Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allan Cobb. Linda Palit.

Handprints and stencils are ubiquitous elements in rock art throughout the world. Numerous well preserved examples have been noted in Maya caves. These elements provide a clue as to the sex of the person whose hand is recorded on the cave wall. Recent studies have shown that sex may be estimated with a high degree of accuracy using anthropometric hand measurements. Sex is estimated by applying a variety of mathematical models based on sexual dimorphism in hand dimensions to direct measurement...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jay Haviser.

Incipient aspects of syncretic processes among Africans and Europeans had begun on the African continent from the fifteenth century, with a particular reference noted for religious practices. Considering the relatively isolated participation of the two groups within the early interactive sphere of West Africa, as well as the in-situ contexts of the African cultures, some syncretical expressions were evident, yet due to the disproportional ratio of populations, were more subtle on the continent....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Camacho-Trejo.

H.B. Nicholson was considered the Tlamatini of Aztec studies. He was also known as a warm and generous professor who dedicated his life to the study of Mesoamerican cultures. His legacy is highlighted by his remarkable collection of articles, books, photographs, and slides acquired over more than five decades. After his death in 2007, Nicholson’s family donated his entire private collection of books, articles, slides, and photographs to the University of California, Los Angeles. Five years ago,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Silvia Mesa Dávila.

The paper we present reveals the legal basis of the Mexican cultural heritage public registry and the consequences of the relation it sustain with it´s statements and academic interests involved in the description of archaeological materials. Accordingly, the real work begins of typology, chronology and cultural classification, associated with the sites and related archaeological materials, as well as, its preservation status. All this information is stored, organized and published, in a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel May Castillo.

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. In this presentation, I argue that paganism-barbarism not only amalgamated colonial propaganda to portray the Maya Peoples as enemies of the crown for the sake of colonization but also served to legally disable any Maya who dared to claim their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shane Montgomery. Holley Moyes.

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. The Las Cuevas region, situated on the southeastern edge of the Vaca Plateau in western Belize, consists of several medium-sized centers dispersed between low hills, steep ridges, and small seasonal swamps. Although occupied only briefly during the Late Classic period (700–900 CE),...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michele Hayward. Frank Schieppati. Michael Cinquino.

Two data sets-Jonsson Marquet's proposed chronological framework for rock art of the Windward Islands and Alistair Bright's reconstruction of settlement, socio-political and exchange networks within the same region-provide a context for examining the interrelationships among the material cultural correlates (petroglyphs, settlement types, pottery) of various aspects of the area's, as well as inter-area prehistoric cultural components.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Livingood.

This is an abstract from the "What’s Canoe? Recent Research on Dugouts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. David Hurst Thomas (1972) described how model building and simulation can lead to serendipitous discoveries, that is findings that were not originally intended. In several projects to simulate cost distance of canoe travel in eastern North America, most of the memorable and impactful lessons have been a result of serendipity. This paper will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Novotny. Anna Novotny. Leigh Anne Ellison.

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. After participating in the Kenyon-Honduras Program as a volunteer in the spring of 2004, I decided to apply to Master’s programs in anthropology, and I used the word "applied" to describe my experience in Honduras. Pat gently pointed out that their research was not technically "applied archaeology," since...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrés Mejía Ramón. Jessica Munson. Jill Onken. Lorena Paiz Aragón.

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. Any sizable population must be sustained by an adequate food supply. As such, estimates for high population densities in the Maya Lowlands must be met with an equal or greater productive capacity. The “Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities” symposium seeks to understand this on a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ellen Lofaro. Anne Amati.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As we reflect on the 30th anniversary of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA), practitioners recognize the progress that has been made and acknowledge the vast amount of work left to be done. In order to meet that challenge, we need to increase capacity for NAGPRA implementation, improve overall engagement with ongoing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori Phillips. Erin Thornton. Kitty Emery. Carlos Peraza Lope.

The ancient Maya utilized two species of turkeys: the Ocellated Turkey (Meleagris ocellata) native to the Yucatán Peninsula, northern Guatemala, and northern Belize and the Wild Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) from Central Mexico. The exact timing of Wild Turkey domestication and its introduction to the Maya area is unknown, although evidence as early as the Preclassic exists. The Ocellated Turkey was never fully domesticated but many scholars have proposed the Maya may have managed the species. To...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Fash.

