Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
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The site of Early Xunantunich in modern day Belize provides the opportunity for a uniquely detailed case study in Preclassic Maya architecture. Thanks to a lack of Classic Period overburden, the Mopan Valley Preclassic Project has been able to conduct extensive excavations of early architecture at the site, documenting important ritual activities from this early time period which likely played a key role in the development of sociopolitical complexity in the region. This paper focuses on...
Monumental Recycling: The Inevitably Perilous Relationship between Shifting Integrative Strategies and Yaxuná’s E-group Plaza (900 BCE to 100 CE) (2017)
Over four consecutive field seasons, the Proyecto de Interaccion Politica del Centro de Yucatan investigated the plaza and several buildings in Yaxuná’s E-group, granting new insight into the site’s origins and development from a modest ceremonial complex into a monumental urban center. Excavations over the east-west centerline of the plaza generated data on several distinct commemorative events spanning 11 floor phases. Nonetheless, each of the observed traditions is fraught with continuities...
Monumentality and Horizontality in a Preclassic Cityscape (2018)
During the Preclassic, the inhabitants of Yaxnohcah, Campeche, Mexico constructed more than 13 civic architectural complexes, each at least 20 m in height. These civic complexes were situated throughout roughly a 36 km2 area in a carefully planned quadripartite arrangement. Alongside these imposing structures, the early Maya also built massive platforms for public gatherings, large centralized reservoirs, a radial network of inter- and intra-city roads, and extensive agricultural features. In...
Monumentality in Sites with Stone Spheres, Diquis Delta, Southern Central America (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Problem of the Monument: Widening Perspectives on Monumentality in the Archaeology of the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Several sites in the Diquis delta, an extensive alluvial plan in southeastern Costa Rica, present architectural ensembles consisting of artificial mounds up to 30 m diameter and a height between 1.1 and 1.4 m with cobblestone walls and ramp accesses, with stone spheres of...
The Monumentality of the Preclassic Maya of the Mirador Basin, Guatemala (2018)
Archaeological investigations in 51 ancient sites within the geographical confines of the Mirador Basin of northern Guatemala have identified an extraordinary emphasis on monumentality in art and architecture dating well into the Middle and Late Preclassic periods of Maya occupation. The structure and format of this phenomenon is replicated in early complex societies in other parts of the world, and suggests a consistent human behavior of predictable characteristics. The analyses and forms of...
Monumentality, Politics, and Power: Implications of Recent Investigations of Late Preclassic Public Architecture at Xunantunich, Belize (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Preclassic Landscape in the Mopan Valley, Belize" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Preclassic period (~300 BC–AD 300) witnessed some of the most important changes in social and political roles in the Maya lowlands when an emergent elite class began to use art and architecture to publicly display their elevated status in society. Recent archaeological research at the hilltop center of Xunantunich, located in...
Monuments, boundaries, and chiefly competition in the development of the Tongan state (2017)
The principal Tongan island of Tongatapu was the epicentre of a hierarchical and geographically integrated society which some archaeologists contend reached the level of archaic state by AD 1300–1400. Dynastic chiefs affirmed their power and rights to land through monumental construction and a dispersed settlement pattern that fully occupied their inherited territories with lower-ranking members of their kin-based corporate groups. Recent archaeological survey, aided by LiDAR, reveals the...
The Moral Community of Pa’ka’n during the Classic Period (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stephen Houston’s collaborative article on the moral community and changes in settlement at Piedras Negras, Guatemala proposed that long-term Precolumbian settlement changes should not simply be analyzed in terms of "agricultural potential, land tenure, and natural increase," but should...
More Carved Monuments from Rio Viejo and their Historical Implications (2017)
The analysis of a dozen recently documented inscribed monuments from the ancient urban center of Rio Viejo, in the Pacific littoral of Oaxaca, provides new insights regarding the historical and political development of the regional capital in the lower drainage of the Rio Verde.
A More Sustainable and Ethical Foundation for CAREfully FAIR Data in Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE Big Data and Bigger Questions: Papers in Honor of David G. Anderson" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists generate vast amounts of data in the form of databases, media files, spreadsheets, GIS files, reports, articles, and other literature. However, despite years of advocacy and data management investments, archaeological information is still poorly curated, scattered, incompatible, and haphazardly...
More Than a Notion: Archaeology’s Issue with Using Social Theory to Comfortably Perceive the Lives of Marginalized Peoples (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Hood Archaeologies: Impacts of the School-to-Prison Pipeline on Archaeological Practice and Pedagogy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In archaeology, we like to theorize about those who lived at the margins of society, the systematically oppressed, the class struggle of those who existed at the bottom and the “creative” ways in which they “persisted,” “resisted,” and survived. However, despite this seemingly...
More than Presence or Absence: Improving Ground Stone Tool Analyses to Address Tool Manufacture, Use, and Maintenance Questions (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Debitage Analysis: Case Studies, Successes, and Cautionary Tales" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The presence of ground stone tools in an assemblage is often indicative of a long-term occupation or resource processing site. The technology represents diverse site activities, including subsistence, social, and symbolic aspects of Indigenous communities. Despite the importance of ground stone tools in the Pacific...
Morir para renacer: Funerary Rituals of Pregnant Women in Chunhuayum, Yucatan (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The lives of women have been a focus of recent research in Maya Archaeology, finding that they fulfilled important roles as mothers, wives, priestesses, members of the elite and even as rulers. Within each social stratum, women lived diverse identities, however they shared similar biological processes, such as pregnancy, which was ruled by diverse beliefs and...
