Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Henry Tantaleán. Alexis Rodríguez Yábar. Kelita Pérez Cubas. Charles Stanish.

During the last five years, we have developed an archaeological research program in the southern Peruvian coastal valley of Chincha. This project focuses on the rise of the Paracas society ca. 800-200 BCE. We excavated the monumental Paracas site of Cerro del Gentil located in the Chincha mid-valley where we recovered an important ritual context in a sunken court related to the Pinta phase. The Pinta phase was defined by Dwight Wallace in 1950´s but not has been systematically described. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey McCafferty.

Ethnoshitorical sources describe migrations from central Mexico of Nahuat and Mangue speakers, known as the Pipil/Nicarao and the Chorotega, who settled along the Pacific Coast of Central America in the centuries prior to European contact. According to these accounts the new groups introduced cultural and religious traits into settlements in El Salvador, the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, and northwestern Costa Rica. Beginning in 2000, archaeologists from the University of Calgary have investigated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jo Burkholder.

Drawing on the archaeological excavations at the site of Pisanay, located in the Sihuas Valley of Arequipa (southern) Peru, this paper will situate the rock art at the site within the broader contexts of multiple rock art traditions in the region. These traditions include both painted and pecked images on rock surfaces, a wide variety of geoglyphs, mobilary art, and sacred offerings made to particular rocks and geographic landmarks that represent huacas (loosely ‘holy places’). Within the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Ingalls.

Public structures across the Maya lowlands functioned as materializations of ideology, memory, and identity. However, documentation of public ritual structures is typically limited to formal ceremonial centers. Little is known about public spaces within hinterland communities. Excavations at the site of San Lorenzo offer insight into the use and transformation of ritual space within a hinterland community. Recent excavations of a public structure group have uncovered multiple construction phases...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomás Gallareta Cervera. Anna Novotny. Brett Houk.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Funerary customs and monumental architecture in the Maya Region are viewed by archaeologists as markers of social status and complexity. The intersection of mortuary rituals and the built environment gives us a window through which to understand the development of social complexity. Excavations at Chan Chich, a medium-sized city located in northwest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Welch.

This is an abstract from the "Place-Making in Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities Past and Present" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Late Classic period, ancient excavators at an elite residence at Ucanha, Yucatan, Mexico, broke through several stucco floors and peeled away rocky fill before partially exposing two earlier buildings dating back to the Late Preclassic. Centuries separated the initial burial of these Preclassic buildings and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Franco Rossi. Heather Hurst.

This is an abstract from the "Place-Making in Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities Past and Present" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2010, archaeologists of the San Bartolo-Xultun Project began investigations of an acropolis complex located at the northern limit of the urban center of Xultun, designated "Los Arboles." The penultimate phase of the complex, dating to the Early Classic period (likely fifth century AD), included extensive preserved...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sheldon Skaggs. Adam King. Christina Luke. George Micheletti. Terry Powis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Late Classic Period (550–800 CE) at Pacbitun, a sequence of events took place that changed the landscape of power and sacredness in the site’s core during a tumultuous time in the Belize River Valley. The sequence of caches and burials likely began in order to consecrate a new courtyard (Court 3) and establish the new center of power at the site....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allen Christenson.

This is an abstract from the "Place-Making in Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities Past and Present" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout the highlands of Guatemala, Maya traditionalists believe that mountains and their associated cave openings are the “mouths of the world” giving access to spiritual realms inhabited by sacred beings that have influence over natural phenomena of importance to the outside world. Each of these caves or watery...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Boyd Dixon. Mike Dega.

This is an abstract from the "When the Wild Winds Blow: Micronesia Colonization in Pacific Context" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This comparative assessment of the San Roque site in northern Saipan to other early Pre-Latte period sites in the Mariana Islands, circa 1500–1100 BC, presents far from uniform data that suggest that maritime settlers of the archipelago may have targeted a range of natural settings for survival upon arrival. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron McNeil. Edy Barrios. Kenia Chacón. Zachary Hruby. Sheldon Skaggs.

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. The Plan de las Mesas archaeological site rests high above the Copan Valley, 2.5 km northwest of the Acropolis. Inhabited by at least the Preclassic, evidence suggests that it functioned as a defensive fortress, or citadel, by the Early Classic period. This paper focuses on Group 1, Plaza B, and Group 12. Group 12 rests on a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Zabecki.

This is an abstract from the "Site Stewardship Matters: Comparing and Contrasting Site Stewardship Programs to Advance Our Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Site stewardship looks different in every state based on how the archeology programs are organized. Public archaeological networks, archaeological surveys, SHPOs, state archaeologist offices, academic departments, and volunteer organizations are connected in infinite configurations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Brady. Brenna Perteet.

