Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
3,451-3,475 (4,066 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The uplands of Kawaihae 1 ahupua‘a, Hawai‘i Island, contain a dense fixed-field agricultural field system built, utilized, and occupied by Hawaiians from as early as the 17th century into the 19th – early 20th century. This field system includes a diverse array of agricultural practices including fixed-field agriculture, planting mounds, terracing, and water...
The Soils and Geoarchaeology of Aguada Fénix and the Middle Usumacinta Region (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Aguada Fénix and the Middle Usumacinta Region: Interregional Interactions and Social Transformations in the Middle Preclassic Period" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Three years of soil, water, and lidar analyses for the Middle Usumacinta Region indicate a diversity of soils, paleosols, and several areas of wetland rectilinear features that indicate a range of wetland farming and other uses. For the soils, we...
Soils, Sedimentary Rocks, and Scale: Recent Geoarchaeological Investigations at Colha, Northern Belize (2018)
The Maya site of Colha is located on a karstic doline that is dominated by Tertiary and Pleistocene limestone and marls. This low-lying area, known locally as the Cobweb depression, encompasses a complex wetland system that is affected by Holocene sea level rise, human-induced vegetation changes, and both natural and anthropogenic erosional sequences. The dynamic landscape, coupled with a long history of human occupation, places this site in a complex geographic and cultural position within the...
Soils, Water, and Agriculture in the Maya Lowlands: Lidar and Paleoproxies Reveal New Perspectives on Complexity and Resilience (2024)
This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Questions of human subsistence, impacts, and response to environmental change have driven decades of research on ancient life in the Maya Lowlands. While traditional geoarchaeology and paleoecology methods have already documented a rich variety of agricultural and...
Solid Foundations: Practical and Symbolic Significance of Bedrock at El Castillo Acropolis of Xunantunich, Belize in the Maya Central Lowlands (2017)
Not all excavations reach to bedrock. In the Maya Central Lowlands, exposing bedrock can be difficult due to the longevity of occupational sequences and the sometimes confounding presence of thick, seemingly endless Preclassic marl floors. In some cases, our ability to reach and examine bedrock helps us to consider early living and ceremonial spaces, masonry and structural techniques, as well as potential emic connections of natural limestone mountains and cultural manifestations of limestone...
Solutions for Stabilizing and Caring for Organic Archaeological Collections (2018)
Care of archaeological materials should begin in the field. Care and stabilizing of objects, if started in the field, will greatly increase the objects research and exhibit potential when it finally finds a home in a museum. How do you identify problems and then what do you do? Proper care and stabilization of objects can and should be a priority for all object users—excavators, lab analysts, museum staff, and researchers. In this paper, object care, conservation environments and stabilizing...
Solutions to Drift on Small and Isolated Populations (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Due to the effects of drift on small and isolated populations, island environments pose particular evolutionary challenges in the retention of richness and diversity of cultural information. Such variation, however, can have significant fitness consequences particularly when environmental conditions change in an unpredictable fashion:...
Some implications of modern mold-made pottery (1948)
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...
Some More Thoughts on the Study of Prehispanic Soundmakers (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of prehispanic musical instruments or soundmakers stored in museum collections was certainly foundational to the history of music archaeology. Due to the fact that they were most often decontextualized, those studies used to concentrate on one of two aspects of many of these artifacts; namely, their...
Some Thoughts on "Clovis": Where Were They From, Where Did They Go, Where Do They Fit in the Peopling of the Western Hemisphere (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This talk will present some opinions I have about Clovis - woven with facts to convince the skeptical. I will define what I mean by "Clovis", show what some others mean by "Clovis", and add some additional ways to think about "Clovis" in both synchronic and diachronic directions. I will present what I think about its origins and about where we might be finding...
Some Thoughts on Altar 3, Pacbitun, Belize (2017)
The rise of public monumental architecture in the Maya Middle Preclassic (900-400 BC) and the eventual development of divine kingship during the Early Classic (AD 250-550) constitute social processes that remain comparatively obscure. Nevertheless, they are increasingly illuminated as new empirical evidence is uncovered from research projects such as the Pacbitun Regional Archaeology Project. Ongoing work at Pacbitun, Belize, has brought to light considerable new information that can clarify...
Something About Kutau-Bao: Understanding Dominant Obsidian Sources (2019)
This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After c. 50 years of research using a diverse range of geochemical techniques, patterns of movement for obsidian in the Pacific region, dating from the Pleistocene up to the historic period, have been documented comprehensively. Although there are eight high quality obsidian sources, by far the largest quantity of...
Something Different or More of the Same? Lowland Maya Polities and Regimes as Viewed from El Perú-Waka’, Guatemala (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Regimes of the Ancient Maya" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Classic period (250–900 CE) politics of the Lowland Maya have been the subject of intense debate among scholars for decades. Having long ago moved beyond unsupported models of peaceful theocracies and vacant ceremonial centers, investigators nevertheless continue to wrestle with characterizing the nature of Classic political structure. This paper will...
The Sounds and Colors of Power: The Sacred Metallurgical Technology of Ancient West Mexico (2002)
This is a groundbreaking analysis of the relationship between culture and technology. Dorothy Hosler, an archaeologist, metallurgist, and anthropologist, shows how the methods of materials science, augmented by archaeological and other sources of data, can be used to illuminate historical puzzles such as the origins of the unique metallurgy developed in West Mexico between the seventh and sixteenth centuries. Hosler traces the roots of this technology to Central and South America and...
