Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

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 Frauke Sachse. Daniel Boomhower.

This is an abstract from the "The Rollout Keepers: Papers on Maya Ceramic Texts, Scenes, and Styles in Honor of Justin and Barbara Kerr" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Kerr Archive constitutes the largest photographic collection of Maya ceramics, including rollouts and stills of more than 5,000 unique artifacts from museums, private collections, and archaeological excavations. Devising their own numbering system, Justin and Barbara Kerr...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Simon Martin.

This is an abstract from the "The Rollout Keepers: Papers on Maya Ceramic Texts, Scenes, and Styles in Honor of Justin and Barbara Kerr" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The cylinder vessel paintings assembled in the Kerr Archive cover a remarkable range of themes, with many of the best-known depicting fantastical beasts and other supernatural actors. But a not insignificant portion of the corpus features scenes of courtly performance and, as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Garay-Vazquez. Dorian Fuller. José Oliver.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeobotanical research of macro-botanical remains in the Caribbean is scarce due to notions of poor preservation in tropical landscapes. This shifted archaeobotanical research towards the analysis of micro-botanical remains because these types of analysis have been reported as more successful for recovering data of subsistence practices in the Neotropics....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Jablonski.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In archaeology, sexual harassment has become a defining part of our culture and affects many professionals across all subfields. This paper is a part of ongoing research that focuses on the history of archaeology as a way to understand sexual harassment in our culture, and to find ways to change this aspect of our culture moving forward. Our field, like...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ari Caramanica. Gary Huckleberry.

The sequence of landscape transformation across the area of the Ascope Canal System in the Chicama Valley involved both natural and anthropogenic events and processes that unfolded in nonlinear ways. We argue that early events were crucial in determining transformations later in the sequence. In the arid environment of the North Coast, water availability plays a key role in landscape histories. This paper highlights evidence for El Niño events, water management, and changing ecologies for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Schumann.

Law works in ways to promote specific interests of those with power, often leading to racial and economic marginalization. Through an examination of 18th and early 19th century Virginia laws, I investigate the relationship between law and race. I explore how laws help shape racial categories and forms of structural racism, and promotes economic inequality. These historical economic and and racial inequalities impact how we understand archaeological landscapes and whether sites meet the criteria...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Toney. Robert Thompson. Anthony Hewitt. Michael Desilets.

This is an abstract from the "A Multidimensional Mission: Crossing Conflicts, Synthesizing Sites, and Adapting Approaches to Find Missing Personnel" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2016 Garcia & Associates conducted forensic archaeological investigations for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) on Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands. Beginning on 7 August 1942 the Battle for Guadalcanal was the first major Allied offensive of World War II in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Diederich.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Umatilla Chemical Weapons Depot (UMCD), a U.S. Army installation located in Boardman Oregon, opened in 1941. The Depot stored a variety of military items, including conventional and chemical weapons. Up to twelve percent of the nation’s chemical weapons were stored at UMCD. After UMCD closed as an active Army installation the facility was transferred...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Hawkins. Krystiana Krupa. Jayne-Leigh Thomas.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When the remains of Native ancestors, or sacred and ceremonial objects, are screened from backdirt or backfill, what implications does this have for the soil in which they rested? Backdirt is usually considered unimportant after screening, but should, perhaps, archaeologists more carefully consider the ethical implications of the ways that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Goodbred. Mario Pino. Tom Dillehay.

This paper focuses on reconstructing the Holocene paleoenvironmental history of the lower Chicama River valley and coastal system, which has provided diverse natural resources for the Preceramic cultures at Huaca Prieta and Paredones. The archaeological site of Huaca Prieta is situated on the southern tip of a Pleistocene terrace along the shore, ~3 km north of the Chicama River mouth and floodplain system. Paredones is located 0.6 km to the north on the eastern edge of the terrace. Here we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hector Neff.

This is an abstract from the "Human Behavioral Ecology at the Coastal Margins: Global Perspectives on Coastal & Maritime Adaptations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Holocene human adaptations to the Pacific coast of southern Mesoamerica and Central America are documented at a number of locations from southern Mexico to Panama. Evidence comes from Archaic-Period shell mounds, Early Formative sites at the edge of dry land behind the mangrove...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Golitko. Clay Jaskowski.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Pacific islands are often used as model cases of human-environment systems and the development of biocultural diversity. In comparison to the smaller islands of the southwestern Pacific, the prehistory of the north coast of New Guinea remains poorly understood, particularly prior to ~2000 BP. We draw together a variety of archaeological evidence collected...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Judith Maxwell.

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. Mayan communities are located within sacred space. Each town has four principal guardians roughly aligned with cardinal directions and, in precontact times, a central altar. Each of the guardians is associated with a landmark (an escarpment, a cave/overhang, a spring or stream, a mountain) and embodies the energy of...

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 Dana Kollmann.

This is an abstract from the "Forensic Archaeology: Research & Practice" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ground-based methods of searching for clandestine graves and surface remains have been utilized by law enforcement and search and rescue personnel for years. When ground conditions and the technique of search are appropriate for the circumstances of the case, results are often successful. However, weather, terrain, acreage, foliage and efforts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Lucero. Adrian Chase.

This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The rainfall-dependency of the ancestral Maya shaped their daily and seasonal existence in homes, communities, and cities. They adapted quite well to the annual wet and dry seasonal cycles—as well as extreme weather events like hurricanes, tropical storms and severe droughts,...

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 Carla Hernandez Garavito. Carlos Osores Mendives.

Most scholarship on the shifts in local lifeways during the Late Horizon strictly focused on changes in the availability to new and limited-access goods by local elites (D’Altroy 2001; Hastorf 1990; 2003). In these models, local leaders became immersed in reciprocal and status-granting relationships with the Inka through gifts and exclusive artifacts. Materiality played a pivotal role in the relationship between the Inka and their subjects. However, it is less clear how local ethnicity was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucas Johnson. Lisa Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Classic period (250–900 CE) Maya economic systems were diverse with most lowland cities revealing a combination of intensive surplus crafting workshops and more domestic household crafting. Some craft production may have been centralized and occurring under the supervision of the state and others appear to be operating independently at the household level...

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 Julian Salazar.

Long term evolutionary narratives on South Andean pre-Columbian history have stressed lineal processes of complexity intensification, defined by big changes on subsistence strategies, from small and egalitarian hunter gatherer groups to complex multicommunitarian chiefdoms. These changes were thought to influence or even determine the structure of household and consequently daily life of people. Nevertheless recent household archaeology studies have demonstrated that the reproduction of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rani Alexander. Héctor Hernández Álvarez.

In this paper, we examine the changes in household ecology that resulted from the introduction of European domesticates to Yucatán after the Spanish invasion. New animals and plants were not adopted wholesale as a Euroagrarian suite in the sixteenth century. Instead, heterogeneous practices took root in highly altered demographic and environmental settings. Ecosystems were re-engineered as animals moved into new anthropogenic niches. We compare archaeological and ethnoarchaeological evidence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Molly Corr.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Starvation and malnutrition have ravaged societies for thousands of years, but the effort to leverage food insecurity has existed just as long. When faced with hunger, humans adapt and respond to the best of their abilities, which may look different according to the resources and options available to them at the time. Maya subsistence literature has a long...