This is an abstract from the "Studies in Mesoamerican Subterranean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the construction of a plaza group on a 5 m high raised platform, a sascabera was excavated into the hill that formed the nucleus of the group. The original circular opening in the cap rock was carefully maintained. When the platform was completed, the northern end of the sascabera was filled with rubble and smoothed to form the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Chitwood. Dana Bardolph.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the analysis of paleoethnobotanical data from excavations at a Classic Taino site (1000 CE–1490 CE) at Cinnamon Bay, a shoreline ritual site located on St. John in the United States Virgin Islands (USVI). Excavations began in 1992 when it was determined that the site was at risk of being lost to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luke Stroth. Mario Borrero. Geoffrey Braswell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We describe the paleobotanical collection from Nim li Punit (AD 150 to 830), a small-scale center in the Toledo District, Belize. The samples were collected from Structure 50, a range building that we interpret to be a Late Classic (AD 700 to 830) elite domestic context. This was a time of growth and change for Nim li Punit, where new construction coincided...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Oas.

The dynamics of household economies provide an important window into processes of social, economic, and environmental change in plantation settings. This paper examines household food production and consumption activities and the use of local landscapes at Morne Patate to better understand the relationships between daily life, landscape use, and the broader political economic changes that influenced plantation life on Dominica over several generations of occupation. I present the results of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie V. Kirakosian.

This paper outlines how this open textbook moved from an idea to a reality over the past year. As a non-traditional project in archaeology, the infrastructure for such a project had to largely be framed from scratch, including a social media and marketing campaign as well as a process for co-authoring and reviewing chapters. Although the textbook is not yet completed, lessons learned along the way will be offered with the hope that sharing our model will inspire more open textbooks in our field.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophie Reilly.

Paleoethnobotanists study human-plant interactions in the past, including the role of plants in ancient foodways. Microbotanical remains (phytoliths and starch grains) enable the identification of many plants because their morphology can be diagnostic to the family, genus, and species. Microbotanical samples can be extracted from specific artifacts, such as ceramics, enabling a better understanding of their use. Paleoethnobotanists can thus discern associations between certain vessel types and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leah McCurdy. M. Kathryn Brown.

In 2016, we discovered a sage’s chamber in the El Castillo acropolis at the ancient Maya site of Xunantunich, Belize. In the Late Classic Tut Building on the east side of El Castillo, all interior and exterior plaster walls are incised with "graffiti." The total number of elements documented is nearly 300 with themes ranging from human and animal forms to glyphs and multi-figure scenes. We expect to encounter more in future field seasons. Based on a variety of factors, we view this as practice...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edy Barrios. Cameron L. McNeil. Kenia Chacón. Zachary Hruby. Jackeline Quiñonez.

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. The Plan de las Mesas archaeological site is a fortress built on top of a high hill, which dominates the Copan Pocket at its northern end. Plaza A, Group 1, is the second highest area of the site and the most complex, containing the tallest pyramidal platform and a central altar to the south, an atypical pattern in the Copan...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaitlin Ahern.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation focuses on examining Preclassic and Classic period plazas at Cival and Holmul in Guatemala to provide greater insight into the role of public spaces and ceremonies in the Central Maya Lowlands. Estimated plaza capacity and population estimates are used to determine how plazas were utilized at both Cival and Holmul, for functions such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Welch.

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. Carved along the exterior of a cylinder vase [K6511], two waterfowl grip flailing fish with their beaks. These fishing fowl occur again on polychrome pots, effigy bowls, censer stands, and modeled stucco friezes. Numerous examples of the “Waterbird Theme” came to light through the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharine Williams.

Plumbate is a lustrous hard-paste ware characterized by small effigy vessels, some of which bear Central Mexican ideological influences. It was widely traded during the Terminal Classic/Early Postclassic across ethnic, political, and linguistic boundaries. Its widespread distribution and luster mark plumbate as unique among contemporaneous wares. It is sometimes found alongside locally produced wares that bear superficial resemblances, leading to the belief that they are imitations of plumbate....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cynthia Kristan-Graham.

An archaeology of the senses expands the understanding of physical, tangible aspects of place to include qualities that are unseen, silent, or otherwise not readily perceptible. My paper analyzes acoustics at the late Maya capital of Chichen Itza. Sound—especially the human voice, animals, music, ritual, and dancing—were part of Chichen Itza’s atmosphere. An analysis of soundscapes, along with the intersection of architecture, planning, and acoustics, augments what is known about the site’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only W. James Stemp. Jaime Awe.

Sixteen small chert bifaces are part of a Terminal Classic (AD 800-900) peri-abandonment "problematic deposit" recovered just above the surface near the western base of Structure A2 at the ancient Maya site of Cahal Pech, Belize. The results of stylistic, technological, and use-wear analyses performed on these chert artifacts indicate: 1) production from locally available stone; 2) five different tool styles; 3) evidence for some tool curation/re-sharpening; and 4) wear patterns on some of the...