Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guillermo Gerardo De Alaniz. Karla Ortega.

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 2018 season, the Gran Aquífero Maya project began exploration of the cave of Balamku, located some 2.4 km east of Chichen Itza's site center. The cave is noteworthy in containing incensarios, manos and metates, and other artifacts identical to those in the back passage of Balankanche, only in greater numbers. The similarity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colin McEwan. Richard Lunniss.

This is an abstract from the "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From the Middle Formative onwards, La Plata Island was gradually incorporated into developing local and regional networks of exchange along the Pacific littoral of Ecuador. The island also became the focus of increasing ritual activity evidenced in the material remains of offerings made on the coastal bluffs and at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ana Mauricio.

El fin del Periodo Intermedio Temprano en la arqueología peruana ha sido cronológicamente ubicado alrededor del 600 AD y culturalmente es representado por el final de culturas costeñas como Moche, Lima y Nasca. Alrededor del 600 AD hay evidencia de un evento extraordinariamente fuerte de El Niño, el cual ha sido registrado en sitios arqueológicos desde Piura hasta Lima. Este evento (o eventos), fue anteriormente interpretado como una importante causal de la caída de estas culturas costeñas, sin...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert DiNapoli. Matthew Napolitano. Jessica Stone. Brian Lane. Damion Sailors.

The timing and pattern of initial human arrival to the Caribbean islands is discontinuous and anomalous, especially considering their proximity to both mainland areas and adjacent islands. With the exception of Trinidad, which was probably colonized ca. 8000 BP—but was connected to mainland South America during the late Pleistocene/early Holocene (and remains close to Venezuela)—some of the Antilles appear to have been colonized quite early ca. 7000-6000 BP, while others were settled centuries...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dominique Rissolo.

This is an abstract from the "Studies in Mesoamerican Subterranean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The construction and ceremonial use of miniature temples, or shrines, in caves across the central coastal zone of Quintana Roo, Mexico is a well-documented tradition and one that has received recent scholarly attention. Also common in caves throughout the region was the siting of unenclosed altars in a range of different forms and styles....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colleen Hanratty. Thomas Guderjan.

This is an abstract from the "An Exchange of Ideas: Recent Research on Maya Commodities" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations at Blue Creek from 1992 to 2000 yielded a large collection of jade artifacts with approximately 900 artifacts being found in a single cache in Structure 4 and a total of nearly 1,500 artifacts recovered from throughout the site. In this paper, we revisit our interpretation of the social context of the Structure 4...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia Miller.

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 II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The striking recumbent stone figure known as a chacmool is a defining feature of the Mesoamerican Terminal Classic and Postclassic, occurring not only at Chichen Itza and Tula, where the largest number of figures is documented, but also in later Mexica...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaitlin Ahern.

In the pursuit to understand ancient Maya ritual, researchers have commonly relied upon the analysis of termination rituals and caches. In the early 2000’s, Jonathan B. Pagliaro, James F. Garber, and Travis W. Stanton introduced a clarification of the terminology, differentiating between reverential and desecratory termination rituals. Following this publication, a surge of studies conceptualizing desecratory termination rituals emerged, while the literature on reverential termination rituals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Hare.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I present a workflow for optimizing the classification of airborne laser scanning point data and the selection of appropriate surface visualization techniques to improve the identification of archaeological and environmental features at the Postclassic city of Mayapán. The initial 2013 digital elevation model enabled the identification of thousands of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zoe Rawski.

The site of Early Xunantunich in Belize provides us with a rare opportunity to conduct large scale investigations of Preclassic architecture due to its lack of Classic Period overburden. Since 2008, ongoing excavations at the site have yielded a wealth of information regarding Preclassic activities in the area. However, recent investigations of a monumental flat-topped platform at the site have illuminated issues with the ways in which we describe and classify these early structures. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Gill. Brigitte Kovacevich. Michael Callaghan.

In the late 19th century, explorers identified graffiti etched in stucco walls of residences, palaces, and temples in the Maya Lowlands. By the mid-20th century, scholars acknowledged that the ancient Maya produced these incised images. Today, archaeologists struggle with documenting these instances of graffiti with precision and accuracy, often relying solely on to-scale line drawings to best represent the graffitied image they see before them. These images can be complex, multilayered, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frank Bayham.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Steve Fretwell served as a Visiting Maytag Professor at Arizona State University in the Biology Department in 1976-1977. He was a well-published, aspiring young evolutionary ecologist and taught several courses and seminars. I was a first-year graduate student in anthropology at that time and had...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Leventhal.

