Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenna Domeischel.

This is an abstract from the "Navigating Ethical and Legal Quandaries in Modern Archaeological Curation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In early 2017 a human skull was left outside the front door of the Blackwater Draw Museum in Portales, New Mexico. No one saw it arrive; it was simply there when the museum opened that morning. Facilities that curate or display archaeological materials encounter situations such as this more frequently than one...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terry Powis. George J. Micheletti. Kaitlin Crow. Sheldon Skaggs. Peter Cherico.

Archaeological research in the Upper Belize River Valley has recently produced information that dramatically improves our knowledge of the earliest Maya. Investigations, particularly at the site of Pacbitun, has revealed evidence of radiometrically and ceramically dated cultural stratigraphic deposits for the early and late Middle Preclassic subperiods (900-300 BC). Excavations were undertaken in the site core, principally Plazas A and B, to determine the nature and extent of these communities...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Puente. Sarah Kurnick.

This is an abstract from the "The Vibrancy of Ruins: Ruination Studies in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After Mexico declared its independence from Spain in 1821, foreign explorers began traveling throughout the Maya area and documenting sites, structures, and monuments then unknown in the United States and Europe. In photographs, drawings, and written reports, these explorers depicted Maya ruins as deserted and lifeless, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only L. Renee Hendricks.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper addresses the inclusion of women within Classic Maya works of art, consisting of, for this purpose, private-consumption ceramic vessels and large scale public monuments. Through the use of Feminist and Gender Theory, Performance Theory, and Iconographic Theory, the roles of women in iconographically depicted ceremonial performance is assessed. A...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Stone. Scott Fitzpatrick. Matthew Napolitano. Connor Thorud.

Remote Oceania was one of the last major regions colonized by humans prehistorically. While there has been an increasing amount of archaeological and genetic research in the region in recent years, many parts are sorely un- or understudied. This is particularly true of Micronesia, where many questions remain as to how and when these early inhabitants settled and adapted to the area. The Palauan archipelago, which comprises hundreds of smaller uplifted limestone "Rock Islands," hosts identified...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Byron Smith. Lara Sanchez-Morales. Samantha Krause. Timothy Beach. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach.

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. This paper reports on recent excavations from the Birds of Paradise wetland field complex where we studied an ancient ancillary structure situated among wetland fields along the lower Rio Bravo of northwest Belize. Here we synthesize previous studies from this broader wetland field complex that includes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ken Seligson. Tomás Gallareta Negrón. Rossana May. George Bey III.

This is an abstract from the "The Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project: 25 Years of Research in the Puuc" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This talk will present an overview of the Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project’s contributions to the study of Maya burnt lime production, drawing on a mix of excavation, archaeometric, and spatial data. As part of their extensive Kiuic-Labná intersect pedestrian survey, Tomás Gallareta Negrón and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Markens.

This paper explores the meaning of butterfly imagery among Classic period Zapotecs of the Valley of Oaxaca. Images of butterflies, or parts of their anatomy, sometimes appear on effigy vessels found in tombs. The effigy vessels represent rulers, or other individuals of high social-standing, as jaguars, owls or the Fire Serpent. I argue that rulers of Zapotec urban centers were perceived to have a number of specific naguales or alter-egos that constitute the moral basis of political power. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Agapi Filini.

During the Classic period, butterfly motifs encountered throughout Mesoamerica are indicative of diverse kinds of interaction with the city of Teotihuacan. Highly standardized stuccoed and painted ceramics from the lacustrine region of Michoacán, West Mexico, were used as the principal medium to project a major iconographic theme: the Butterfly-Solar Complex, which was very likely related to a Teotihuacan solar militaristic ideology. Symbolic meanings were encoded in symmetrical panels which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Ringstaff.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Buttermilk Creek Ranch (BCR) is located within the upper Buttermilk Creek Valley in Bell and Williamson Counties, Texas. Across this landscape, valley incision dissects chert-bearing limestones of the Lower Cretaceous Edwards Group exposing extensive outcrops of tool quality stone. In direct proximity to BCR, are the well-known multi-component sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sheldon Skaggs. Peter Cherico.

Recent investigations in a large, enclosed courtyard on the southwest corner of the ancient Maya site of Pacbitun, Belize, revealed evidence of successive emplacements of ritually important deposits. Initial analysis of the ceramic material suggests that the entire courtyard plaza has only one or two floors, with construction and use only during the Late to Terminal Classic period (600 – 900 CE). Five caches and two cyst graves were related directly to the plaza floor. The caches consisted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaitlin Ahern.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2013 and 2014, a series of excavations were conducted on Structure 9 at the Preclassic period center of Cival. Structure 9 is the western radial pyramid associated with the site’s central E-Group complex. These excavations uncovered a series of caches, termination rituals, and deliberate destruction of architectural features across five major phases of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eugenia Robinson. Marlen Garnica.

