Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
751-775 (4,066 Records)
The city-state of Minanha, located in west central Belize, reached its zenith and most culturally complex stage by the Late Classic period, 675-810 AD. Only a century later, its royal court had "collapsed". Contreras Valley is a small farming community in the settlement region of Minanha. Decades of research at Minanha and the analysis of artifact frequencies from commoner households allows for a better understanding of the the intra- and inter-community social practices occurring at the site of...
Community Engaged Bioarchaeology: Decolonizing Research (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Community Engaged Bioarchaeology: Centering Descendants" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bioarchaeology as a field of inquiry aims to bring forward the life histories of individuals through the analysis of skeletal markers of disease, trauma, and activities, at the individual and population level to better understand the experiences and identities of people that came before. A recent and important shift in the...
Community Engaged Scholarship and the Oklahoma Public Archaeology Network (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Oklahoma Public Archaeology Network (OKPAN), founded in 2016, recently engaged in strategic planning that has helped streamline our programs and increase the breadth of our community engagement. In our paper, we highlight two initiatives that have proved particularly effective at empowering communities that have traditionally been excluded...
Community Engagement in Archaeology through Photogrammetry (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Photogrammetry is a rapidly-evolving technology that is applicable to a wide array of archaeological contexts and reconstructions. Researchers affiliated with the Proyecto Arqueológico Waka’ (PAW) at the site of El Perú-Waka’, Petén, Guatemala, initiated a program of photogrammetric recording of stelae during the 2018 season. In this process, a series of...
Community Formation through Movement: Focal Nodes and Community Landscapes of the Mopan River Valley, Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Movement is often implicitly assumed when exploring the ancient makeup of communities. We conceptualize movement at different scales of interaction – at the hyperlocal through households, as well as between and across communities, polities, and landscapes. Here, I will explore how movement to/from focal nodes on a...
Community Identity and Social Practice during the Terminal Classic Period at Actuncan, Belize
This research examines the relationship between the ways in which urban families engaged local landscapes and the development of shared identities at the prehispanic Maya city of Actuncan, Belize. Such shared identities would have created deep historical ties to specific urbanized spaces, which enabled and constrained political expansion during the Terminal Classic period (ca. A.D. 800–900), a time when the city experienced rapid population growth as surrounding centers declined. This research...
Community Organization and Urban Dynamics at Copan, Honduras (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades, many archaeologists did not consider ancient Maya centers such as Tikal, Palenque, and Copan to be cities. While today most archaeologists would agree that large Maya centers were cities, the nature of Maya urbanism is still little understood. Maya cities seem different, and in attempt to explain these differences, they have been termed "Garden...
Community Resilience in the Río Amarillo East Pocket: Commoner Occupation around Río Amarillo and Quebrada Piedras Negras at the end of Late Classic through Postclassic Periods (2017)
Recent and ongoing research at residential groups at the sites of Río Amarillo and Quebrada Piedras Negras are providing a better understanding of the lives of commoners and of the population dynamics during the Late Classic through the Postclassic period in this area. These sites share the second-widest pocket of the Copan River Valley, and lie in the middle of one of the main trade routes between Copan and Quirigua. The excavations and mapping of the household groups distributed in this...
Community Training and Traditions: Accessing Archaeological Methodology In Creating a Baseline for Trail Stewardship (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Along the base of Muliwai Pali in Waipio Valley, Hawaii the King’s Trail gently travels through a traditional cultural landscape rich in moʻolelo (story) and genealogy. During the summer of 2020 descendants of Waipio, Muliwai and Waimanu participated in the documentation and mapping of select portions within a 1.5 mile corridor of this kuamoʻo (trail) from...
Community, Territory, and Polity in Postclassic Highland Oaxaca (2017)
In late prehispanic Oaxaca, Mexico, the community was a territorial polity cross-culturally comparable to the city-state. Sixteenth-century native and Spanish sources describe aspects of these communities. Full-coverage archaeological surveys have mapped dozens of cases, providing information on size and internal structure not available in the documents. This study compiled evidence regarding population, territory size, boundary marking, internal complexity, political status, languages,...
Community-Based and Collaborative Archaeology in South Greenland: Past, Present, Future (2019)
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. Archaeologists are increasingly engaging in community-based and collaborative approaches to develop frameworks for co-production of knowledge and its dissemination. Encouraging collaborative frameworks and community engagement has been a key element of the NSF Arctic Social Sciences Program under Anna Kerttula's leadership....
Community-Based Ethnoarchaeology to Inform Experimental Archaeological Research: Learning from the Diasporic Tigrayan Community in Vancouver, British Colombia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Experimental archaeology is an extremely beneficial method of inquiry, as it centralizes the physical knowledge of material culture and sensory experiences. While experimental archaeology brings researchers closer to the realities of creating and using material culture, ethnoarchaeology reconnects researchers...
Community-Defined Heritage and Uncertain Futures (2024)
This is an abstract from the "At the Frontier of Big Climate, Disaster Capitalism, and Endangered Cultural Heritage in Barbuda, Lesser Antilles" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation considers heritage as defined by members of stakeholder communities that have experienced a history of displacement as well as the pressures of disaster capitalism/neoliberal development. It explores the value of community-defined concepts of heritage to...
