Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shawn Morton.

For nearly two thousand years, the E-Group at Yaxnohcah served as this city’s spiritual and administrative heart. From the early facet of the middle Pre-Classic through the Terminal Classic, as the rest of the site grew, morphed, and ultimately fell into disuse, this group continued to be remodelled, refurbished, and rededicated. Further, in a stunning testimony to social memory, and after a period of clear abandonment, it became the focus of Post-Classic activity that included the erection of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Chamberlin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers whether processes of symbolic conflict propel change in the spatiality of social groups from ethnographic and archaeological vantage points, particularly with respect to the mobility of agents positioned differently within and at the edges of nascent communities such as small villages. Of special interest is the interaction between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Ruhl.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Effective water management was key to settle in the Maya Lowlands, where scarce surface water is found. While numerous investigations have showed how complex systems had been organized in Maya sites, implying a great deal of attraction to them, new data, available through LidAR for example, indicates a much more decentralized reality, where household-scale...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David McCormick. Zachary Hruby. Olivia Navarro-Farr. Michelle Rich. Keith Eppich.

This is an abstract from the "Ceremonial Lithics of Mesoamerica: New Understandings of Technology, Distribution, and Symbolism of Eccentrics and Ritual Caches in the Maya World and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Obsidian blades and related debitage from four elite tombs recently excavated at El Peru-Waka have the potential to answer the question of why and how the ancient Maya placed this material above, around, and sometimes within the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Baquedano.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Symbolism in Postclassic Mesoamerica: Papers in Honor of Cecelia Klein" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Frogs and toads were important animals in Mesoamerica with several species of Mexican frogs. They were especially associated with the rainy season. Some species of frogs are active above ground only in the reproductive period while some species of toads spend part of the year underground. These batrachians are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandra Aguirre.

In the seventh field season of the Templo Mayor Project, we discovered various ritual deposits in an inverted pyramidal monument located west of the monolith of the Tlaltecuhtli Goddess. We determined that this space symbolized the threshold to the underworld, or realm of the dead. In this space we made the exceptional discovery of the Offering 125, associated with the ruler Ahuítzotl (1486-1502 CE). In this offering we found three flint knives that were dressed like Ehécatl-Quetzalcóatl (God of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Barber. Guy Hepp. Jeffrey Brzezinski. Arthur Joyce.

Mesoamerica has a long tradition of masking, as evidenced by representations of masked individuals, and the masks themselves, extending back to at least the Early Formative period. In the lower Río Verde valley of Oaxaca, evidence for masking exists throughout the Precolumbian sequence, from the earliest villages to Postclassic settlements. This evidence often consists of figurines depicting masked individuals or representations on ceramic vessels and carved stones. Recent excavations have also...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benno Fiehring. Hans Martz de la Vega.

With only scarce information on the topic, we have undertaken an archaeoastronomical investigation in Tamtoc, because we consider that the relations between its architecture and phenomena in the sky constituted an important element for the harmonic integration of it’s urban space, which probably supported oral discourse in the past. The measurement of the building’s orientation in relation to the local horizon, allows us to know the specific calendric dates at which the sun aligns with the axis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret Nelson. Thomas McGovern.

This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Anna Kerttula's Contributions to Northern Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Anna Kerttula had the vision and commitment to support an experiment: two interdisciplinary research teams working in dramatically different settings, striving to find valuable insights from cross-region, cross-case studies. One team from the North Atlantic islands (NABO) and another from the US Southwest (LTVTP) combined...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Morrison.

This is an abstract from the "Research and CRM Are Not Mutually Exclusive: J. Stephen Athens—Forty Years and Counting" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Steve Athens legacy has provided archaeologists working within a historic preservation context a reminder of the numerous opportunities available to conduct research within a cultural resource management setting. This paper argues that not only does historic preservation provide a plethora of funding...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Boulanger. Ryan Breslawski. Ian Jorgeson.

This is an abstract from the "Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For nearly 100 years, archaeologists have commented on the perceived morphological diversity in projectile points dating to the Paleoindian period in eastern North America, though the significance of this diversity and what explains it remain underexplored topics. Hesitancy to address these broader questions is, we argue, attributable to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Burtt.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dog-feeding strategies employed by Indigenous North Americans vary across place and time. Human restrictions on prey animal parts given to dogs have been recorded in the ethnohistoric record. Dog feeding taboos are transcultural and often speak to ideas of a dog’s place among other animals and the influence dogs may have on the predator-prey relationship...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Corey Herrmann.

Archaeological excavations by the Proyecto-Paleoetnobotánico Río Jama (PAPRJ) in the Jama River Valley of northern Manabí, Ecuador, have established a cultural chronology spanning over three millennia of prehispanic occupation. One of these occupations, the Tabuchila Complex of the Late Formative Period (1000 BC – 500 BC), remains poorly understood. Excavations at three sites in the Jama Valley in the 1990s recovered ceramic, lithic, obsidian, paleobotanical, archaeofaunal, and human skeletal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cara Tremain.

