Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
2,401-2,425 (4,066 Records)
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. Much debate has surrounded population and land-use strategies of the Maya. Residential settlements are accepted as a proxy for population and areas without architecture would be available for subsistence. We examine the case of Tikal, where the existing map visually describes...
Modeling the Milpa-Cycle at Classic Period El Pilar: A New Method for Assessing Maya Subsistence Production (2023)
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 ancient Maya city El Pilar was founded in an ecotonal location, where the karstic ridgelands of the greater Petén grade into the alluvial Belize River Valley and coastal plain. Established early in the Middle Preclassic (ca. 1000 BCE), El Pilar grew into a major center that...
Modeling the Milpa-Cycle: A GIS-Based Approach to Envisioning Ancient Maya Land Use and Traditional Agricultural Practices (2023)
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. Traditional ecological knowledge from living Maya farmers informs us of a storied heritage of agricultural production within the tropical Maya lowlands that traces its lineage to the development and height of ancient Maya civilization. In studying the Maya milpa-cycle, a 20-year...
Modeling the Past: Using Structure from Motion (SfM) Photogrammetry to Record the Sugar Works of a Statian Plantation (2021)
This is an abstract from the "NSF REU Site: Exploring Globalization through Archaeology 2019–2020 Session, St. Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study utilizes structure from motion (SfM) photogrammetry as a documentation tool to understand the layout and usage of Site SE095, a sugar works, on the Dutch Caribbean island of St. Eustatius. The research goals are to create a spatially referenced 3D model of SE095;...
Modeling the social demography of a Classic Maya city-state, the case of El Perú-Waka’, Guatemala (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper attempts to model Classic Maya society and social dynamics, as expressed at the ancient city-state of El Perú-Waka, Guatemala. Large-scale ceramic analysis, combined with traditional excavation and an ambitious test-pitting program, allow for novel perspectives on the internal functioning of this complex Native American society. The urban...
Modeling Water Routes Through a Divide: Retracing Movement from the Greater Antilles to the Lesser Antilles in the Late Ceramic Age. (2017)
This paper focuses on modeling hypothetical sea routes between islands within the Caribbean Sea to try and redraw the map of social mobility and material exchange that existed during the Late Ceramic Age (A.D. 1250–1400). With the emphasis for modeling canoe pathways more focused on uncovering possible colonization routes, this map has yet to be thoroughly explored. However, analyzing the back and forth of travel between two sites known to be occupied during the same period can open up ideas on...
Modeling White-Tailed Deer (Odocoileus virginianus) Responses to Human Population Change and Ecosystem Engineering in Precolonial and Colonial Eastern North America (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. White-tailed deer were an important resource for both Native peoples and European colonists in precolonial and early colonial North America. Yet, evidence for possible overexploitation of deer prior to European colonization remains inconclusive. Some have argued that the species was resilient to human predation due in part to anthropogenic fire, which...
Modern Migration Theory and Their Applicability to Prehispanic Mesoamerican Populations (2024)
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. Modern migration theories are based on a capitalistic view of economic forces for people (mostly males) to migrate in search of better economic conditions. However, the dynamics that characterize modern times are hardly applicable to prehispanic...
Modern Yucatan Maya pottery making (1958)
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...
Modernization in Transportation: Archaeological Study of a Narrow Gauge Railway from Yucatán’s Gilded Age, Mexico (2018)
In the century after Independence, Yucatán experienced unprecedented industrial, economic, and social transformation derived from henequen production and export. During the presidency of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911), an ambitious modernization project was launched to unify the nation. It fomented capitalist industrialization of all production sectors, the introduction of railroads, and the opening of new commercial markets. Yucatecan hacendados obtained federal concessions and invested in the...
Mohammed’s Paradise: indigenous society and natural surroundings in southern Central America (2017)
Human-environment relations are a point of interest in the archaeology of indigenous southern Central America, defined here to encompass Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. As such, it does not seem to deviate from other world regions. This focus in past and contemporary research reflects the weight given to the idea of natural surroundings as resource endowments, following the cultural ecology approach. Elsewhere, such emphases on material, and indeed economic, sides of human...
Molded Meaning (2017)
Since the time of Walter Benjamin, scholarship has posed important questions about replication and meaning: what is an "original," what does this imply for "aura"--the particular resonance of unique productions--and are such concepts and concerns solely applicable to industrial production in capitalist society? This session converses with Benjamin, long after his death, by addressing the meaning of replication in pre-capitalist societies, indeed, outside a Marxian framework altogether. The...
Molding a New Order: Ideological Transitions and Gulf Coast-Maya Lowland Interaction, AD 800–1000 (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As numerous studies have noted, changes in themes, compositions, and content in Maya stone monuments from the ninth and tenth centuries present a departure from their Classic counterparts, which in turn appears to reflect changes in social structure and...
Molding and Stamping Hieroglyphs on Maya Ceramics (2017)
This paper examines the implications of mold-made ceramic texts for understanding Maya scribal practice and script ideology. Most studies of hieroglyphs on ancient Maya ceramics have focused on painted and incised vessels whose glyphic and iconographic contents were made by hand on an individual basis and often with a particular consumer in mind. In contrast, the molded texts addressed here consist of pre-formed hieroglyphs that were integrated into the vessel body itself, either by shaping all...
