eduard Seler—that loops under the eyes (with their characteristic inward curl for pupils) and twists between them, sometimes ending under the deity’s jaguar ears. This feature, perhaps to be associated with fire and burning, takes up its place on the nose of a different deity, Tlaloc, in Central Mexico,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Dunning. Jeffrey Brewer. Christopher Carr. Kathryn Reese-Taylor. Armando Anaya Hernández.

This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient inhabitants of the Elevated Interior Region of the Maya Lowlands spent centuries devising ways to capture and store rainwater in this seasonally arid environment devoid of sizeable permanent surface water bodies. Over time, varied methods were created to ensure a sufficient quantity of water to meet the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kat Fitzgerald. Kacey Grauer. Zachary Nissen. 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. A human geography perspective provides our broadest lens to envision the entwined relationships of people, communities, and environments at Aventura. Drawing from an 18 km2 lidar survey and 1 km2 pedestrian survey, this paper presents a human geography of Aventura that links people, settlement, agriculture,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Saldaña. Tia Watkins. Emma Messinger. Rosamund Fitzmaurice. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Classic Maya graffiti (AD 300–800) provides a unique perspective of individual experiences, with figures etched onto plastered surfaces that were added as secondary elements within existing architecture. In the Maya lowlands, graffiti is typically found within monumental architecture, as these contexts favor preservation in tropical environments. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George J. Micheletti. Sheldon Skaggs. Terry G. Powis.

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. For the ancient Maya of Pacbitun, the onset of the Late Classic period (AD 550-800) signifies a time of exponential site growth and heightened prosperity. While this florescence is evident in the archaeological record, recent studies have begun to demonstrate that this affluence...