Archaeological survey of Cakhay, the largest Classic site (200-800 A.D.) in the Maya Kaq’chik’el area, was carried out in 2017 by the Proyecto Arqueológico del Área Kaq’chik’el (PAAK). The goal of the survey was to determine the limits of the site and survey its periphery. Reconnaissance of 20 sq km found that populations were nucleated on the hillside surrounding the defensive and religious center with some look out sites in the periphery. Within the center and the nucleus of the site,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dennis Lewarch.

Archaeologists and geographers calibrate the flow of commodities among households and settlements to infer patterns of production, consumption, economic function, and social class. Michael Smith and his colleagues developed sophisticated measurements of wealth and social class using residential architecture attributes and domestic artifact assemblage diversity from excavations at three Aztec Period sites in Morelos. Here, data from over 4,000 surface collection units in eight Aztec Period sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Beth Padon.

This is an abstract from the "Site Stewardship Matters: Comparing and Contrasting Site Stewardship Programs to Advance Our Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There are many ways to organize and administer site stewardship. We highlight some characteristics of California site stewardship and we discuss why they matter. CASSP is provided by Partners for Archaeological Site Stewardship, a private, nonprofit organization. Because CASSP is not a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miguel Contreras-Sieck. Paola Everardo-Martínez. Paloma Constanza Huerta-Chavez. Alejandro Alvarado-Gonzalez. Víctor Acuña-Alonzo.

This is an abstract from the "Increasing the Accessibility of Ancient DNA within Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient DNA approaches have a long-standing history in bioanthropological and archaeological contexts in Mexico. However, we are starting to see a gap between these novel data and anthropologists; this could be the result of the mixture of the rapid advance of paleogenomics together with the lack of technological and...

DATASET Rachel Horowitz.

Lithic Analysis from Callar Creek Quarry

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gary Haynes. Janis Klimowicz. Piotr Wojtal.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The characteristics of human-killed and human-scavenged elephant carcasses differ in important ways. The bones of an elephant butchered immediately after humans killed it are identifiably distinct from bones taken from a "ripened" carcasses that was scavenged by humans. With newly killed carcasses, the butchering may be light to full, resulting in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carol Colaninno-Meeks. John Chick.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Education: Building a Research Base" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For many undergraduate anthropology majors, participation in an archaeological field school is the entry point to a professional career in the discipline. Despite the importance of field schools, few scholars have investigated the learning outcomes students gain or lasting impacts, either negative or positive, from participation in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharine Fernstrom.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Rock Art in Cultural Understanding: A Symposium in Honor of Polly Schaafsma" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Polly Schaafsma’s extraordinary body of rock art publications allows us to return repeatedly to the images to ask different questions as our knowledge expands. Rock art informs my studies of pre-European Native American murals and 3-dimensional human figures because murals are compositions on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Krause. Timothy Beach. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach. Thomas Harold Guderjan. Fred Valdez.

In 2016 the Northwestern Belize Lidar Consortium acquired nearly 300 square km of LiDAR imagery that covers large areas of ancient Maya agricultural systems, including ditched and raised fields, reservoirs, terraces, and sacbeob. This new imagery allows us to map beneath the canopy and shows that over nearly 20 years without LiDAR we studied only a small spatial sample of these complex systems. We have tested these systems with multiple excavations, and used multiple proxies such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Audrey Smith. Claire Ebert. Brett Meyer. Julie Hoggarth. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For millennia dogs (Canis familiaris) have fulfilled various biological, functional, and companionship roles, yet their use and significance in Mesoamerica varied substantially through time. Previous studies of dogs in the Maya lowlands argued that human-canid relationships involved high levels of dog consumption, though zooarchaeology and epigraphic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Earley.

Stripped, humiliated, and often sacrificed, the captive in ancient Maya art acted as a potent symbol of defeat. Captives are a central theme of Maya art, appearing on media from painted vases to carved stone monuments. However, discussions of ancient Maya captives often focus on their captors: rulers, usually depicted as conquering warriors. "Captive Bodies, Captive Power" investigates, instead, the captives themselves. Treating the captive body as a cultural project that both modeled and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron L. McNeil.

Pollen analysis of Classic-period temple and tomb spaces in Copan’s Acropolis revealed a range of plants important to ancient Maya ritual practice. Some of these species were not represented in macroremains in ritual or household contexts. Scholars have described temple spaces as thick with the odor of burned offerings and copal, but added to this would also have been the fresh and heady fragrance of blooming buds and greenery, adding a fecund perfume to the areas of ritual supplication. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jean Larmon. Lisa Lucero.

Cara Blanca, in central Belize, consists of 25 pools that run east to west along the base of a limestone cliff. The Pre-Colombian significance of the pools has been studied by the Valley of Peace Archaeology Project, yet little attention has been paid to their Post-Contact influence on the local and regional landscape. This paper explores the role that Pool 6, a shallow lake centrally located in the line of lakes and cenotes, played in colonial logging operations around Cara Blanca. The 2014...