Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
476-500 (4,066 Records)
Placed within the context of the ERC-NEXUS1492 research, this paper focusses on transformations in indigenous social and material worlds in Early Colonial Hispaniola. The initial intercultural encounters in the New World have led to the creation of entirely new social identities and changing material culture repertoires in the first decennia after colonization. The incorporation of European earthenwares in the indigenous sites of El Cabo and Playa Grande will be contrasted with the presence of...
Breaking the Site Museum Mold: Designing the Dos Mangas Community Museum (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Working with the Community in Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations began in Dos Mangas in 2006, and continued with excavation of a Valdivia village site, Buen Suceso, in 2009. Those and subsequent excavations carried out by Sarah Rowe have combined archaeological inquiry with community engagement activities such as presentations in the primary school, workshops for community guides,...
Breaking with Tradition? Terminal Classic and Postclassic Developments Across the Guatemala – Belize Border (2019)
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. Following the Classic Maya "collapse" a clustering of traits appear at sites in the Peten – Belize area of the Southern Maya Lowlands. These include new architectural forms, such as circular and colonnaded buildings and the introduction of distinctive portable goods such as...
Breathless in the Underworld: The Effects of Low Oxygen, High Carbon Dioxide, and High Carbon Monoxide on Cave Ritual (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Studies in Mesoamerican Subterranean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maya explored caves with torches and burned copal with wood fires during ceremonies. These activities, in a confined space such as a cave, used up oxygen and produced carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. The effects of high carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide on the human body are well studied by OSHA and documented in environmental and...
Bricks and Mortar: The Concealed Politicization of Fired Clay Adobe at Comalcalco, Tabasco (2018)
Comalcalco displays a radical departure from traditional Maya building materials in its brick and seashell mortar construction instead of the paradigmatic Maya limestone. Incised animal, architecture, hieroglyph, and human forms adorn the brick slabs of principal buildings of Comalcalco’s ceremonial core. However, their inward-facing, or concealed, orientation rendered these markings invisible. Because monumental architecture benefited from the labor of non-elites, the purposeful placement of...
Bridging the Gap: Spectral and Structural Analysis of Archaeological Settlement in El Zotz, Guatemala (2018)
In the last decade, archaeologist have successfully employed active remote sensing technologies, such as LiDAR, to identify ancient settlement in the Maya lowlands. Near the site of El Zotz in northern Guatemala, this technology has aided in the identification of fortresses, terraces, and a network of raised roads. Archaeologist who employ LiDAR focus principally on the structural data acquired from the LiDAR point clouds. Building on these methodologies, we assess the benefits of incorporating...
Bridging the Gaps: Integrating Archaeology and History in Oaxaca, Mexico (2015)
Bridging the Gaps: Integrating Archaeology and History in Oaxaca, Mexico does just that: it bridges the gap between archaeology and history of the Precolumbian, Colonial, and Republican eras of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, a cultural area encompassing several of the longest-enduring literate societies in the world. Fourteen case studies from an interdisciplinary group of archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and art historians consciously compare and contrast changes and...
Bridging the Gulf: Reconnecting Belizeans to Their Pre-Colonial Heritage through Enhanced Archaeological Education (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Belize is rich in cultural diversity and history but has long faced a disconnect between its citizens’ knowledge and the profound legacy of its precolonial past. Belize's ancient Maya remains attracts archaeologists from around the world. Despite this extraordinary heritage, some Belizeans are disconnected from this past, leading to a diminished sense of...
Bringing Two Halves Together: Combining Modern Phylogenetics and Zooarchaeological Analysis to Understand Past and Present Trends of Freshwater Mussels (Unionidae) in Mesoamerica (2018)
For over a century, the taxonomy of the Central American freshwater mussels (family Unionidae) has been the subject of numerous classifications and reclassifications, with naturalists identifying morphologically identical taxa as different genera or species, while at the same time classifying obviously distinct taxa under the same name. Zooarchaeologists at the mercy of these erratic classification schemes have been unable to effectively compare datasets. This study uses a combined...
British Peasant Ideologies and Technological Approaches to Marginal Caribbean Landscapes (2017)
British colonial ideology originated, in part, from a view of the proper relationship between people, land, and government that was rooted in the ecology of Britain itself. This view was informed in the Caribbean by Barbadian and other large-scale sugar planting colonies, but the British Virgin Islands are ecologically and politically distinct. This paper employs high-resolution satellite imagery and GIS modeling to explore what happens when a British "peasant" ideology is laid onto a very...
Broader Impact of Archaeological Science Methods in Forensic Science Investigations (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Intersection of Archaeological Science and Forensic Science" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences report on “Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States” emphasized the importance of change needed in forensic science disciplines to ensure reliability, enforceable standards, and to promote best practices. Over the years many archaeologists and bioarchaeologists have...
Broadscale Machine Learning Model for Archaeological Feature Detection in the Maya Area (2023)
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Comprehensive maps of ancient structures across the Maya area of Central America can help archaeologists to deepen knowledge of past settlement patterns and regional interactions, potentially leading to enhanced understanding of thousands of years of Maya civilization. However, most Maya archaeological sites are not...