The abundance and diversity of monumental art, architecture and hieroglyphic texts at sites outside the Principal Group in the Copan Valley, and into the hinterlands, illuminate the timing and intent of regal investiture of authority in elites considered important to the stability of the kingdom. The consistent use of two imagery programs in architecture, and the linking of one of those programs with textual confirmation of membership in the royal court, reveal two strategies for leveraging the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juan Jijon.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Innovations in Ecuadorian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Currently, precise and high-resolution lidar (light detection and ranging) data is increasingly important for the detection of archaeological settlements. Through this technology it has been possible to detect a series of landscape modifications in the Hojas-Jaboncillo massif that could be of prehispanic origin. During the field verification...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcello Canuto. Luke Auld-Thomas.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican Population History: Demography, Social Complexity, and Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2016, the Pacunam Lidar Initiative surveyed 2,100 km2 of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the Department of Petén, Guatemala. This lidar survey provided an unprecedented scale of settlement data that attest to elevated population levels throughout the southern Maya lowlands, especially for the Late...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Reese-Taylor. Felix Kupprat. Armando Anaya Hernández. Nicholas Dunning. Adriana Velazquez Morlet.

This is an abstract from the "A Session in Memory of William J. Folan: Cities, Settlement, and Climate" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Building on the work of William J. Folan, the Bajo Laberinto Archaeological Project, initiated in 2022, is focused on investigations of urbanism centered on the city of Calakmul in southern Campeche. An initial 100 km2 lidar survey along the northern rim of the Bajo Laberinto has revealed large, elaborate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Reed Miller. Kenichiro Tsukamoto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An essential component of analyzing lidar data is adapting them to the researcher’s specific environmental situation, including the effects of local vegetation types on the identification of archaeological features. Doing so, can refine estimates of existing structures in non-surveyed areas and inform improved ground survey strategies in the future. At the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Ringle. Tomas Gallareta Negron. Dan Griffin.

A 2013 NASA LiDAR mission passed over the eastern extreme of the region being investigated by the Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project (BRAP), in the process partially imaging the secondary site of Acambalam II/III. A substantial portion of the site was ground-checked during the summer of 2016. This paper discusses post-collection LiDAR processing and the possibilities for feature detection and landscape use revealed by ground truthing. The data also provide interesting demographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mariana Vazquez.

This is an abstract from the "New and Emerging Perspectives on the Bajo el Laberinto Region of the Maya Lowlands, Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study introduces a method for estimating aboveground biomass (AGB) in contemporary tropical forests near archaeological sites using lidar technology. Accurate AGB estimates are crucial for assessing wood resources available to the ancient Maya for city development. We propose a lidar...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marisol Cortes-Rincon. Cady Rutherford. Jason Laugesen. Michael Mcdermott. Spencer Mitchell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the last decade airborne mapping lidar has become an extremely valuable tool for archaeologists studying ancient settlement patterns. It has proven especially useful in regions covered by dense forests on which prospection with other remote sensing techniques is not possible. This paper contributes to the growing international dialogue regarding the use of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Kepecs.

This is an abstract from the "After Cortés: Archaeological Legacies of the European Invasion in Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Spaniards characterized the northeast corner of Yucatán state as being demographically depleted and possessed of unhealthy terrain and a lack of exploitable minerals. This picture has been perpetuated by historians, who lack independent lines of evidence against which to check it. Yet archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Willa Trask. Kristin Hoffmeister. J. Alex Canterbury.

The southern Belize region is typically considered geographically and culturally peripheral to the primary activity areas of the ancient Maya. Although researchers have documented the development of a "southern Belize style" in terms of architecture and material culture, to date very little systematic work has been undertaken to understand health, diet, and mortuary behavior in the region. Ten years of excavations at Uxbenká have yielded rich evidence of a continuous occupation spanning from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shintaro Suzuki. Fernando Gutiérrez.

This is an abstract from the "Aguada Fénix and the Middle Usumacinta Region: Interregional Interactions and Social Transformations in the Middle Preclassic Period" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We explore a Middle Preclassic skeleton from the site of Aguada Fénix, Tabasco. It is one of the scarce cases of the early temporality in the Maya area. We first describe in detail its archaeological context and osteological sex and age-at-death and infer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Cerezo-Román. Kenichiro Tsukamoto.

During the Late Classic period (A.D. 600-800), Maya non-royal elites frequently appeared in courtly scenes, which are depicted on polychrome vessels and carved monuments. While epigraphic studies over the last two decades have gradually shed light on their political and ritual roles, little is known about their life histories and mortuary practices. One group of these elites held the title of lakam, which has been reported only at three archaeological sites. We detected tangible evidence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allan Ortega. Rosa María Flores-Ramírez. Andrés Saúl Alcántara-Salinas.

Life conditions of agrarian populations in Mesoamerica changed during the cultural periods. Scholars have seen a stature decrease and a pattern of increase of the morbidity indicators across the time (Del Ángel 1996; Márquez et al. 2002). The aim of this paper is compare skeletal stress indicators between Maya (Quintana Roo) and West México (Colima) settlements to evaluate life conditions, similarities and differences from 200 to 900 BC. These settlements share modes of production and weather...