A Molecular Anthropological Re-examination of the Human Remains from La Galgada, Peru (2017)
The archaeological site of La Galgada is located on the eastern bank of the Tablachaca River in the highlands of Northern Peru. The site was dated to both the Preceramic period and Initial period through a combination of detailed archaeological investigation of the site complex, and the use of radiocarbon dating of material collected stratigraphically. Human remains found at the site were also categorized into these two periods based on stratigraphic location. However, recent radiocarbon dating...
Molecular Disease characterization in a pre-Columbian Indigenous population of Punta Candelero, Puerto Rico. (2017)
Skeletal remains belonging to a Late Saladoid population from Punta Candelero site (AD 640-1200), southeast Puerto Rico were used for the detection of Pathogens. Previous studies have established the presence of trace genetic indicators of molecular disease in skeletal remains, such as syphilis and tuberculosis, with associated history or pathology. In this study, we are investigating the presence of various pathogens associated with pre-Columbian Indigenous populations of Puerto Rico....
Molecular taphonomy of biominerals in the Western Pacific (2017)
Molecular and microarchaeological artifacts of human subsistence are recorded in the bones, tissues and residues of the skeleton. These artifacts provide substantial correlative evidence for macroscopic and sedimentary data of dietary plant and animal use in the archaeological record. Within the depositional context however, many factors in the local environment disturb or degrade these signatures, reducing or eliminating their usefulness in diet reconstruction. The islands of the tropical...
Mollusk Foraging and Gendered Labor in Seventeenth-Century Guam, Mariana Islands (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Coastal Environments in Archaeology: Ancient Life, Lore, and Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological investigation of gendered labor in traditional households in the Mariana Islands is still in a nascent stage of development. Archaeological field school excavations by the University of Guam Micronesian Area Research Center and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa yielded a rich assemblage of...
The Monagrillo Ceramic Complex of Panama in Subsistence and Social Contexts (2017)
The Monagrlon ceramic complex has been identified at myriad archaeological sites around Parita Bay, Panama. These vary widely in geography from costal, to inland, to riverine places. In these different environments, there is disparate and varied evidence of agriculture, indications of hierarchical social structures, and relationships with the creation of pottery at Panamanian sites. I theorize that maritime resources as opposed to cultivation formed the basis of these sedentary or semi-sedentary...
Money Grows on Trees: Arboricultural Proxies and Engendering Ancient Maya Finance (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among the Classic and Postclassic period Maya, cacao beans were one of the most common forms of currency. Ancient Maya art depicts this money, which grows on trees, as tribute in courtly scenes most often populated by men. Yet contact period ethnohistoric documents consistently attribute ownership of trees to women. While contemporary...
Monkey Business: Examining the Significance of Monkey Imagery in Maya Caves & Ideology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Monkeys are prominently featured in Maya creation narratives, in Maya art, and more rarely in burial contexts. Despite their apparent importance in Maya ideology, however, previous research on monkeys in the Maya world has primarily focused on their primatological, and linguistic significance. In contrast to those studies, this research investigates the...
Monkeys and the Maya: Zooarchaeological Analysis at Isla Civlituk, Campeche, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In my thesis, I examined the primate remains, Ateles geoffroyi and Allouata pigra, found at Isla Cilvituk, Campeche, Mexico, to understand the agricultural and sustainability practices of the Postclassic period (AD 1200–1525) in this area. I weigh evidence of contemporary human-primate relationships in the Maya region to understand continuity...
Mono no Aware: Challenges of Impermanence in the Archaeological Record of a WWII Japanese American Concentration Camp (2018)
From 1942 to 1945, the third largest city in the state of Wyoming was the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, one of ten camps where Japanese immigrants and their Japanese American descendants had been forcibly relocated from their homes along the West Coast for the duration of World War II. During their residence, the incarcerees did everything they could to make the camps their home, establishing gardens and fields, building swimming pools and root cellars, and otherwise trying to make life...
A Monumental Afterlife: Reconfiguration and Reuse at Aventura, Belize (2018)
Previous research suggests that the ancient Maya city of Aventura, Belize thrived during the Terminal Classic to Early Postclassic periods (800 – 1100 CE). During this period, occupants of the city constructed up to 27 buildings within the confines of the site’s A plaza. This paper presents the results of the 2017 test excavations of a sample of the A plaza buildings. Maya plazas are typically conceived of as large open places for ritual and political performance. However, these excavation...
Monumental Architecture of Yaxha and Nakum (Northeastern Guatemala) during the Middle and Late Preclassic Periods (2018)
Yaxha and Nakum are two important Maya centers located in northeastern part of Guatemala. Recent research carried out by different projects at both sites indicate that during the Preclassic period Yaxha and Nakum rose to power and became important polities that had many examples of monumental architecture such as E-Groups, triadic complexes, ballcourts, causeways and other constructions. The scale of monumental architecture documented at Yaxha indicates that it was one of the largest Late...