Broken Molds, Burned Wealth, and Scattered Monuments: Defining the Terminal Classic Period at Pacbitun (2018)
The Terminal Classic period in the southern Maya Lowlands was one of great social transition, witnessing the disruption of long-standing economic systems, and the downfall of divine kingship. The manifestation of this "collapse" in the artifactual record has been well documented at many sites throughout the Belize Valley, yet how it does so at the site of Pacbitun, on the southern rim of the Belize Valley, remains poorly understood, in spite of nearly three decades of archaeological research...
The Buffalo Hill Quarries Site: Investigations of an Ancestral Maya Quarryscape in the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, Belize (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Rio Frio Regional Archaeological Project (RiFRAP) 2022 Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve regional survey resulted in documentation of the Buffalo Hill Quarries (BHQ), the first recorded ancestral Maya granitic rock quarry with a ground stone implement workshop site. Preliminary investigations indicate a complex multicomponent quarryscape with...
Building a Case for Resilience: A Call to Action (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE Hope for the Future: A Message of Resiliency from Archaeological Sites in South Florida" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. South Florida contains a vast record of over 10,000 years of human occupation. The archaeological timeline of the area has the capability to demonstrate human adaptation to rapid climate change in the past during the transition from the Younger Dryas to the Holocene. As archaeologists, we have a...
Building a Community: Late Classic and Postclassic Residential Structures at Rio Amarillo, Copan, Honduras (2015)
Rio Amarillo, an ancient town, rests 20 km east of the great Maya city of Copan in Honduras. In the last four years residences from the Late Classic and Postclassic period have been excavated at the site. Investigations of the residential buildings from Río Amarillo have allowed us to better understand the influences and allegiances of the inhabitants of this community resting on the margins of the Maya world. The architecture of the structures reflects ties to both Copan and to areas in the...
Building a Façade: When Political Involvement Changes the Narrative, Fabric, and Value of Historic Sites (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the ways in which local government involvement in the restoration of historic structures and archaeological sites can change the ways in which they are valued and used by local communities. How do opinions surrounding heritage change when people are confronted with differing actors imposing differing values on historic properties? How do...
Building a Frontier? Preliminary Investigations into a Late Preclassic Maya Triadic Temple Group (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For the ancient Maya, the second century B.C. was a period of growth and consolidation; populations boomed, and a common set of cultural ideas spread across the Maya Lowlands. This expansion of ideas is evident in the widespread presence of chicanel ceramics, the spread of a unified Late Preclassic figural style found on mural and carved monuments, and in the...
Building a High-Resolution Chronology: A Case from the Maya Archaeological Site of El Palmar, Mexico (2018)
This paper aims to refine the Maya chronology during the Classic period (A.D. 250-950) through the development of Bayesian models. In so doing, we combined radiocarbon dates with stratigraphic information, ceramic data, burials, and calendric dates from stone monuments. At the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry of Yamagata University, we ran 78 radiocarbon samples recovered from the Guzmán Group, an outlying group located 1.3km north of El Palmar in southeastern Campeche, Mexico. To...
Building a Long-Term Underwater Economy Advancing Technology, Ecology, and Cultural Resources (BLUE TEC) (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. Offshore wind is increasingly vital as the United States intensifies efforts to reduce its carbon footprint and improve energy security through renewable energy. Currently, the time and cost of planning, permitting, and building offshore energy projects are daunting, and mitigation for these projects is in its...
Building an Empire: Spanish Colonial Encounters with Maya Houses and Housebuilding (2018)
In the late sixteenth century, King Philip II of Spain sent out a request to the local administrators of his overseas colonies, asking that they complete a questionnaire designed to collect information about the lands he had conquered. The responses to this questionnaire, completed primarily between 1578-1586, form a set of documents now known as the Relaciones Geográficas. Question 31 asked respondents to describe the form and construction of the local houses and the materials used to build...
Building Collapse: Hierarchy and an Anarchic Social Movement in the Hohokam Classic Period (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Why Platform Mounds? Part 2: Regional Comparisons and Tribal Histories" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have offered multiple explanations for the dramatic architectural, subsistence, and political shifts that happened at the end of the Hohokam Classic period. Many of these explanations are good at exploring potential factors leading to these changes in regional contexts, like the Phoenix Basin where it...
Building Resilience with Traditional Knowledge in Samoa (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Analyses of lidar datasets have allowed archaeologists to expand the study of archaeological landscapes to study extensively human-modified environments at regional scales with more advanced geospatial methods. In Sāmoa, lidar reveals networks of ditches, terraces, and other earthen- and stone-monumental architectural features which extend from the coast...
Building Resilient Cultural Resource Programs with Tribal Partners: A Department of Defense (DoD) Perspective (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Crucial Issues in United States Department of Defense Cultural Resources Management " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many challenges exist to keep training and operations on military installations viable over time. Environmental and cultural stewardship programs are part of a military planner’s strategic approach to ensuring Department of Defense (DoD) managed lands remain healthy and active use areas for the...
Building Societies of Knowledge (2018)
This paper aims to analyze the implementation of integrative project designs developed with local communities in Brazil, in a bottom-up strategy. The objective is deliver relevant outcomes and outputs to society incorporating local social values to the process. This strategy is also aligned to the development of UNESCO’s Sustainability Science goals, from which archeology cannot be isolated. It considers the development of Cultural Environment Projects, where archeology research has more...