Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cynthia Robin.

This is an abstract from the "Advancing Public Perceptions of Sustainability through Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As over half of the world lives in cities today, there is perhaps no more pressing question than: how can people create cities that are sustainable? Archaeology is uniquely suited to answer questions about the longevity of cities, because archaeologists excavate long expanses of human history. The social, political,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Hoover. Maria Cunningham. Erin Niles. Cynthia Robin.

This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Household archaeology provides a powerful lens to understand people, their daily lives, and the myriad social, political, economic, and environmental relations that link people, households, and communities to broader societies. For its first decade of research, the Aventura Archaeology Project conducted a study...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kacey Grauer.

This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Water was essential for the longevity of ancient Maya cities, and Aventura was no exception. The site’s watery landscape consists of pocket bajos, defined as karstic depressions less than 2 km2 in area. While they are seasonally inundated today, this paper presents data from excavation, oral histories, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sharisse McCafferty. Geoffrey McCafferty.

This is an abstract from the "Centralizing Central America: New Evidence, Fresh Perspectives, and Working on New Paradigms" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout human history people have been entranced by avians. Their ability to fly from earth to the sky, while displaying grace and beauty, as well as exhibiting a ferocity to protect their nests and hatchlings was revered. Birds were often seen as messengers between the sky and earth,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bernadette Cap. M. Kathryn Brown. Whitney Lytle.

The ancient Maya formalized avenues of movement between and within urban centers through the construction of sacbeob that both defined space and connected places on the landscape. In this paper, we discuss the ways in which a formally constructed sacbe at Xunantunich functioned as an axis connecting economic and ritual activities. The architectural arrangement of Classic Xunantunich emphasizes a north/south directionality. The site’s sacbe, however, was constructed on an east/west alignment....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristina Nielsen.

Since the 1960s, Mexicayotl communities––or communities focused on Mexican Indigenous revivalism––have pursued an Indigenous cultural recovery. In the United States, these efforts have gained traction among Danza Azteca communities who increasingly employ pre-Hispanic flutes, rattles, and other Mesoamerican instruments in their rituals and performances. Danza Azteca communities have drawn on lines of inquiry that parallel those of Robert Stevenson (1968: 17, 18), including the study of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruben G Mendoza.

J. Whittaker: Revisionist efforts attempt to refute accounts of Aztec sacrifice as “racist, colonialist” etc. But our understanding of large-scale sacrifice not based only on Spanish accounts, also arch evidence of ritual violence - experiments in heart excision, serological study of deposits, forensic analysis of skeletal remains, including numerous sites with evidence of peri-mortem mutilation and cannibalism, 170 crania from tsompantli skull rack at Tlatelolco associated with stone tools used...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ross Hassig.

J. Whittaker: Compiled from various sources. Atlatl predates Aztecs, although some myth claims they invented it, or credits god Opochtli. Surviving examples often ornate, perhaps for ceremonial occasions, ca. 2 feet long with hook and groove. Grips with loops, holes, or pegs. [Poor photo shows elaborate atlatl with apparently simple grip; codex drawing shows peg grips on atlatls used against Spanish] Darts made of oak and fletched, a variety of points used. Shown in art carried in hand, not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanne Pillsbury.

With the return of peace after the dislocations of the US Civil War, The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 by businessmen, civic leaders, and artists in New York. Unlike its European counterparts, the institution had no royal collections on which to build. Its ancient American holdings grew through gifts and purchases from diplomats, philanthropists, and collectors. By 1900, with the acquisition of the Petich Collection of some 1500 "Aztec," and "Toltec" works, The American...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Bednar.

As part of the on-going research into the development of socio-political complexity at the Maya site of Yaxnohcah, the Proyecto Arqueológico Yaxnohcah has been conducting investigations in the Baalche’ Group, a large courtyard group located at the center of the site. The group sits adjacent to many prominent architectural features, including a Preclassic period E-Group assemblage, a ball court, and a water reservoir. Radiocarbon dating and ceramic analysis has revealed that the Baalche’ Group...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Whitney Battle-Baptiste. Elizabeth Chilton. Elena Sesma.

Over the past several decades there has been a great deal of archaeological excavation and analysis of both U.S. and Caribbean plantations. However, many of these research projects are designed to address archaeological research questions rather than some of the pressing problems faced by descendant communities concerning their heritage. In 1994, UNESCO launched their “Slave Route” project, with the aim of “contributing to a better understanding of the causes, forms of operation, issues and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dru McGill. Katherine Chiou. Daulton Selke.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this poster, the authors introduce a project funded by the National Science Foundation to advance knowledge on the pervasiveness and effectiveness of ethics and responsible conduct of research training interventions in archaeology and other science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Specifically, the project will examine the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul R. M. Miller. Paola Cortez Bianchini. Paola May Rebollar. Marta Adriana Pedri. Luis Renato Nascimento.

