Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bernadette Cap. Rachel Horwitz.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Embedded Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient economies are intertwined with aspects of the daily life of individuals in both market and premarket economies. To more fully understand these relationships, we must explore the ways in which economic actions are embedded and entangled within social, political, and religious practices. We briefly discuss the history of the term and how we utilize...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Bankuti.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In antiquity, the use of prestige objects and adornment made of jade was a key aspect of Maya elite life which carried over from the Preclassic to the Classic period. The establishment of jade indicating high social status has shown to have begun in Mesoamerica with the Olmec, however the scope of this dissertation will focus only on the 1,800-year span of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yasmine Flynn-Arajdal. Christina Halperin. Carolyn Freiwald. Katherine Miller Wolf. Miriam Salas.

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. Fifty years ago, Maya scholars argued that peoples from the Gulf Coast invaded and settled several sites in the Southern Maya Lowlands in the ninth century, including the site of Ucanal. These invasions were thought to have led to the collapse of Southern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liam Brady. John Bradley.

As an interpretive tool for rock art studies, the concept of embodiment has much to offer especially when used in conjunction with ethnographic data. In this paper we focus on embodiment in the context of relatedness using a case study involving Yanyuwa rock art from three sites – Muluwa, Wulibirra, and Kamandaringabaya – in the Sir Edward Pellew islands in northern Australia’s southwest Gulf of Carpentaria region. Although not stylistically similar, the rock art from these sites is intimately...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharine Fernstrom.

Two- and three-dimensional human figures, and disembodied parts of figures, are commonly found across North America, and are considered important dimensions of Native American art. Figures appear in diverse media and sizes including stone, copper, shell, earthen effigy mounds, and petroglyphs/petrographs. In the literature, they are most frequently addressed as examples of art for the regions in which they are found, but rarely as pan-North American phenomena. A solely regional perspective...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vera Tiesler.

In Mesoamerica, sacrificial ceremonies for the sake of religious merit-making tended to bridge polarities between action and symbols. Some of the ritual practices were mediated by mythical narratives surrounding domestic hearths, divine fire, and the sun itself. Among ancient Mesoamericans with their hierophagic cosmic understanding, the fiery protagonists to which sacrifices were destined to were deemed necessary complements of all life and had to be fed. This talk combines graphic and textual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Takeshi Inomata.

This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Aguada Fénix features an artificial plateau, which measures 1,400 × 400 m horizontally and 10–15 m vertically. Nine causeways and corridors radiate from the plateau. These monumental constructions were built between 1050 and 750 BC. This building, discovered in 2017, turned out to be the largest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juan Barcelo. Florencia Del Castillo Bernal.

In this contribution we present the results of a computer simulation of an "artificial society", implemented to understand how cultural identities and cultural standardization may have emerged in a prehistoric hunter-gatherer society as a consequence of restricted cooperation. The aim of the model is to explain how diversity and self-identification may have emerged in the small-scale societies of our prehistoric past. The computer model explores some possible consequences of theoretical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Suárez Calderón.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The settlement of Java is a Precolumbian socioceremonial center located on a hilltop in the Coto Brus Valley, in Southern Costa Rica. An intensive survey of the site revealed that the main occupation of the site occurred several centuries earlier than previously thought. Java is one of the largest settlements from the Aguas Buenas period, with an area of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Iyaxel Cojti-Ren.

In this paper I will explore how the western Kaqchikel managed from being military auxiliaries to the K’iche’ kingdom to become and independent and expansionist polity, and how this transition was reflected in the material culture of their two last settlements. I will use ethnohistorical documentation to inform how the western Kaqchikel conceived their auto determination, and how they reached it after they abandoned their first capital Chi Awar after breaking their political alliances with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thegn Ladefoged. Benjamin Davies.

Cultivation in the Leeward Kohala Field System (Hawai‘i Island) required sufficient rainfall for crops to flourish. Periodic droughts restricted production to upper elevations where orographic rainfall was higher and more dependable, likely influencing the labour needs and settlement patterns of resident populations. We employ a series of spatially-explicit agent based models incorporating cultural conceptions of kapu (sacred) and noa (profane) in conjunction with environmental parameters and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Nuckols-Wilde.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Preclassic niche monuments, found from Guatemala to Chiapas to Veracruz, portray anthropomorphic figures emerging from a high-relief cavity. Presently there is no extant study of niche monuments that assembles the entire corpus and situates them within a broader matrix of exchange via trade, interaction and linguistics. In this paper, I will present my...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Jackson. Linda A. Brown. Brett A. Houk.