Mortuary analysis of juvenile burials in the sacristy of a Spanish colonial reducción in the southern highlands of Peru (2017)
Mortuary practices at Spanish colonial sites in Latin America varied in terms of burial location, style of burial, and associated grave goods. Understanding burial practices is one way to investigate shifting identities, conversion to Catholicism, and the degree of control over and involvement of priests in daily life at colonial sites. The mortuary practices at the reducción (planned colonial town) of Santa Cruz de Tuti (today known as Mawchu Llacta, Colca Valley, Peru) reveal nuanced insights...
Mortuary Feasting at Sitio Drago, Panama and Elsewhere in Lower Central America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological materials recovered from a central burial mound at Sitio Drago, Panama are diverse and include many well-preserved vertebrate and invertebrate faunal remains. I examine these materials in context with the artifacts recovered in direct association with four coral slab tombs located at the heart of the site and then compare the observed...
Mortuary Landscapes and Placemaking through Veneration at the Maya Site of Colha (2018)
Traces of veneration are sedimented within the landscape and the collective memory of its occupants, transforming these spaces into places. Such palimpsests become potent, which, in the case of mortuary landscapes, can manifest in increasingly complex burial rituals through time. The 2017 excavations at Colha revealed a series of 9 interments in the main plaza of the 2000 sector, yielding a minimum number of 13 individuals. This mortuary area initially utilized during the Middle Preclassic was...
Mortuary Patterns of a 18th Century Cemetery on Sint Eustatius (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Exploring Globalization and Colonialism through Archaeology and Bioarchaeology: An NSF REU Sponsored Site on the Caribbean’s Golden Rock (Sint Eustatius)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Little is known about the mortuary patterns of enslaved and freed Africans during the 18th to early 19th century on the Dutch Caribbean island of Sint Eustatius. Excavation and analysis of burials from a small 18th century cemetery...
Mortuary Practice and Placemaking: The Establishment of a Cemetery during the Preceramic-Preclassic Transition at Ceibal, Guatemala (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent investigations in the Amoch Group of Ceibal, a minor ceremonial complex located outside of the site epicenter, have provided new insights into the transition from the Preceramic to the Middle Preclassic periods in the Maya lowlands (ca. 1000 BC). Previous investigations in the civic-ceremonial core of Ceibal revealed an E Group dating to around 950...
Mortuary Practices at the Pre-Columbian Site of Indian Creek, Antigua - Preliminary Results (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 discusses the preliminary results from recent excavations at Indian Creek, Antigua that have helped identify, document, and recover four late period Saladoid burials. Despite this being the longest continuously inhabited site on Antigua, and one of the longest continuously inhabited sites in the Caribbean, only one other complete burial has been...
Mortuary Vessels at the Maya City of El Peru-Waka' (2018)
Residential burials are useful tools that help archaeologists better understand domestic ritual practices at the household level. With the household acting as a unit of social identity, funerary practices help archaeologists relate said practices to prominent trends of the time. These include, but are not limited to social and religious structures, identity, power, and social reproduction. One of the many types of artifacts that often appear in Classic Maya burials that are significant to burial...
Motherhood at Majaltepec: A Hypothesis Based on an Early Colonial Period Cemetery in the Sierra Sur of Oaxaca (2017)
In 2011 and 2013, the Nejapa/Tavela Archaeological Project explored a possible Early Colonial period cemetery (A.D. 1550-1650) at the site of Majaltepec. The excavated portion of the cemetery included eight individuals from five burials, wherein four were sub-adults, at least one of which is likely a woman, and four were children. In spite of the overall poor preservation, it is clear that the children and sub-adults were buried together, without accompanying household members of older ages and...
A Mound or Not a Mound? How Rasters and Point Clouds Can Help with False Positive Identification (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster will discuss the benefits of using different combinations of rasters for large scale survey and the functional usage of viewing problematic mounds in the point cloud to weed away the false positives. Maya sites around Mesoamerica have and will be scanned with LiDAR. Since the turn of the century, technology has improved and now the data...
Mounds and Monoliths in Isthmo-Colombian Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Problem of the Monument: Widening Perspectives on Monumentality in the Archaeology of the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Isthmo-Colombian Area entails an archaeology of landscape engagement. Well-attested are the material traces of shifting networks of human ideas that, through communities of practice, led to the creation of monumental landscapes and, with regional specificity, shared...
Mountain Lords: Divine Game Keepers of the Ancient Maya and their Mesoamerican Context (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Supernatural Gamekeepers and Animal Masters: A Cross-Cultural Perspective" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores a set of mythical narratives on Classic Maya pottery (550-800 C.E.), which involve Huk Si’ip, the divine keeper of animals, and Itzam Kokaaj, the celestial creator of animals. Most of these narratives form part of a larger theogony cycle where the elderly gods of animals, sky, earth, and fire...
Mountains, Obsidian, and Power in Classic Mesoamerica (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Mountains, Rain, and Techniques of Governance in Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lithic analysis at various sites in the Maya area, such as Plan de las Mesas, Kaminaljuyu, Copan, and Piedras Negras reveal regional differences between obsidian tool production, distribution, and consumption. Some patterns in obsidian economies were shared between these sites, as well as others more distantly located such as...