Ancient Maya polychrome vases, especially those that are decorated with elaborately painted scenes, fill the display cases and collection drawers of museums and galleries around the world. Unfortunately, the majority of these are unprovenienced and many also lack clear provenance. Furthermore, modern restorations and/ or falsifications further muddy our understanding and blur the line between authentic and inauthentic. In order to learn more about these ceramics, and help to restore some of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sherman Horn.

This is an abstract from the "Where Is Provenance? Bridging Method, Evidence, and Theory for the Interpretation of Local Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle Preclassic (1000 – 400 B.C.) Maya Lowlands were peppered with autonomous communities connected by webs of socioeconomic interactions at the local and regional scales. Increasingly complex social relationships were forged in Middle Preclassic centers and later developed into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Matisoo-Smith. Anna Gosling. David Burley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lapita peoples transported a number of animal species in their colonizing canoes as they settled the islands of the Pacific. Included among the domesticated animals introduced by Lapita peoples were chickens (Gallus gallus). Later, Polynesians also transported chickens as they settled many of the islands of the Polynesian Triangle. The discovery of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelley Esh. Sabrina Ta'ala. Owen O'Leary.

This is an abstract from the "A Multidimensional Mission: Crossing Conflicts, Synthesizing Sites, and Adapting Approaches to Find Missing Personnel" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The successful recovery of human remains from aircraft crash sites is significantly impacted by the circumstances of loss, to include how the crash occurred, the size of the aircraft, and taphonomic factors. Two WWII aircraft crashes in the East Sepik and Madang...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomás Gallareta Cervera. Brett A. Houk.

Research on ancient Maya cities is generally modeled after large sites with massive architecture, dynastic burials, and written records documenting the activities of divine rulers. However, the development of these cities is the exception, rather than the norm, since the majority of Maya sites did not reach such enormous proportions, yet many of them likely qualified as cities from a functional standpoint. Hence, a research on non-massive cities, "from the bottom up," is crucial to understand...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Callaghan. Brigitte Kovacevich.

This is an abstract from the "Making and Breaking Boundaries in the Maya Lowlands: Alliance and Conflict across the Guatemala–Belize Border" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we use frequency distributions of ceramic types and modes to identify and assess the presence and strength of permeable ceramic boundaries between sites in the northeastern Peten and west central Belize in the early Middle Preclassic through Postclassic periods. We...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Wingfield.

The art and structures of the ancient Central American sites of Quelepa in El Salvador and Guayabo de Turrialba in Costa Rica both suggest influence from afar by the late first millennium CE. Quelepa was restructured from what was likely a Lenca foundation to reflect possibly invasive Veracruz tastes, yet some Lenca elements were retained. Did both Lenca and Veracruz immigrants live together peacefully? What can art and architecture tell us of this possible merger, an instance of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roberto Lopez Bravo.

Research focused on El Lacandon, a rural community in the outer hinterland of the Late Classic Palenque polity, has allowed the understanding of shifting patterns of relationships between the urban and the rural realms in two specific times: 1) at the end of the Late Preclassic period, when Palenque developed from a rural village into a dynastic capital; and 2) at the end of the Late Classic period, when the ruling dynasty developed new political strategies for hinterland integration.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carrie Tucker. Jeffrey B. Glover. Dominique Rissolo.

Coastal communities in the Maya Lowlands played a myriad of roles in the ebb and flow of political, economic, and social formations over the past 3000 years, yet these roles have remained along the periphery of Maya studies. Though ever present, Maya coastal sites were atypical – perhaps even idiosyncratic – in terms of how they were imagined and lived-in by the Maya. Critical to our understanding of these coastal settlements is the material culture traded and utilized by the occupants of these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Overholtzer. John Millhauser.

Studies of Spanish colonial capitalism often exclude Mesoamerica or relegate it to a peripheral and dependent role in the emerging global economy. Despite pre-Hispanic antecedents for many capitalist practices, such as market-based circulation and market dependence, the economy that emerged in New Spain is often portrayed as a function of the European economy. In contrast, we follow Pezzarossi in considering how colonial shifts in consumption were informed by pre-Hispanic practices and were not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerald Ek.

This is an abstract from the "A Session in Memory of William J. Folan: Cities, Settlement, and Climate" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over his distinguished career William Folan made a substantive contribution to knowledge of the scale, form, and nature of Maya urbanism. Classic Maya cities are often classified as a low-density agrarian-based urban tradition, a cross-cultural concept characterized by expansive settlement zones, lack of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Cook Hale.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Global Submerged Paleolandscapes Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Submerged prehistoric archaeology by its nature depends intensively on natural science methods, particularly where topics such as submerged site formation processes are concerned. As such, it offers potential to advance the state of the art in both methodology and interpretation but must be applied with due care. I present here a...