Twenty-five years of archaeological research in northwestern Belize have yielded a robust regional database, allowing a rich and diverse picture of ancient Maya life to emerge. As part of this research, multiple projects have recently adopted innovative digital technologies using new methods to record and envision ancient sites in novel ways. This paper presents some of the ways in which researchers have engaged with digital technologies that allow for the collection of new types of data, as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. Alan Covey. Miriam Aráoz Silva.

Located in the Andean highlands of northern Peru, the Inca administrative center at Huánuco Pampa served as a provincial capital, drawing thousands of tributary households into scripted encounters with imperial officials on festive occasions. Inca site planning created spaces for performing diverse identities and reinforcing relationships between local people and Inca elites. After an unsuccessful Spanish attempt to establish a town within the central plaza of the site, Huánuco Pampa faded to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxime Lamoureux St-Hilaire.

This paper reports on the final results of a multi-facetted study of the northern section of the regal palace of La Corona. This study sampled (n=328) both plaster and soil in three adjacent patios and adjoining middens. The plaster samples underwent a geochemical analysis (ICP-MS), while the soil samples underwent flotation analysis which recovered macro-botanical remains and micro-artifacts. These results were then combined to traditional artifactual data derived from five middens excavated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mallory Matsumoto.

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. Michael Coe’s “The Maya Scribe and His World” (1973) and the 1971 Grolier Club exhibition for which it was produced marked the first sustained treatment of scribes and artists in scholarship on Classic Maya civilization. It also highlighted the wealth of information that ceramics and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerardo Jiménez Delgado. Javier López Mejía.

This is an abstract from the "New and Emerging Perspectives on the Bajo el Laberinto Region of the Maya Lowlands, Part 2" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological site of Calakmul has a long history of archaeological research and documentation, from the initial sketches and hand-drawn plans to those created using precise topographical instruments, to the recording of the different architectural spaces. Nowadays, the use of innovative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Horvey Palacios. Delaney Cooley. Bonnie Pitblado.

This is an abstract from the "Democratizing Heritage Creation: How-To and When" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Science communicators are in an unprecedented time of digital innovation and global connectivity that has given rise to accessible and engaging projects, including podcasts, TikToks, apps, and interactive websites. These platforms have demonstrated how the power to create and disseminate narratives can shift from a select few to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Cowie.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Science and African Archaeology: Appreciating the Impact of David Killick" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although perhaps best known for his research and mentorship in archaeological science and African archaeology, David Killick has also mentored students who do more humanistic research and broadly encouraged diversity in the sciences, with far-reaching effects. For decades, his support of women and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaime Awe. Julie Hoggarth. Christophe Helmke. Jim Aimers.

The discovery of cultural remains on or above the floors of rooms and courtyards at several Maya sites has been interpreted by some archaeologists as problematic deposits, defacto refuse, or as evidence for rapid abandonment. Investigations in the Belize River valley have recorded similar deposits at several surface and subterranean sites. Our regional and contextual approach to the study of these remains, coupled with ethnohistoric and ethnographic information provide limited support for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Meierhoff. Sergio López-Garzona.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the latter half of the nineteenth century the ruins of Tikal were briefly reoccupied. Refugees fleeing the Caste War of Yucatan cohabited with Lacandon Maya from the surrounding jungles and heavily Hispanized Itza Maya from the lakes of central Petén, Guatemala, to form a small multi-ethnic hamlet amongst the hulking ruins of the ancient Maya city....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Graesch. Makena Lurie.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. North American houses are among the largest in the world and, for the better part of a century, their occupants have been accumulating and storing possessions at a rate and volume unlike any other period in human history. These lifelong-amassed assemblages are rarely kept or valued by descendants, and at the conclusion of homeowners’ lives, the bulk of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mara Stumpf. Sara Juengst.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dental modification has been well-documented from the coast of Ecuador, with practices including elaborate dental inlays and incisions. However, few examples come from recently excavated or well-provenienced sites, making the antiquity and changing significance of dental modification unclear. Additionally, it is unclear whether this practice originated in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Ingram.

Increasing the public benefits of archaeology involves more than increasing our assertions of relevance. Relevance is a vague term that is easy to assert because it is difficult to disprove. Likewise, archaeology is not a predictive science and promoting "lessons from the past" creates unrealistic expectations of archaeologists and our work. If we are to connect the past to efforts to address climate change, we need to provide specific, archaeologically-informed examples that demonstrate how the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith Hardy.

This is an abstract from the "To Move Forward We Must Look Back: The Slave Wrecks Project at 10 Years" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2014, the National Park Service, as a partner in the Slave Wrecks Project, has conducted a community archaeology program as part of multiyear effort combining underwater and terrestrial archaeology with public engagement activities. Christiansted National Historic Site, and the Danish West India and Guinea...