Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
1,826-1,850 (4,066 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Primary Sources and the Design of Research Projects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Much has been written about widening our research scopes to incorporate peripheral topics that include ethnicity, class, gender, age, and status. Although these past decades there has been significant progress, we should ask ourselves how can we impact and motivate students to address these issues. This presentation will demonstrate...
Incorporating Indigenous Feminist Theory into Rock Art Interpretation (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Gender in Archaeology over the Last 30+ Years" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of gender within the archaeological discipline has been a cornerstone of archaeological theory since the late 1980s. Though the study of gender has been foundational in changing our understanding of past peoples, there has been a severe lack of consideration of Indigenous women’s knowledge as well as Indigenous feminist...
Incorporating Soil Micromorphology into First American Research: A Tale of Two Sites (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past several decades, the application of soil and sediment micromorphology in geoarchaeology has flourished, especially outside of the Americas. Despite widespread acceptance and use of various micromorphological techniques by our European counterparts, a similar fluorescence has yet to occur among geoarchaeologists who are focused on the early...
Incorporating Vegetation Reconstruction in Computational Landscape Archaeoacoustics: An Ancient Maya Case Study (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeoacoustics: Sound, Hearing, and Experience in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ancient Maya perceived settlements as *kahkab, or “populated earth”; that is, urban agrarian places where residences intermixed with gardens and orchards. In previous work, we simulated the late eighth- and early ninth-century landscape of the ancient Maya city of Copán to investigate multisensory experience. Building...
Indian Ethnic Complexity in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico and Its Implications for the Study of European/Indian Contact During the Early Colonial Period (2018)
Scholarly interest utilizing archaeological and ethnohistorical studies to understand the genesis and development of Caribbean creole societies has grown in the last few years. Perspectives have shifted to emphasize the diversity of groups in the Caribbean during precolonial times, and how this continued into the colonial period as Europeans and Africans coalesced in the area. The conflictual aspect of this interaction whereby Europeans imposed a system of forced labor, along with drastic Indian...
Indians and Africans: Food, Ethnicity and Status in Early Colonial Cuba (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Intangible Dimensions of Food in the Caribbean Ancient and Recent Past" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the first half of the sixteenth century the Spanish colonial project in the Greater Antilles was based on the intensive exploitation of Indians and Africans, who saw the transformation of all aspects of their existence, including the food issue. Using historical and archaeological data, this article...
Indicators of Skeletal Stress in a Small Skeletal Sample Spanning the Holocene in the Maya Mountains of Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Bladen Paleoindian and Archaic archaeological Project (BPAAP) is an ongoing research endeavor focused on excavations from two rock shelters in the Maya Mountains of southern Belize: Maya Hak Cab Pek, and Saki Tzul. Continued use of these rocks shelters from the Late Pleistocene to the collapse of Mayan civilization has resulted in a unique perspective on...
Indigenizing Archaeology in the 21st Century (2018)
Nearly 30 years after the passage of NAGPRA, indigenous perspectives and consultation have led to significant positive changes within the practice of archaeology in the United States. Despite these advances, however, it seems that many archaeologists continue to adhere to the letter of the law while disregarding its spirit, suggesting that the colonial imperatives that gave rise to our discipline remain firmly entrenched. The Eurocentric interpretive frameworks, use of loaded terminology, and...
Indigenizing the Typology (2018)
The typology is one of the archaeologist's oldest analytical tools and it pervades nearly every facet of archaeological research, whether explicitly or implicitly. Using theories of practice, ethnographic evidence of Native American classification systems, and an interdisciplinary understanding of human perception and pattern recognition, this work attempts to deconstruct and reconstruct the typology as a tool of archaeological analysis, with an eye toward creating a newly theorized typology to...
Indigenous and Transcultural Implications in the "Seasoning" of Early 17th-Century Settlers of Barbados (2018)
The early 17th century settlement of Barbados is often projected as "Little England" and the settlers unidimensional as "Englishmen Transplanted" onto a rather blank slate of an abandoned island (Puckrain 1984, Gragg 2003). Current archaeological investigations of the initial period of colonial settlement on Barbados focusing on Trents Plantation, and the pre-sugar era (1627-1640s) project an all-together different picture. The archaeological and historical record projects a multivalent,...
Indigenous Archaeology, Memory, and Ethnoarchaeology: A Multivocal Research in Collaboration with the Guarani for Land Repatriation in Brazil (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Food, Land, and Communities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation explores my ethnoarchaeological research on a long-term interdisciplinary project in collaboration with Guarani communities toward Indigenous land repatriation in Brazil and offers a case study of a collaboration designed within the framework of Indigenous archaeological approaches. The project’s planning and fieldwork were...
Indigenous Copper Production in Colonial Mexico (1533-1630) (2017)
During the entire colonial period, the South-Central region of Michoacán, Mexico was the main producer of copper in New Spain and one of the most important loci of production in the whole Spanish empire. Copper was a fundamental material for artillery, coinage and silver extraction, not to mention its importance in the manufacture of all sorts of daily life items. However, Spanish colonizers had an almost complete lack of copper extraction knowledge. On the other hand, the region had a natural...
Indigenous Interpretations of the Past (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines indigenous understandings of the archaeological record through the case study of the Mopan Maya of Belize. Among many traditional Mopan Maya, classic era artifacts such as potsherds and stone points are often attributed to the Cheil or "those of the forest." Mopan believe that the Cheil are magical anthropomorphic beings descended from the...
