Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
1,976-2,000 (4,066 Records)
After the defeat of Azcapotzalco in AD 1428, the rulers of Tenochtitlan employed different strategies to recreate and reinforce their identity during the Triple Alliance. One of them was the regional request of master artisans, called tolteca, for working at the Aztec capital. Some of these craftsmen and their workshops were located inside the palaces of the tlatoque. Among them were the jewelers that crafted sacred objects for the gods and prestige goods for the elites. The technological...
Jewels, Flowers, and Paper Bows: Ornaments on Instruments for Sacrifice and Self-Sacrifice in Nahua Prehispanic Art (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Sacrificial and Autosacrifice Instruments in Mesoamerica: Symbolism and Technology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By analyzing the codices, ceramics, and pre-Hispanic sculpture, it is possible to identify different instruments employed both for the extraction of blood itself and for the sacrifice of victims. In these sources, maguey spines, bone awls, flint knives, and even the quadrangular stones where the victims...
Joseph Ball and the Reformulation of the Protoclassic: Revisiting Critical Issues (2018)
At the 1985 Maya Ceramic Workshop, Arthur Demarest noted the intense interest in the Protoclassic. Indeed, ceramists with only a mammiform support and a handful of sherds would pause to speculate on the significance of a statistically insignificant number of sherds. During the 1990s, Joseph Ball and I doggedly worked to reexamine every aspect of the Protoclassic issue. Aided by contributions of a number of colleagues, the resulting document attempted to strip the Protoclassic of association...
"Jouer sur du velours": Archaeological Evidence of Gaming on Sites of Slavery in the Caribbean and United States (2017)
Hand-carved ceramic discs excavated from historic-period sites across North America and the Caribbean suggest the widespread growth of gaming culture during the third quarter of the 18th century. From Spanish missions and French forts to villages of enslaved people across the British, French, and Spanish colonial domains, people fashioned discs from flat portions of ceramic vessels for use in a variety of games. We begin by exploring the production and use of hand-carved ceramic gaming discs of...
The Jovel Valley of Highland Chiapas from the Classic Period to the Postclassic Period (2017)
In contrast to the sociopolitical instability and depopulation observed at many sites in the Southern Maya Lowlands during the Classic to Postclassic transition, Highland Chiapas was characterized by stability and demographic expansion, as suggested by our excavations in the Jovel Valley, where small cities and towns maintained their roles as political and economic centers throughout this period. In this paper, we examine patterns of continuity and change evidenced by recent excavations at the...
Just a Matter of Time: Preliminary Ceramic Chronology Building in Central Nicaragua (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Reconstructing the Political Organization of Pre-Columbian Nicaragua" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeology of central Nicaragua offers a challenging arena for the deconstruction of traditional ceramic chronology discourses in Southern Central America. The ‘anthropology of techniques’ approach and ethnoarchaeological research have determined that the most stable steps in ceramic manufacture are connected to...
Just for the Celt of It: Investigations and Discoveries Beneath the Petroglyph Panels of Aktun Kuruxtun, Yucatan (2018)
During 2011 excavations deep beneath the petroglyph panels in Aktun Kuruxtun, Mexico, members of the Central Yucatan Archaeological Cave Project (CYAC) uncovered a small tunnel leading into a previously unknown chamber of the cavern. The discovery came in the final days of the field season, however, and the chamber was too choked with flood sediments to be methodologically investigated. As a result, the passage was reburied. Last summer, CYAC returned to the cave and successfully explored the...
The Justin Kerr Maya Vase Database and Its Contribution to the Study of Maya Iconography (2024)
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. It is hard to overstate the rich intellectual benefits that iconographers and epigraphers have been given through the lens of Justin Kerr’s remarkable Maya Vase Database. It not only brought to light a world of gods, rulers, courts, and vivid bestiary but also revealed complex...
The Jácanas Archaeological Collection: Laying Down the Facts (2017)
While researching an archaeological collection, it is important to trace its history in terms of its origins, what makes up the collection, where it is located, and who is responsible for it. Jácanas, a pre-Columbian site in Ponce, Puerto Ric,o was excavated during the first decade of the 21st century. The fieldwork was carried out by a non-local cultural resources management company under contract with the United States Corps of Engineers (USCE). Among the many concerns expressed by local...
Kaanu'l Lords in Quintana Roo: New Data from Dzibanche and Resbalón Monuments (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Rise and Apogee of the Classic Maya Kaanu’l Hegemonic State at Dzibanche" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Re-documentation and analysis of inscribed monuments from the archaeological site of Dzibanche and its vicinity have revealed new details of the history of the Kaanu’l polity during the Classic period. The presentation centers in particular on the narratives recovered from the hieroglyphic stairways of El...
The Kaanul Dynasty and the Early History of the Northwest Petén (2021)
This is an abstract from the "New Light on Dzibanché and on the Rise of the Snake Kingdom’s Hegemony in the Maya Lowlands" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past two decades it has become increasingly clear that the ancient Maya political landscape was permeated by regional systems of political asymmetry. These hegemonic networks fluctuated through time, but the steady presence of a few especially dominant polities shows that they were a...
Kahalu`u and Keauhou on Hawai`i Island as Living, Dynamic Landscapes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper analyzes the ahupua`a Kahalu`u and Keauhou on the west coast of Hawai`i Island as living, dynamic landscapes applying methodologies from archaeology, ethnohistory, and heritage studies as well as the framework of memory. Kahalu’u and Keauhou appear to be an incredibly interesting archaeological landscape...