This is an abstract from the "Politics of Heritage Values: How Archaeologists Deal with Place, Social Memories, Identities, and Socioeconomics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In many parts of the world, it is assumed that the most important heritage are the ancient sites that are visible on the landscape. This is certainly true within the Maya region of Central America. Projects often start out with the assumption that contemporary Maya...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darryl Wilkinson.

This paper will consider the Amaybamba Valley of southern Peru as an ecological and political frontier zone, from the late prehistoric era until the early colonial period. The Amaybamba region is a part of the cloud forest zone of the eastern Andean slopes, and is thus located where the highlands rapidly shift into the warm tropical lowlands of Amazonia. It is a region that has a complex and highly variable history, one reflecting its environmental characteristics, but often in unpredictable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ricardo Rodas. Omar Alcover. Mónica Urquizú.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Entre los grupos mayas; fortalezas, armas, y sistemas de murallas defensivas nos indican lo común que era el conflicto en las relaciones sociopolíticas de estas comunidades. En las Tierras Bajas occidentales, fueron pocos los sitios que alcanzaron un alto grado de desarrollo convirtiéndose en grandes centros urbanos para el Clásico. Dentro de la región, una...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arthur Demarest.

This is an abstract from the "Regimes of the Ancient Maya" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of regimes can be critical to the ongoing transformation of understandings of the Classic Maya economy. Currently, many scholars continue to refer to anthropomorphized mythical agents, e.g., exchange between “Tikal” and “Holmul” or between “Cancuen” and “the highlands,” as simply black boxes inhibiting economic research. With populations in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Fries.

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 settlements of the Aguacate region of western Belize feature a dispersed settlement pattern spread across a highly varied landscape. Both soil and water resources are unevenly distributed across the region, interspersed with karst outcrops and ridges. Nonetheless,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maureen Meyers. Amber VanDerwarker.

This is an abstract from the "Presidential Session: What Is at Stake? The Impacts of Inequity and Harassment on the Practice of Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sexual harassment has long been rampant in the discipline of archaeology, and until recently, our collective understanding of its pervasiveness and effects has been largely anecdotal. Recent surveys on the topic aimed at the memberships of the Southeastern Archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aviva Cormier. Francisco Estrada-Belli.

Stable isotope analysis is a productive tool for understanding the migratory histories of past populations in various regions of the world, including the ancient Maya. This paper presents the strontium and oxygen isotopic ratio values of dental enamel samples as compared to the geographical location of burial to address questions of regional identity, population migration, and social complexity of the Maya at the archaeological site of Holmul and the nearby centers of La Suficaya, K’o, Cival,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gloria Hernandez-Bolio. Patricia Quintana-Owen. Nadia Neff. Keith Prufer. Vera Tiesler.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding dietary patterns in past societies is critical for interpreting economic and social transformations. The analysis of dietarily derived isotopes is a reliable source of categorical information about the types of foods consumed by an individual. Furthermore, multisystem-isotope analyses can clarify inferences about food sources and relative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Vallejo-Caliz. Scott Hutson.

Regional integration as materialized by the connections created through sacbeob can widely transform political, economic and social institutions in the participant communities. Perceiving the process through dichotomies such as center-periphery or paramount-subordinate clouds the agency of the multiple stakeholders involved in the matter. Active manipulation of social systems by intermediate elites and the commoner population seems to have had a great influence on the general process of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandra Roche Recinos.

This is an abstract from the "Dynamic Frontiers in the Archaeology of Chiapas" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle Usumacinta River was a politically fragmented and contested region during the Classic Maya period, with neighboring polities vying for territory, prestige, and wealth. Recent archaeological and epigraphic work is continuing to delineate the shifting borders and alliances of this time period, with the goal of understanding the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tia Watkins. Rosamund Fitzmaurice. Christophe Helmke. Jaroslaw Zralka. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The precolumbian game of patolli was imbued with ideals of competition, risk, and ritual significance. The board game had a widespread presence across Mesoamerica throughout the Classic period (~ AD 250–820) and was often etched into the surfaces of monumental architecture. Recent excavations led by the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica MacLellan.

This is an abstract from the "Preclassic Maya Social Transformations along the Usumacinta: Views from Ceibal and Aguada Fénix" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent investigations at the Karinel Group, an early residential area at Ceibal, Guatemala, show that the roles household rituals played in the development of complex societies varied across the Maya lowlands during the Middle Preclassic period (c. 1000-350 BC). In northern Belize, rituals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wanda Hernández Uribe.

As a result from the restructuring and updating of the Public Registry of Monuments and Archaeological Areas, attention that was traditionally given to the broad nature of mobile, prehispanic or archaeological goods, is incorporated formally to the Public Registry as well as the complex universe of historical assets, which from a legal scope covers - practically - from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. This paper summarizes the progress achieved to date and the challenges we might face in...