The "true garden" or "Bai Kui" of the Kashinawá, Pano language speakers in the state of Acre, Brazil, is described here as an example of the original horticulture which occupied the arc of dry forests in southeastern Amazon. Improved forms of manioc, peanuts, and peppers evolved during 9,000 years of cultivation and were exchanged with farmers on the Pacific Coast to improve garden diversity in an ancient and far-flung cultural interaction sphere. The connectivity required for long-distance...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ricardo Borrero. Flor Trejo. Roberto Junco.

From the arrival of Cortes in 1519 until the 20th century, Veracruz was one of the most important ports in the Americas. In addition to its role in transatlantic trade, it also played an essential role in maritime relations between Mexico, the Antilles and the northern Gulf of Mexico. In the 80´s, late 90´s and 2010 diving surveys carried out at Bajo Hornos reef by the Underwater Archeology team (SAS) of the Mexican National Institute for Anthropology and History (INAH), yielded a variety of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Rissetto. Kelli Bacon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As the public increases its influence over how the discipline of archaeology defines its scientific and educational value, state-sponsored archaeological institutions, such as the State Historic Preservation Office, must continue to adapt to satisfy their professional and public audiences. In 2017, the Nebraska State Historic Preservation Office (NeSHPO)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Saldana. James Brady. Robert Schmittner. Cristina Verdugo. Guillermo De Anda Alaniz.

With the discovery of passages sealed behind a blockage in 1959, Balankanche became the preeminent cave in Maya archaeology. Because so many of the intact vessels were incense burners and because of the Maya ceremony recorded as part of the investigation, Balankanche’s ritual function was never questioned even though at that time most caves were thought to be habitational. E. Wyllys Andrews IV’s monograph on the cave has remained one of the field’s best reports. In the summer of 2017, the Gran...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam King. Terry Powis. Sheldon Skaggs. Christina Luke. Nilesh Gaikwad.

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we discuss our recent absorbed residue study of a marble Ulúa style vase found at the Pacbitun site in Belize. In that study, we detected evidence for the consumption of the ritual drink balché dating to Terminal Classic period (800–850 CE). Consumption of balché is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorraine Williams-Beck.

In the geographic heartlands of the Yucatan Peninsula, academic literature describes the Chenes region as an "archaeological province" with a particular regional cultural character, in which sculpted monuments with glyphs or ballcourts are scarce components in urban systems, and even less frequent in most monumental cores. To date only three ballcourts had been recorded. After field seasons in 2016 and 2017 I confirm another example in Tabasqueño, the only site also to exhibit a free-standing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dmitri Beliaev. Alexandre Tokovinine. Milan Kovác.

During the 2017 field season of the Uaxactun Archaeological project new monument was excavated at Buena Vista, a minor center at Uaxactun urban periphery. It is a small carved altar or ballcourt marker, which according to its style dates to the Early Classic. High quality of the carving and the hieroglyphic inscription indicates that the altar/marker itself was a part of the monumental corpus of Uaxactun urban core; uncomplete text provides important new information on the dynastic history of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marijke Stoll.

As a specially marked category of public architecture, ballcourts were both socially-integrative and socially-divisive spaces through hosting games and other important ritual activities. Moreover, research has shown that ballgames in Oaxaca acted as mechanisms of social mediation within and between different ethnolinguistic communities. The distribution of ballcourts is therefore significant and expresses underlying social and political relationships. The Nejapa region is a frontier zone between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Fitzpatrick.

Centuries ago in western Micronesia, Yapese islanders began traveling to the Palauan archipelago to carve their famous stone money from limestone, which they then transported back to use in a variety of social transactions. While commonly referred to as ‘money’, these disks were not currency in the strict sense, though their value is not dissimilar to other traditional and modern objects where worth is arbitrary based on both real and perceived attributes (e.g., size, shape, quality, pedigree,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Traci Ardren.

This is an abstract from the "Textile Tools and Technologies as Evidence for the Fiber Arts in Precolumbian Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While bark cloth and paper are well known in the ethnographic and artistic records of Pacific and African cultures, due to preservation concerns these important plant based products have been challenging to investigate in the precolumbian cultures of the New World. Often our only proxy for bark...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bonnie Clark.

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. The sourcing of lithic raw material often challenges preconceived notions of the relationships between people, places, and objects for time periods prior to written records. But what of historic obsidian? What can sourcing reveal about the more recent past? This paper presents the case study of a most amazing historical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Sampeck.

While much scholarship has focused on indigenous-Spanish relationships in the construction of colonial Mesoamerica, a substantial and growing part of the population of colonial settlements were people of African descent. This trend was equally true in the Izalcos region of colonial Guatemala, what is today western El Salvador. This region was a crucial center in the developing trans-colonial economy because of its early leading role in the production of cacao, the tree whose seed is the main...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juan Fernandez Diaz. Ramesh Shrestha.

The Fundación Patrimonio Cultural y Natural Maya (PACUNAM), a non-governmental-organization (NGO) from Guatemala, works for the promotion and preservation of cultural and natural patrimony contained within the Mayan Biosphere Reserve (MBR) in the department of Petén in Guatemala. To aid with their preservation and promotion goals, PACUNAM, has developed a plan to perform an airborne lidar and hyperspectral survey of nearly 14,000 km² of the MBR and neighboring regions over a three year period....