Comparative Analysis of Food Production, Waste, and Socioeconomic Dynamics in Red Light Districts and Brothel Sites across Three Port Cities during the American Industrial Revolution (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE New Orleans and Its Environs: Historical Archaeology and Environmental Precarity" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I present a comparative analysis of brothel sites and red-light districts in three major port cities during or around the period of the American Industrial Revolution. With a focus on Storyville in New Orleans, Louisiana, I will use Five Points in Manhattan, New York, and Hell's Half Acre...
Comparative Analysis of Pathological and Ontogenetic Variation within Archaeological Macaw and Turkey Assemblages Using Micro-CT Data (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the utility of computer tomography (CT) data and the VolumeGraphics StudioMax software program for digital reconstruction in aiding zooarchaeological analyses. A wide range of archaeological specimens of captive macaws from the US Southwest and captive turkeys from across central and southern Mexico were selected for CT scanning, with...
A Comparative Bioarchaeology of Health and Status in Pre-Classical K’axob and Cuello (2018)
This paper explores whether there is a statistical difference in rates of non-specific infection between two Maya pre-classic villages, K’axob and Cuello, and whether these findings can be correlated to social status within and between the two villages. Using representative skeletal samples from these populations, an osteological analysis is performed to determine the presence of non-specific infection markers in the form of periosteal reactions. Any signs of reaction are scored by level of...
A Comparative Functional Analysis of Old Copper Culture Utilitarian Implements via Artifact Replication, Materials Testing, and Ballistic Analyses (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. North America's Old Copper Culture (4000-1000 B.C.) is a unique event in archaeologists’ global understanding of prehistoric metallurgic evolution. For millennia, Middle and Late Archaic hunter-gatherers around the North American Upper Great Lakes region regularly made utilitarian implements out of copper, only for these items to decline in prominence and...
Comparative Micro-Usewear and Residue Analyses on Late Pleistocene Unifacial Tools from Huaca Prieta, Peru, and Monte Verde, Chile (2018)
This study presents the results of a comparative multi-year analysis of high and low power micro-usewear and residue patterns on 14,000-10,000 cal BP unifacial stone tools from the late Pleistocene archaeological sites of Huaca Prieta on the north coast of Peru and the Monte Verde I and II sites in south-central Chile. The archaeological stones from these sites are also compared with experimental assemblages employing various actions (e.g., scraping, cutting, gouging, perforating) to work...
Comparative Stable Isotopic Analyses between Dental Enamel and Bone Collagen among Central American Archaeological Samples Spanning 8,000 Years (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Interdisciplinary Isotopic Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Carbon, Nitrogen and Oxygen stable isotope analyses are popular tools within the field of archaeology. Applications for stable isotope analyses of human and faunal bone collagen and dental enamel include environmental reconstructions, modeling subsistence patterns, and investigating human-animal relationships, as well as potential to...
Comparing Age-at-Death Profiles from Cemeteries on Sint Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Exploring Globalization and Colonialism through Archaeology and Bioarchaeology: An NSF REU Sponsored Site on the Caribbean’s Golden Rock (Sint Eustatius)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On the Caribbean island of Sint Eustatius (Statia), there are several cemeteries dating from the 18th and 19th centuries, primarily utilized during a time of colonization and trade by the European colonial powers, Netherlands, Great...
Comparing Demographic Shifts versus Permanence across the Maya Lowlands: A Multiproxy Approach to the Centuries Surrounding the “Maya Collapse” (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. he so-called Maya collapse has been seen as an entelechy of the depopulation and emigration of the great Maya cities of the lowlands during the ninth and tenth centuries AD. However, proper paleodemographic and archaeodemographic works that support this...
Comparing Labor Regimes: Debt Peons in the Northeastern Yucatan versus Free Laborers in British Honduras (2017)
In this paper I compare the working conditions and cultural material found at a cluster of three sites in the northeast corner of the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula, to those at San Pedro Siris in the Cayo District of then British Honduras. The people in both areas contended with more militant Maya groups that were unhappy with improved relations with Mexican and British Honduran authorities respectively. Similar workplace dangers confronted both the lumber workers at San Pedro Siris and the...
Comparing Middle Woodland and Mississippian Period Agglomerations in the Eastern Woodlands of North America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ephemeral Aggregated Settlements: Fluidity, Failure or Resilience?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Large aggregated settlements have been a persistent feature of the settlement landscape of the Eastern Woodlands of North America for more than 3000 years. By the turn of the first millennium ephemeral agglomerated settlements become common settings for the enactment of practices and traditions that presage the next...
Comparing Multiple Methods of Fish Size Estimation Using Sheepshead Remains from New Orleans, Louisiana (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Size estimation of archaeological fishes has been employed by zooarchaeologists to address a number of topics, including past fishing methods, commodification of fishes, and overfishing. Although the development of regression formulae describing the relationship between fish length and skeletal measurements is the most common method employed by...
Comparing Patterns of Skeletal Pathology in Enslaved Africans from an Eighteenth-Century Cemetery on St. Eustatius (2021)
This is an abstract from the "NSF REU Site: Exploring Globalization through Archaeology 2019–2020 Session, St. Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research investigates the patterns of skeletal pathology of 15 enslaved individuals in an eighteenth-century cemetery on St. Eustatius. Nine different pathology markers were analyzed from the 15 individuals of St. Eustatius and compared to individuals from the Newton...