Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
3,351-3,375 (4,066 Records)
The ancient Maya port site of Conil is located in the modern community of Chiquilá on the north coast of Quintana Roo, Mexico. In 1528 Francisco de Montejo, a Spanish conquistador, reported that Conil was a large town consisting of 5,000 houses. William Sanders was the first archaeologist to work at the site in 1954, but the site core was not formally mapped until 2005 by Glover. Further work was conducted in 2014, 2016, and 2017 as part of El Projecto Costa Escondida (PCE). Data collection and...
Settlement Scaling in the Eastern Woodlands of the United States, ca. 3500 BC to AD 1700: Size, Monumentality, and Public Space (2018)
The concept of settlement scaling is increasingly being utilized in archaeology to empirically evaluate mathematical properties of urban and non-urban settlements. However, principles based on settlement scaling theory have yet to be tested in the Eastern Woodlands of the United States despite the existence of a robust sample of settlements, including those containing monumental architecture. As part of a broad regional study, I collected spatial data on settlement size, monuments, and public...
Settlement Survey of the Rural Mountainous Region of Quiechapa in Southern Mexico (2017)
While extensive research has been conducted in and around well-known sociopolitical centers located in valley and coastal regions of southern Mexico, relatively little work has been done in the rural regions outside these core areas. Specifically, one of the understudied regions of southern Mexico is the mountainous region between the highlands and Pacific coastal lowlands. Recently, El Proyecto Arqueológico de Quiechapa (PAQuie) conducted a Full-coverage pedestrian survey of a 99 sq. km area in...
Settlement Zone Communities of The Greater Blue Creek Area - Occasional Paper 2 (2000)
The present work is an archaeological study of the settlement zone of the greater Blue Creek Area, located in the upper Rio Hondo drainage of northwestern Belize. The excavation data reported here were recovered during the 1997 and 1998 field seasons of the Maya Research Program's Blue Creek Project inder the direction of Dr. Thomas H. Guderjan PhD.
Settlement, Subsistence, Culture Change and Networking: New Perspectives on Bocas del Toro’s Integration with Greater Central America (2018)
Understanding the settlement chronology and degree of interaction and integration of Caribbean western Panama within "Gran Chiriqui" and greater Central America has driven archaeological research in the region since the 1950’s. Hernan Colon’s accounts of Bocas and adjacent Costa Rica depict a populous region, with vast fields of maize, people traveling about in numerous canoes and wearing more gold objects than ever seen in the New World. Lothrop’s 1947 synopsis of the "myth" of the Sigua...
Severed from the Landscape: Wrangling Over 100 Years of Collections from the Public Lands and Coordinating Repatriation (2018)
The Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) cultural resource responsibilities expand beyond the landscape, to the artifacts recovered from archaeological sites, and the associated records. These "gatherings" under the Antiquities Act and "archaeological resources" under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) were collected in the public interest to be preserved in museums for future generations. Some of these collections may also be sacred and sensitive to descendant communities, and the...
The Shadow Realm: How Belizean Archaeology Has Illuminated the Maya Postclassic Era (2024)
This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Without Belizean archaeological data, we would know very little about the Maya Postclassic period (CE 950–1530). While viewed as a period of lesser cultural development by earlier researchers, Postclassic archaeological research in Belize was published as early as 1898 but...
Shadows of War, Shadows of Peace: Sites from El Salvador’s Civil War (2017)
The Salvadoran civil war, fought from 1980 to 1992, devastated the country and left 75,000 to 100,000 people dead. Much of the worst fighting was in the northeastern department of Morazán. Numerous battles were fought there, where several terrible civilian massacres occurred as well. Through most of the war, northern Morazán was a primary stronghold of the FMLN guerillas. The poster examines two civil war sites in northern Morazán. The first, Cerro Pelón - the northern spur of Cerro Gigante, was...
Shake, Rattle, and Roll: Continuity of Rattling Ceramic Vessels and Adornos in the Caribbean (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramic rattles and rattle vessel adornos have received little attention in current Caribbean archaeology literature. These rattles may be overlooked or misidentified in Caribbean ceramic collections due to their minimal audibility or “failure” during the construction process due to their technical complexity. Here, we evaluate existing reports of rattle...
Shamans, Jaguars, Owls, Cosmograms, and Zygotes: Matapalo and the Origins of Late Valdivia Stone Plaques (2017)
The material record of Ecuador’s Early Formative Valdivia culture has long been approached from the perspective of a New World, particularly an Amazonian, shamanism incorporating foundational features of animistic ontology. More recently enigmatic stone plaques from Northern Manabí Province have been included in the non-secular repertoire of later Valdivia phases; however, their temporal and spatial associations remained poorly known. Investigations in the Coaque Valley clearly establish their...
Sharing Curation Expertise and Space for Digital Archaeological Data (2018)
Archaeologists are busy all the time. Often stretching to meet a variety of professional obligations. CRM and government agency archaeologists are among the most stretched given the different directions that pull upon their professional lives. Scholarly pursuits; administrative, bureaucratic, regulatory, and public outreach responsibilities related to physical sites and collections, easily fill or over-fill their schedules. Now the care and curation of digital data adds to the piling up of...
Sharing Wares and Waging Wars: The Politics of Ceramic Exchange at the Classic Maya Site of El Zotz, Guatemala (2017)
The Classic Maya city of El Zotz, relatively small compared to its neighbors, is situated geographically, and at times politically, between El Perú-Waka’ to the west and Tikal to the east. The archaeological site occupies an elevated position within the Buenavista Valley, a southwest to northeast corridor running for some 32 km to the north of the Lake Petén Itza region. The valley connects the northeast and northwest Petén, from Chetumal Bay to the Bay of Campeche, placing the site in a...
