Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Storey. Gina Buckley. Douglas Kennett.

Altica is the earliest-known settled village in the Teotihuacan Valley, and perhaps the only first-farming village site in the Basin of Mexico that has survived to modern times. Thus, it provides a rare glimpse into life during the Early-Middle Formative period. While only four burials comprising four individuals were recovered from pits dug into bedrock, each tells a unique story.Two individuals are older-aged females, the third, a middle-aged male, was accompanied by prestigious nonperishable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Delle.

In the late 18th century, the British colony of Jamaica entered the first of its several boom periods in coffee production. A highly addictive product that was at the time primarily a luxury good for a small domestic market, overproduction on the island resulted in attempts by the coffee industry to expand their markets in Great Britain and the European continent to the middle and working classes. Meanwhile, the rush to get coffee to the market resulted in a rapid expansion in the number and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Baquedano.

When metals were introduced in Mesoamerica ca. AD 850 they were used with both utilitarian and decorative purposes. Copper artifacts were turned into fishing hooks, tweezers, or axes. However, silver and gold were mostly used in jewelry production. Several deities were fashioned in gold as well as animals associated with gods. They included pendants, nose-rings, necklaces, etc. Warriors were also depicted as pendants, and there are examples in discs too. The context where the objects have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maline Werness-Rude. Kaylee Spencer.

Ancient Maya architecture tends to follow predictable patterns. Many structures have a single, clear façade, for instance, conceptualized as a literal face. Northern sites, with their toothy-jawed monster buildings, express this idea with particular directness. Stairways and sculptural adjuncts, like altars and stelae, are integral elements that contribute to the idea of facing, both literally and metaphorically, and, as such, are critical to the visual identity of many Maya sites. With a few...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara L. Gonzalez. Ora Marek Martinez.

This is an abstract from the "Sins of Our Ancestors (and of Ourselves): Confronting Archaeological Legacies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While the history of North American archaeology points to a long engagement with tribal elders and scholars, these encounters largely consist of unequal, extractive relationships wherein indigenous collaborators and indigenous archaeologists have been treated more as objects of study and pity—what Bea Medicine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allen Christenson.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Women in Mesoamerican Ritual" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. According to the Popol Vuh, the first truly successful human beings were created from maize by the goddess Xmucane: “The yellow ears of maize and the white ears of maize were then ground fine with nine grindings by Xmucane. Food entered their flesh, along with water to give them strength. . . . The yellowness of humanity came to be when they were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam King. Sheldon Skaggs. Terry Powis.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Ground Stone Studies in the Eastern Maya Lowlands" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Between 2012 and 2014, a small mound was excavated on the periphery of the Pacbitun site, a medium-sized ancient Maya center located in the Belize River Valley of west-central Belize. That mound revealed a record of the production of 4,000 granite mano and metates dating to the Late Classic period. Since those...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meaghan Peuramaki-Brown. Shawn Morton.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Ground Stone Studies in the Eastern Maya Lowlands" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this presentation, we discuss our research into the use of granite by the ancient inhabitants of Alabama: a Late to Terminal Classic boomtown of the eastern Maya lowlands. One of our initial hypotheses regarding the relatively sudden rise of the town toward the end of the Late Classic period focused on granite as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Guthrie.

This is an abstract from the "In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part IV): NAGPRA in Policy, Protocol, and Practice" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In response to stagnated repatriation efforts in the 32 years since the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, 43 CFR 10) became law, a new proposed rule to revise implementation regulations was entered into the federal register...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian Chase.

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. Agricultural production is a fundamental aspect of most societies, and research into agriculture has focused on invention, innovation, involution, intensification, and disintensification in varying forms worldwide. Generations of scholarship have accumulated knowledge and theorized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Seikel. Rachel Feit. Jon Budd.

Ethnohistoric accounts and archaeological evidence show that North American Indigenous hunter gatherers utilized fats and oils rendered from smashing and boiling faunal bone for dietary and other uses. In the archaeological record, evidence of bone grease extraction is interpreted from fractured faunal remains recovered from midden deposits and thermal features. However, most archaeological studies of bone grease extraction tend to focus on subsistence to the exclusion of other uses. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Devlin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological interpretations of household organization have long recognized its role in the construction of social identities and in the furtherance of social goals. While much of the historical archaeology of Jamaica, and indeed the Caribbean more broadly, has focused on exploring spatial and consumption choices of enslaved Africans and African...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Uploaded by: Chelsea Walter

In The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, contributors reject the popularized link between societal collapse and drought in Maya civilization, arguing that a series of periodic "collapses," including the infamous Terminal Classic collapse (AD 750), were caused not solely by climate change-related droughts but by a combination of other social, political, and environmental factors. New and senior scholars of archaeology and environmental science explore the timing and intensity of droughts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ilean Isaza. Eric Vrba.

