Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Takeshi Inomata.

Royal palaces at the medium-sized centers of Aguateca and Ceibal appear to represent a basic template for the spatial and functional configurations of Maya palaces. They exhibit simple square forms resembling smaller residential groups of lower status, indicating their primary function as residential complexes of the royal families. Administrative and ceremonial functions were likely merged with domestic ones. These palaces also provide information on the degree of spatial mobility. While the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William J. Folan. Maria del Rosario Dominguez C.. Joel D. Gunn.

The Palaces of the Peten Campechano and the remainder of the Yucatan Peninsula represent single and composite, royal multipurpose households of varying shapes and sizes often associated with triadic relationships representing religious, civic, and military responsibilities. These relationships are manifest in structures at Calakmul, Oxpemul, Becan, Santa Rosa Xtampak, the triadic Monjas Quadrangle of Uxmal, Structure #385 of Dzibilchaltun, the triad of Noh Cah Chan Santa Cruz, El Palacio de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Hart. Debora Trein. Fred Valdez.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part I" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Widespread terrace construction in the Lowland Maya region is often viewed as a response to increasing demands for food during the Late Classic. Such was the demand that terraces became integrated into the architectural arrangements of large urban entities, going so far as to be built right up to the edge of a settlement center....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mario Zimmermann.

For several years, peasant communities on the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, have not produced high enough maize-yields to sustain populations in the area. This is despite the fact that modern-day demographics are considerably lower than population estimates for the heights of Maya cultural development during the pre-Columbian era. Some scholars have argued that maize was not the sole staple for the ancient Maya. Root and tree crops are among the candidates for alternative staples given their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josuhé Lozada. Joel Palka. Alizé Lacoste Jeanson.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Archaeological Investigations in Chiapas, Mexico" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation focuses on the anthropology of pilgrimage as a journey to places outside of everyday realms. For Maya societies, pilgrimages are important for maintaining the relationships between people and nonhuman persons linked to the ritual landscape. In this context, the presence of human bones in caves around the lakes at...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Christina Marroquin.

Jade is a valuable tool for studying Maya political economy because it is not only geologically rare but socially and ritually significant. Control of jade acquisition, production, and distribution became a measure of the power, prestige, and authority of the increasingly competitive polity elites. However, there is no catalog of jade artifacts for the Maya region. Therefore, this study compiles jade data from eight Southern Lowland sites with well-documented collections, creating a publicly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only María J. Novelo Pérez. Daniela González Chablé. Lilia Fernández Souza.

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Balché is a ritual beverage elaborated with honey and tree bark that, during many centuries, has been fundamental for Maya religious rituals in Yucatán, as documented in precolumbian codices, historical sources, and ethnographic research. Some information at the Madrid Codex indicates...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philippe Bezy.

For the ancient Maya, the use of music was often depicted as central to ritual activity.  One of the longest lasting instruments, the shell trumpet, provides ample material for analysis.  My three-pronged interpretive approach is made possible by the shell’s use in ancient ritual contexts, its appearance in Classic era iconography, and its organic origins. Archeologically provenanced trumpets, for example, yield deposition data, while art historical methods address both unprovenanced trumpets...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelin Flanagan. Astrid Runggaldier. Samantha M. Krause.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and the History of Human-Environment Interaction in the Lower Belize River Watershed" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study evaluates a water feature and two associated structures within the Late Terminal/Early Postclassic Maya site of Chulub in the Western Lagoon Wetlands near the island of Crooked Tree, Belize. The term “pocket *bajo” is a term used to describe water features that are similar to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katarzyna Radnicka-Dominiak.

This is an abstract from the "The Maya Wall Paintings of Chajul (Guatemala)" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The revealing of Chajul mural paintings has opened a completely new chapter in the history of colonial art of Latin America. Most of today’s known examples of colonial art are located in churches or other buildings related to religious spheres, while Chajul murals cover walls of private houses of Ixil Maya families. Not only the location of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Bruhns.

This is an abstract from the "Postclassic Mesoamerica: The View from the Southern Frontier" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Terminal Classic and Early Postclassic, Mesoamerican cultures underwent not only political turmoil but also a general renaissance in terms of material culture, including urban planning, architectural forms, ceramics (such as Tohil Plumbate), and the growth of truly international cults such as those of Tlaloc and Xipe...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Leventhal.