Shark Interactions in Early Times: A Comparison of Some Sites from Colombia and Panama (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Past Human-Shark Interactions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The data obtained from the zooarchaeological remains of some Panamanian Pacific sites and Colombian Caribbean Sites allowed for unprecedented discussions about the role of sharks in the lifestyle of precolumbian inhabitants on the intermediate area. People captured and processed sharks, using their body parts both as a food source and for ornaments. These...
Shark Teeth Research Opportunities Broadened by Innovations in Materials Science (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Past Human-Shark Interactions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of sharks in the archaeological record provides plentiful research opportunities within the lenses of social zooarchaeology and materials science. The convergence of these two themes when analyzing artifact shark teeth presents unique advantages and challenges to understanding how past people perceived sharks and made use of their physical...
Shell Fishhooks on C. chorus Mussel Shell (7500 to 4500 Years BP) from the Atacama Desert Coast (Chile) (2018)
Fishing was a crucial aspect in the lifeway of ancient coastal societies. Along the Pacific Coast, the appearance of shell fishhooks has been interpreted as part of different contexts of growing population, economic specialization, and social complexity, among others. Along the coast of the Atacama Desert (18° to 26° Lat. South), fishhooks on Choromytilus chorus shells (mussel) appear in archaeological sites located along 1.6 thousand kilometers of coast with dates around 7500 years BP. Around...
The Shell Game: Maya Cosmology as Reflected in Recent Discoveries at Tutu Uitz Na (2018)
The plaza held special significance to the ancient Maya, and across ancient Mesoamerica. In a reflection of Maya cosmological beliefs, the plaza was seen as a representation of, and a portal to the primordial sea, the watery underworld from which all things originate. This connection is evident in various ways throughout the region, from special dedicatory deposits to decorative architecture and iconography. This presentation explores that cosmological salience through the recent excavations at...
Shell Midden Zooarchaeology and Paleoecology of Guaimoreto Lagoon, Northeast Honduras (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent research documents resource use and ecological change at the Selin Farm site, a group of around 30 well-stratified house and shell mounds occupied AD 300 – 1000 near the Guaimoreto Lagoon on the northeast coast of Honduras. A 4.5 m high shell mound with excellent preservation of vertebrate and invertebrate remains provides a full view of landscape...
Shellfish Harvesting, Subsistence Strategies, and Human/Environmental Interactions in the Río Champotón Drainage, Campeche, Mexico (2018)
With regional occupational continuity from the Middle Formative through Postclassic Periods, the Río Champotón drainage provides an ideal case study to examine long-term change in ancient Maya subsistence strategies and human/environmental interactions during two and a half millennia of human occupation. This poster presents the results of analysis of an assemblage of over 13,000 shell artifacts generated by the Champotón Regional Settlement Survey during seven seasons of research in the Río...
Shifting Colonial Narratives at the Edge of the Spanish Colony: 15th-17th Century Maya Archaeology at Progresso Lagoon, Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "After Cortés: Archaeological Legacies of the European Invasion in Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is no question that colonialism in the Americas brought huge and unanticipated changes for both European and Indigenous peoples. Yet Indigenous people often contextualized colonial efforts within their own worldview, or ontology, even as they interacted with European people, things, and colonial...
Shifting Course: Change as the Norm in the Preclassic Usumacinta Faunal Record (2019)
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. The Usumacinta River and its tributaries played an integral role in the survival and growth of Maya communities in the southern lowlands of Mexico and Guatemala. Early human settlements relied on the river as a source of food and transportation. Examining the animal bones and shell remains...
Shifting Domestic Economies at Postclassic Period Moxviquil: Insights from Ceramic Petrography (2017)
The Early to Late Postclassic Period transition brought substantial changes to the political and economic organization of many regions of Mesoamerica. For the networked polities of highland Chiapas, these changes included substantial decreases in population at existing monumental centers; the establishment of new political centers in several principal highland valleys, and the establishment of an expansionary Chiapanec state in the Central Depression, centered on the city of Chiapa de Corzo....
The Shifting Political Landscape of the Mopan Valley: A Diachronic Perspective (2018)
The Mopan River valley of Belize is home to five closely spaced Lowland Maya ceremonial centers with extensive settlement occupying the landscape between. From south to north, the ceremonial centers are Arenal, Early Xunantunich, Classic Xunantunich, Actuncan, and Buenavista del Cayo. Archaeological evidence suggests that each of these centers was initially occupied by the Middle Preclassic, but they had distinct histories, evolving into ceremonial/political centers at different times, from...
Shifting Practices: Materiality and Mortuary Ritual at Early Classic Charco Redondo (2017)
This paper explores the relationships between the people, objects and practices that created an Early Classic communal mortuary space at the site of Charco Redondo in the lower Río Verde Valley of Oaxaca. The Early Classic follows the collapse of the first Rio Viejo polity, and significant differences in mortuary practices may signify a transformation in how power and authority were constituted. While communal internment continued, burials were generally undisturbed by later internments and...
Shifting Regimes at La Corona: Political Resilience of Classic Maya “Secondary” Center (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Regimes of the Ancient Maya" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Data from investigations at the archaeological site of La Corona reflect the role that secondary sites had for political integration in the Maya lowlands. Comparing what the hieroglyphic texts suggest with what the material culture of the secondary sites indicates, it is possibly to assess the nature of La Corona political regime before, during, and after its...
Shifting the paradigm of coastal archaeology in Latin America (2017)
How might knowledge of past fisheries contribute to the future sustainability of modern coastal societies? Small-scale coastal fisheries provide a crucial source of food and livelihood to millions of people living in South America. Such coastal economies are founded on long-established knowledge that is deeply rooted in the past. Whilst marine conservation, dwindling fish stocks and environmental sustainability have driven the research agenda in recent years, government and international...