The islands of the Coiba National Park (CNP) are located on the continental platform of Panama and the southeastern fringes of the Greater Chiriquí cultural region. During the period of the earliest human migrations to the isthmus (ca. 13,000 - 10,000 a.P.) these islands were connected to the mainland, although the current state of research cannot provide evidence of being inhabited earlier than ca. 1800 B.P. Multidisciplinary research aimed to study the long-term impacts of human on the insular...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alanna Radlo-Dzur.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A distinctive tradition of intricately sculpted metates—commonly known as grinding stones—flourished along the Pacific coast of Nicaragua and Costa Rica circa 300-900 CE. The Greater Nicoya burials that contain carved metates often include grave goods made of precious materials such as jade and gold. As a result, these sites have been subject to looting since...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Ringle. Melissa Galvan. Kenneth Seligson. Gabriel Tun Ayora.

This is an abstract from the "The Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project: 25 Years of Research in the Puuc" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It has long been recognized that the two principal physiographic subdivisions of the Puuc are the wedge-shaped Valle de Sta. Elena, just south of the Puuc escarpment, and to its south, the Bolonchen Hill District. One goal of the PARB project was to explore the eastern manifestations of these two regions for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Blitz. Lisa LeCount.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Embedded Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Classic Maya economies, artifact distributions alone do not neatly reflect modes of production and exchange. The simultaneous existence of multiple modes of production (domestic, specialized, ritualized, etc.) and exchange (gift giving, tribute extraction, and markets) in households complicate our understanding of the strength of any given aspect. We...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Miller.

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 Grolier Codex was reportedly found with other objects, including the Kislak box, the Dumbarton Oaks turquoise mask, and other objects in the United States and abroad. In this brief talk, these objects and their context will be addressed, as well as the likelihood of their having been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Blitz. Lisa LeCount.

Understanding the political economy of ancient Maya communities requires reconstructing the forms and scales of exchange, the articulated nature of exchange modes, and the degree to which elites controlled commoner access to goods. These issues are examined at the site of Actuncan, Belize, by documenting the chronology, morphology, raw material, and social context of a large sample of groundstone manos and metates distributed across structures ranging from a palace to large houses to patio...

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 Michael E. Smith. Aundria Arneson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The growth trajectory of a city through time is responsive to both internal and external forces. The shapes of such trajectories provide information about a variety of social, political, and economic processes that operated in the past. We present and analyze data from both well-excavated cities and regional settlement surveys in Mesoamerica. The patterns we...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Robert E. Bell.

This guide to the identification of certain American Indian projectile points is designed to acquaint the reader with a series of projectile point types that have been identified and named by archaeologists. As a guide it is far from complete, and there are many additional types of projectile points that are not included; also, there are a number of distinctive forms which have not been typed. There are somewhere between 150 and 200 projectile point types that have been named in the United...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Gregory Perino.

Special Bulletin No. 3 is a continuation of the Guide to the Identification of Certain American Indian Projectile Points, published by the Oklahoma Anthropological Society in December 1958, and October 1960. Information and pen drawings are presented for 50 projectile point types that have been recognized in the United States and Canada. There are 150 point types included in the three Special Bulletins; still, not all are included that have been recognized or identified throughout the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Pye.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The analysis and historical study of burial container hardware and other mortuary artifacts is crucial in establishing a useful discourse between the multiple lines of evidence recorded and recovered in historical cemetery investigations. Exact identification of types and styles of burial container hardware is vital in defining the chronology of burial,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynneth Lowe.

El presbítero Crescencio Carrillo y Ancona fue un destacado intelectual yucateco y precursor del estudio científico de la arqueología maya, que culminó sus esfuerzos con la inauguración del Museo Yucateco en 1871 en base a sus propias colecciones. El análisis de diversos documentos de archivo ha hecho posible conocer los antecedentes de tal institución durante el Segundo Imperio mexicano. El emperador Maximiliano mostró un notable interés por la historia y las culturas indígenas, al igual que la...