The study of the ancient Maya has become complicated over the past 30 years. As the ancient Maya writing has been deciphered, these texts provide an historical record of parts of the ancient social and political systems. This development has moved the study of the Maya past into the realm of historic archaeology. In addition, the study of the colonial period in the Maya area has focused upon Spanish and indigenous texts to understand this historic period but additionally to create analogical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yeonju Shin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research into ancient Mayan murals in San Bartolo, Bonampak, and Rio Azul demonstrates that the Mayans used paintings to educate people and to portray religious beliefs. The intricacy of their painting technique and the use of natural pigments elicit a durable, complex representation of the Mayan culture rooted in their cosmology of mystic deities called...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Mora-Marin.

This is an abstract from the "Coffee, Clever T-Shirts, and Papers in Honor of John S. Justeson" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper deals with the topic that inspired me to study with John Justeson: it traces the major spelling practices of Mayan writing from the Late Preclassic through the Late Classic periods. It employs the evidence from Late Preclassic and Early Classic inscriptions, some of which I have documented myself, as well as the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emiliano Melgar. Reyna Solís.

Across Mesoamerica and outside the Maya Region, archaeologists have found different greenstone lapidary objects with glossy appearance and particular iconography and aesthetics that were considered as jadeite and crafted by the Maya. Unfortunately, their detailed analysis to confirm these assumptions is scarce. In this paper, we will show the study of Mayan style lapidary items from different sites, like Teotihuacan, Monte Albán, Teteles, Tula, Tamtoc, and Tenochtitlan. We employed Micro-Raman...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. M. Adovasio.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The year 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of initiation of excavations at Meadowcroft Rockshelter in southwestern Pennsylvania. Meadowcroft was the first serious challenge to the Clovis-first peopling model that had dominated American archaeological thought for decades. Generations of students have passed through graduate schools since the early excavations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Ortíz. Julia Perez. Ximena Chávez. Emilio Ibarra.

Each offer in the Tenochtitlan Sacred Enclosure is the representation of a microcosmos that can be understood through the analysis and interpretation of each one of its compounds. An important part of them are the vegetal microremains, floral remains that did not endure trough the pass of the time for its own organic nature but that in the Aztec period had multiple meanings that allowed them to be an frequent material of offering. The Offer 149 is an exceptional case up to the moment, not only...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Shaw-Müller. John P. Walden. Qiu Yijia. Anaïs Levin. Julie A. Hoggarth.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although Hirth’s (1998) distributional approach has been recently applied to identifying markets at Classic Maya centers, much research still has yet to be done on the diversity and origins of Classic Maya modes of exchange. This picture is even less clear at small Late Classic (AD 600-900) Maya centers such as Lower Dover, Belize, where evidence for Hirth’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John O'Connor. Scott Fitzpatrick. Todd Braje. Matthew Napolitano. Thomas Leppard.

Archaeological research on islands worldwide demonstrates that initial colonists exerted substantial environmental impacts on local ecologies, ranging from the extirpation of native species to landscape modification. The degree of impact was dependent on a host of variables, including the kinds and number of introduced plant and animal species, the remoteness of settled islands, and extent of interaction between discrete landmasses. Yet, there is still much to learn about the consequences of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colin Palmer.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Woodcock. William Keegan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The shells of Codakia orbicularis clams are common at archaeological sites throughout the Bahama archipelago. These clams were harvested as food, and their abundance indicates that they were processed in habitation areas. Previous studies have suggested that the shells record daily, tidal, and seasonal growth sequences that can be used to determine when...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Earley.

This is an abstract from the "A Celebration and Critical Assessment of "The Maya Scribe and His World" on its Fiftieth Anniversary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among Michael Coe’s many contributions to Maya studies with his landmark show and publication “The Maya Scribe and His World” was the observation that imagery on Classic Maya ceramics is different from imagery on carved stone monuments. Coe notes this gap between ceramic and stone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Tran. Anabel Ford.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maya land-use strategies, based on traditional agricultural methods documented by the Spanish conquerors and oppressed during the colonial period, have demonstrated a staunch resilience into the modern age. The milpa forest garden cycle demonstrates dynamic regeneration via an asynchronous cycling of open fields with annual crops, perennial succession...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Rowe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Pleistocene... basically a no-man's land that is trapped between the disciplines of archaeology and paleontology when it comes to the animals that inhabited that period. For American archaeologists, these animals are sometimes too old to be considered as having archaeological connotations. For Paleontologists, these are not fossils and, by some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Giles Spence-Morrow.

This paper examines the temporal dimensions underwriting relationships linking humans, architectural representations and the meaningful places they reference in past Andean life-worlds. I argue that for the Moche of the North Coast of Peru, acts of symbolic compression and miniaturization served to reanimate specific times, known ceremonial locales, and the social identities created and reaffirmed in these places. The ritual efficacy of architectural simulacra rests in their mimetic power to...