Indigenous Knowledge in Dangerous Times: Research Partnerships, Knowledge Mobilization, and Public Engagement (2018)
What are the impacts of the contemporary political climate on community-based research with Indigenous communities? When archaeologists work in partnership with communities what added complexities do they face during a time when accusations of "fake news" are ever-present, conspiracy theories abound, and the science of climate change is questioned. Contrary to the way some have framed indigenous knowledge as being at odds with science, I'll discuss approaches in which community-based research...
Indigenous Knowledge: Scaling the Impact of Archeological Research Up, Out, and Across (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Collaborative Archaeology: How Native American Knowledge Enhances Our Collective Understanding of the Past" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) or Indigenous Knowledge (IK)—evolved and evolving from hundreds or thousands of years of observation and interaction with specific environments—has answered questions posed by geomorphologists and archaeologists, among others, attempting to...
Indigenous Miners and the Making of the Andean Markets in Colonial Huancavelica (2017)
The mercury mines of Huancavelica have often been described through two familiar discourses in the colonial narrative, the European pursuit of wealth through extractive industries, and the simultaneous destruction of indigenous Andean communities through brutal forced labor and the corrosive effects of the colonial market. While these two historiographical traditions contain a great deal of truth, they can minimize the role of indigenous Andeans in the creation of new economic networks that...
The Indigenous Worldview of Water in the Isthmus of Panama (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Unraveling the Mysteries of the Isthmo-Colombian Area’s Past: A Symposium in Honor of Archaeologist Richard Cooke and His Contributions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The rivers are natural limits to many cultures between the knowing and unknowing worlds. Also, they were the border between different territories and a fundamental element in establishing a settlement in a place or not. The names of the rivers are...
Industrial Heritage and Henequen Landscapes: The Social Spaces along the Conkal-Progreso Railway in Northern Yucatan (1886–1950) (2018)
From the second half of the nineteenth century the Yucatecan henequen industry experienced an extraordinary growth that would result in a "Gilded Age". The most notorious vestiges of this era are the henequen haciendas, which were dispersed across the entire peninsula and whose ruins evoke nostalgia for an era of industrial and commercial splendor. By the end of the century, new developments in communications and construction industries also appeared. Yucatán’s accelerated economic growth, tied...
Industrial Islands: Ecological Impacts of the steam-powered mills of the El Progreso plantation, Galápagos Islands. (2017)
From 1880 to 1917 "El Progreso" plantation operated on the humid highlands of San Cristóbal Island in the Galápagos archipelago (Ecuador). The plantation enterprise used steam-powered machinery for sugar refining and alcohol distillation. Despite its remote location, 1000 km west from the South American coast, this large operation took advantage of the latest industrial technology. A number of specialized machines were used in sugar processing which were imported from factories in Scotland and...
Industry Challenges for Cultural Heritage Consulting Firms in North America (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Transformations in Professional Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A main challenge confronting archaeologists today is the uncertainty surrounding the availability, viability, and sustainability of careers. As such, this paper provides an economic overview of the cultural heritage consulting (CRM/HRM) industry, the largest employment sector for archaeologists, in the United States and Canada. The industry...
Inequality and Gender in Spaces of Craft Production (2017)
This paper explores questions of inequality and gender in the Classic Maya world by examining the spatial relationships between and within local sites of craft activity. Pulling from recent archaeological work at the Classic period site of Xultun, Guatemala, we present research on two contexts that were connected to the production and use of limestone and lime plaster. In presenting this work, we discuss the broader social implications of these spaces as they relate to class and gender through...
Inequality and Taskscape in a Precolumbian Agricultural Landscape (2017)
Raised fields and other earthworks, as parts of archaeological landscapes, can be theorized through Ingold’s related concepts of taskscape and lines. In the Bolivian Amazon, such earthworks are the physical remains of group or community activities in the precolumbian past. As such, they are both the products of community tasks, and infrastructure, or resources that in turn afford other community tasks. In conjunction with archaeological survey and excavation, mapping of raised fields and other...
Inequality in the Maya Lowlands (2023)
This is an abstract from the "To Have and Have Not: A Progress Report on the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Assessing inequality using the Gini coefficient based on house size provides a standard metric for studying dynamic societal change across vast spatiotemporal contexts. Within a single geographic region, such as the Maya Lowlands, wealth inequities change over time as political systems...
Inequality, Urban Longevity, and Commoner Households at the Ancient Maya City of Aventura, Belize (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological studies of urbanism frequently seek to assess the factors which enable some cities to persist over the long-term while others fail after a few generations. This paper continues this line of inquiry by drawing on anthropological scholarship on inequality to examine the relationship between socioeconomic inequality and urban longevity. The paper...
Inferreing Markets from Material Remains: Hirth’s Distributional Approach in the Light of Economic Theory (2017)
Hirth 1998 proposed identifying archeologically the operation of mar- kets in ancient societies by looking at the distribution patterns of selected objects across households of different types. This paper revisits criti- cally this so called `distributional approach' and argues that it essentially amounts to a (failed) attempt at `estimating' a (say, Classic Maya) market demand from archeologically recovered consumption data. Such an un- dertaking, besides facing considerable identification...