Sounds in context. Musical instruments from Teotihuacan. (2017)
In this paper we present the advances in the organological, acoustic and contextual analysis of musical instruments excavated by Dr. Linda Manzanilla in the sectors of Teopancazco, Oztoyahualco, Tunnels and Xalla, all of them located in the archaeological site of Teotihuacan. These instruments were part of a complex system of sound communication that often accompanied the rituals and daily activities. We propose some interpretations on the use of certain instruments and their relationship with...
The Soundscape inside the Ancient Ceren Sweat Bath (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Heat, Steam, and Health: The Archaeology of the Mesoamerican Pib Naah (Sweat Baths)" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Ceren sweat bath was a communal facility of notable sophistication, especially for a commoner village. Household 2 supported its functioning with ollas full of water, pine kindling, and presumably structural maintenance. Loma Caldera’s phreatomagmatic eruption phases, with lava bombs, caused...
Soundscapes and Visionscapes: Investigating Ancient Maya Cities with GIS and 3D Modeling (2018)
Researchers have been applying Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to examine the roles of visibility and movement in archaeological landscapes around the world. However, few studies have investigated the role sound potentially played in structuring experience in ancient cities. To begin to fill this gap, this paper builds on our initial investigations to develop new geospatial and virtual reality (VR) methods to examine ancient acoustics. For the ancient Maya, sight and sound worked in...
Sources of Variations in Breastfeeding and Weaning Practices among Caribbean Populations (2017)
Breastfeeding in humans is a biocultural process shaped by complex interactions of beliefs about health and nutrition, construction of childhood and parental identities, religious values, and lifestyle. While some studies have stated that the type of subsistence does not determine weaning ages in a population, these factors could have affected weaning food choices. This paper analyzes carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes in bone collagen of four pre-colonial Caribbean populations: Paso del Indio...
Sourcing Maya Lowland Chert Resources: A Multimethod Perspective (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within the Maya region, chert artifacts remain one of the most common material types recovered from archaeological excavations and are a core line of evidence when reconstructing ancient economy. However, methods for sourcing of chert through Mesoamerica have largely been underutilized. Archaeologists are often left wondering how these artifacts moved...
Sourcing Obsidian in the Central Mesoamerican Region Using XRF Analysis (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Obsidian tools and flakes are commonly examined in sourcing studies in areas with abundant volcanogenic deposits. Obsidian provenance research in the central Mesoamerican region has shown extensive networks of obsidian trade during the Formative and Classic periods. In this study, we used portable XRF to analyze a previously unstudied collection of over...
Sourcing Preceramic obsidian from Las Estacas, Morelos, and Yuzanu 36, Oaxaca (2018)
Understanding of long-distance exchange during the Mesoamerican Preceramic suffers from a limited range of materials whose source locations can be determined relative to later periods. Obsidian is one of the few materials that can provide evidence for long-distance exchange through geochemical analysis, although relatively few sourcing studies have been carried out on Preceramic obsidian. In this paper, we report recent pXRF results from obsidian recovered at two Preceramic sites: Las Estacas,...
Sourcing Stones: PXRF Use at Pacbitun (2018)
The Maya site of Pacbitun in Belize has produced large amounts of granite ground stone tools, debitage, and debris. Determining provenance is integral to reconstructing the chaîne opératoire of ground stone tool production at the site. Portable X-Ray fluorescence (pXRF) is becoming widely used in the field for quick and accurate geochemical assessments. Most prior archaeological work has focused on fine-grained materials, rather than coarse-grained rocks like granite. This project used geologic...
The South Gap Site: A 9,000-Year-Old Submerged Hunting Site in Lake Huron with Far Reaching Connections (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Liquid Landscapes: Recent Developments in Submerged Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The South Gap site is at a depth of 105 feet beneath Lake Huron on a submerged landscape referred to as the Alpena Amberly Ridge (AAR). Once exposed as dry land between 11,000 and 8000 cal BP, the AAR provided a causeway for migrating animals, such as caribou, to cross the Lake Huron basin. The landform also...
The Southern Deseado Massif (Patagonia, Argentina): Spatial Knowledge and Changes in its Use from the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition to the Late Holocene (2017)
The semiarid Southern Deseado Massif (SDM) is highly variable in geology, geomorphology and the spatial and temporal availability of water. To the south it transitions into open lowlands and basaltic plateaus dissected by canyons that extend to the Chico River. The La Gruta 1 rock shelter in the extreme south of the SDM has provided the oldest evidence of human logistic occupation in the area, with ages between ca. 12,800 and 12,000 cal yrBP, when conditions were wetter than today. Human use...
Southern Patagonia:coastal versus interior human migration (2017)
In spite of the ca. 14,000 Cal BP or more at 41º S, the oldest human occupations in southern Chile below 52º S are not easy to explain as a result of a Pacific coastal migration. The oldest Late Pleistocene occupations recorded at Ultima Esperanza and Tierra del Fuego are all focused on the exploitation of terrestrial resources and have ties with sites located in the eastern steppes, such as Fell Cave, Piedra Museo or Cerro Tres Tetas. The oldest maritime oriented human occupations of the...