Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erica Hill.

This is an abstract from the "SANNA v2.2: Case Studies in the Social Archaeology of the North and North Atlantic" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over 300 Viking Age (AD 871–1000) human interments are known from Iceland, many with accompanying dogs and horses. Though these interments are similar to those of elites in Scandinavia, inhumation burial in Iceland apparently served a different purpose — to demarcate boundaries in a landscape devoid of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Chuchiak IV.

Upon initial contact with the lowland Yucatec Maya, the Europeans discovered that a significant number of Maya slaves existed within the Maya communities that they encountered. War captives, orphans, and forced and enslaved sexual servants from the lower classes, Maya slaves and their possession became by the late Postclassic and early colonial period the major source of wealth and power of the traditional Maya Nobility. Divorced from control over specified traditional patrimonial landholdings...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ciprian Ardelean.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 2016-2017 excavations at Chiquihuite Cave (northeastern Zacatecas, Mexico) produced solid evidence in favor of a sustained human occupation of the Northern Mexican Highlands during and before the Late Glacial Maximum (LGM) (in process of publication at the time of the submission of this abstract); an occupation that lasted for thousands of years in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only César Méndez. Antonio Maldonado. Andrés Troncoso. Amalia Nuevo Delaunay. Sebastían Grasset.

The geographical band between 31°-32° S, from the Pacific to the Andes, lies in the southernmost part of the Semi-Arid North of Chile, south of the Atacama Desert. Multidisciplinary research to the north and south of the Choapa River’s mouth is uneven, thereby in need of new data for understanding the relative intensity of the human traces across the landscape and the human interactions with environmental changes. Currently, the combined pollen records in the coast and highlands indicate arid...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Judith Ruiz. Isabel Casar Aldrete. Vera Tiesler Blos.

This is an abstract from the "New Perspectives on Ritual Violence and Related Human Body Treatments in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A number of non-reverential, highly processed human assemblages containing mutilated sternal bones have been documented in different parts of Postclassic period Mesoamerica and beyond after being described by Carmen Pijoan in a massive ritual deposit from Tlatelolco, in the Aztec capital. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Enriquez.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation examines the 1562 confessions of Maya ritual murder (“Procesos contra los indios idólatras de Sotuta, . . .” “Processes against the idolatrous Indians of Sotuta, . . .”) obtained during the Idolatry Trials led by Friar Diego de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandra Vidal Elgueta. Luis Felipe Hinojosa. María Fernanda Pérez.

Maize from Andean region has a recognized complex history, involving ecological and human interaction. Today, while Andean maize show high morphological and low genotypic diversities, the process involved in its production and selection is unclear. In this work we ask how the morphological and genetic diversity of maize has varied through Formative Period to present time in Tarapacá Region, northern Chile? To answer this we analysed thirty morphological traits and eight microsatellites markers...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Pratt.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Tropical Montane Cloud Forests" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although a growing bodies of scholarship address later cultural developments in such regions, Tropical Montane Cloud Forests (TMCF) are nevertheless perceived by many as environments marginal for human occupation, especially for hunter-gatherers. One such region, the Chachapoyas culture area in northern Peru, has to date been home to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Graesch.

This is an abstract from the "AD 1150 to the Present: Ancient Political Economy to Contemporary Materiality—Archaeological Anthropology in Honor of Jeanne E. Arnold" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After decades of aspirational spending, and in houses brimming with tens to hundreds of thousands of objects, North Americans have amassed inventories of belongings that are extraordinary for their scale and complexity. In a process largely devoid of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jago Cooper. Alice Samson.

This paper will review some of the ways in which unprecedented human migration and cultural encounter in the 15th and 16th century Caribbean is reflected in the transformative material exchanges made on Isla de Mona. Discoveries made during recent fieldwork on Isla de Mona will be used to illuminate and inform these thoughts by examining the dynamic ideological setting within which they are situated.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Pintar. Nora Viviana Franco.

Deserts have traditionally been considered marginal environments, because survival depends on several factors. Some researchers have pointed to the importance of water for hunter-gatherers living in these environments, as well as the increased knowledge of the environment they lived in, and its resources, as well as the awareness and knowledge of neighbors on whom to call in lean times or with whom to interact and exchange partners and the knowledge of resources. Here we present two cases from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexis Ohman.

Fish and fishing occupy an intersection between meat and not-meat, hunting and gathering. As such, it does not fall into a clean division of labor by gender. Fish were acquired, processed, and distributed according to distinct sociocultural and sociopolitical codes of conduct that could result in death if not properly carried out: either accidental death from ciguatera toxicity or execution as punishment for breaking kapu/taboo. Tuna is well-known to be one of the most prized animals in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Peros.