Kalunga!: Identifying Afrodescendant Landscapes in Spanish Santo Domingo, 1502-1822 (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The first Afrodescendant peoples arrived in the Americas on Spanish ships to the island of Hispaniola in 1492, and by 1502 played an integral role in the development of the colony of Spanish Santo Domingo. Both free and enslaved Afrodescendants undertook most of the labor needed to construct the urban landscapes on the island, as well as the production of...
Kanaloa: Lessons from Paleoecology of a Once Common Lowland Forest Species in Hawai'i (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Research and CRM Are Not Mutually Exclusive: J. Stephen Athens—Forty Years and Counting" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the late 1980s and early1990’s paleoenvironmental investigations at wetland sites in coastal lowlands of O‘ahu and Mau‘i revealed a very common unknown mimosoid pollen type occurring during pre-Polynesian times. Following Polynesian arrival in the islands around AD 1000, sediment profiles...
Karst Landscapes and Uses of Caves among the Prehispanic Zoque people of Cerro Brujo, Ocozocoautla, Chiapas (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cerro Brujo is located in central Chiapas and is part of a mountain ridge that forms different karstic rock shelters, caverns, and caves. Early Zoque groups inhabited the area, took advantage of the resources, and developed symbolic activities in the interior of the cave system. Nearly a decade ago, the speleological "Grupo Jaguar" started expeditions to...
Keeping It in the Family?: An Investigation into the Relatedness of Individuals Found in an Ancient Maya Chultún (2017)
The ancient Maya site of Blue Creek, located in northern Belize, has revealed archaeological evidence suggesting regional occupation from the Preclassic through Terminal Classic periods. The excavation of one Late Classic group (550 C.E. - 830 C.E.), Kin Tan, by the Maya Research Project revealed a chultún containing the remains of five commingled individuals of various ages. Examination of these skeletal remains revealed some commonalities in postcranial non-metric traits among those interred...
Keeping Track of it All: Building a Repository Database from the Ground Up (2019)
This is an abstract from the "How to Conduct Museum Research and Recent Research Findings in Museum Collections: Posters in Honor of Terry Childs" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Office of the Wyoming State Archaeologist (OWSA) and the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office are shifting towards digital-only submissions for professional archaeological projects through new and interconnected database-and-web-interface systems going live in...
Keeping Up Productivity: Persistence of "Lost" Crops in the Trans-Mississippi South (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most crops in the Eastern Agricultural Complex were no longer members of Native American farming systems when Europeans first took note. Reasons usually proposed for the fall-off entail advantages of maize over the pre-maize cultigens, with heightened defensibility of close, compact fields being another...
The Kenyon-Honduras Program 1988-2019: Learning from the Past About Ourselves (2019)
This is an abstract from the "I Love Sherds and Parasites: A Festschrift in Honor of Pat Urban and Ed Schortman" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the 1980s, the Kenyon-Honduras Program, under the leadership of Drs. Patricia Urban and Edward Schortman (P&E to us), has engaged students in the study of archaeology, anthropology, and life. Hundreds of students have been a part of the program over the past several decades. Being in the program...
Kept Out or Closed In? An Analysis of Civilian Fortification Strategies during the Maya Social War (2018)
In this paper, I explore the ways in which albarradas, or the dry-laid enclosure walls ubiquitous to Yucatec Maya towns, can be manipulated to become defensive structures under the threat of attack. I discuss the results of a recent study that conducted a construction analysis on a series of wall features in the now unpopulated town of Tela – an auxiliary to and key commercial throughway for the burgeoning frontier hub of Tihosuco (since repopulated) during the 19th century. This town was...
Killing Meat Softly, use of toxins in the procurement of food (2009)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us using the...
The Kingdom of Piedras Negras: A View from Mexico (2018)
Though today the Usumacinta River marks part of the boundary of Mexico and Guatemala, during the Classic period the Usumacinta would have passed through numerous kingdoms, including Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan. Alternate travel routes through the valleys to the west in Mexico crossed an even more complicated political landscape approaching the kingdoms of Palenque, Tonina, and Sak Tz’i’, as well as the plentiful minor centers and rural settlements throughout the region. While surveys between...
Kitchen Affairs: First Insights into the Intimacies of Food Plant Preparation at El Flaco, Northern Dominican Republic (XII–XV Centuries) (2018)
Ongoing investigations by the Nexus 1492 Synergy Project (Leiden University) at El Flaco archaeological site, has revealed the existence of an interesting Amerindian hamlet chronologically situated between XII and XV centuries. People who lived and died there, being carriers of the Meillacoid and Chicoid traditions, kept their kitchen areas extremely close to their houses, leaving noticeable remnants of their processing tools (shell scrapers, rudimentary grinding stones), cooking pots and...
Kleidung und Schmuck (1988)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us using the...
Knowledge Networks and Entanglements in the Crafting of Pre-Columbian Maya Ceramics and Architecture (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the underlying precepts of materiality is that, whereas people make objects, objects simultaneously and recursively make people. Objects also make objects, however, in so far as seemingly separate crafting traditions were intimately entangled with each other, stimulating and reinforcing similar procedures, practices, and...