Hurricanes are major climatological events with significant impacts in tropical and extra-tropical regions worldwide. Despite this, little research has been undertaken on the effects of hurricanes and other intense storms on prehistoric societies. New evidence from the field of paleotempestology—the study of past hurricane activity using geological proxy techniques, such as lagoon sediments and speleothems—is shedding light on how hurricanes varied over the Holocene in terms of frequency,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rus Sheptak. Rosemary Joyce.

Archaeological excavations in Caribbean coast Honduras explored the site of Ticamaya, described in 16th-century Spanish documents as the seat of a leader of indigenous resistance. Yet despite testing confirmed deposits from the period covering initial conflict with the Spanish, roughly 1520-1536, these excavations produced no use of European goods until the late 18th century. Contemporary with Ticamaya, the site of Naco to the west hosted troops sent by Cortes, and at least one majolica vessel...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Bracken.

This is an abstract from the "Hydro-Ecological System of the Maya in Petén, Guatemala" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Premodern landscape modification at the northeast corner of Lake Macanché, surrounding the site of Muralla de León, predominantly consists of small hilltop settlements and hydraulic channels. These channels interact with the lake itself, as well as the juleques (pond-sized water-filled sinkholes) that cluster in the vicinity. Two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kacey Grauer.

This is an abstract from the "The Past, Present, and Future of Water Supplies" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents legacies of water supplies at the Maya site of Aventura, in northern Belize. During its ancient occupation, Aventura was a city with ample water resources integrated into its settlement. Access to this water was not restricted by economic status as local political ecology was organized heterarchically. In 1848, refugees...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine France. Haiping Qi.

Hydrogen isotopes in archaeological bone collagen (i.e. δ2H-collagen) are poorly understood, but can potentially facilitate new understanding of the complex relationship between trophic level (i.e. animal protein consumption) and meteoric water controls on hydrogen isotopes in omnivorous humans. These concurrent influences on human δ2H-collagen values were examined in 11 North American archaeological sites. The δ2H-collagen values were compared to bone hydroxyapatite oxygen isotopes (i.e....

DOCUMENT Citation Only William White.

This is an abstract from the "Hood Archaeologies: Impacts of the School-to-Prison Pipeline on Archaeological Practice and Pedagogy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The monoraciality of archaeology perpetuates systems where many European American archaeologists assume archaeologists who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) have arrived because of affirmative action. Our presence is considered the result of traumatic lives that led to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Bennett. Sally Reynolds. Sarah Maryon.

This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Archaeological Footwear" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human footprints have been found throughout the world. At White Sands (New Mexico) they hint at early human presence in the Americas, and during the summer of 2022 a new footprint site was reported from Utah. These sites are linked by their geological setting, dried lake beds and ancient playas, a common feature of the Americas. One question often...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexis Ohman. Jennifer Kahn.

ScMo-350 is located on Mo’orea Island, northwest of Tahiti in French Polynesia. Our ichthyoarchaeological analyses assess which fish taxa were utilized by the pre-contact Ma’ohi, and how those taxa may have changed over time. Our diachronic approach investigates fishing activities over a c. 1,000 year period, between AD 900-1800. We broadly divided this beach ridge site into four excavation blocks to aid in spatial analyses of the recovered artifacts. Fish specimens were heavily concentrated in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark McCoy. Mehrdad Aghagholizadeh. Nicos Makris. Mara Mulrooney. Britton Shepardson.

This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeologies and Islands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Monuments are a critical window into people’s values, beliefs, and social memories. The destruction of monuments is especially important since it can shed light on how these aspects of societies change over time. We describe new research aimed at understanding the destruction of moai (statues) on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Our first goal is to build a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fernando Getino Granados.

Representaciones de mariposas en la escultórica de la antigua ciudad de Tula, se observan en edificios monumentales y conjuntos habitacionales comunes. Aparece en forma de pectoral de las cariátides que sostenían los techos de los templos principales. Este distintivo también identifica a guerreros sacrificados, representados como altares dentro de espacios ceremoniales. El pectoral lo portan además gobernantes en pilastras y seres mitológicos en lápidas. Atributos de la mariposa se distinguen en...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Khaghani. Whitney Goodwin. Marcello Canuto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This thesis explores the relationship between iconography and material analysis of Ulúa polychromes in Honduras between 450 – 1200 CE. From a dataset of 56 ceramic pieces, first analyzed iconographically which has been the main form of analysis for these artefacts. Second, the 56 pieces were sampled for INAA and processed through a computer program. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Alvarez. Lynneth Lowe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The abundance of pottery stamps, variety of designs and quality of its craftsmanship during the Postclassic period, contrasts with the scarce studies regarding these special artifacts whose analysis can contribute to the knowledge of significant aspects of ancient Maya culture. These stamps were used to imprint decorative motifs on the human body, fabrics,...

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...