Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Gala. Anna Mika. Michael Wilson. Jeremy Williams. Robert Walker.

This is an abstract from the "Old Technology, New Methodology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stone weaponry and tools were fundamental to the success of past peoples. Stone weaponry varies dramatically, with both functional and nonfunctional factors contributing to this variation. The durability (whether a stone tip breaks or not) and robusticity (how much damage is incurred upon breakage) of stone weapon tips were two important functional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matt Nelson.

This paper compares two new predictive models of prehistoric archaeological site locations to better understand modelling successes and complications. For my recent M.A. thesis project, I created one model for Yellowstone National Park to predict Paleoindian site locations within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem of the northwestern Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. I created the second model for the Pinelands region of central New Jersey for the United States Air National Guard, Warren Grove...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valorie Aquino. Douglas J. Kennett. Yemane Asmerom. Keith Prufer.

In studies of human-environment interactions, the conceptual framework of panarchy and its associated resilience theory posit that periods of stability and transformation are inevitable in what has been termed an "adaptive cycle". This presentation discusses the reconstruction of a community-level political adaptive cycle for Uxbenká, an ancient agrarian polity in the Maya hinterlands, and explores its linkages with the broader political ideology of divine kingship and climate stress. Employing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Johnson. Jason Nesbitt.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite decades of archaeological research, the economic and social ties connecting the eastern Andes and Upper Amazon remain underexplored. Stylistic and compositional comparison of ceramics from the sites of Canchas Uckro (ca. 1100-850 BCE), a large monumental platform situated above the Puccha River, and the Cave of the Owls, on the Monzón River near...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Beverly Chiarulli. Eleanor King. Anne Pyburn. Anabel Ford.

Small lithic flakes have been recovered from most Maya sites in Belize. They are often viewed as byproducts of the lithic manufacturing process. A closer analysis of small flakes recovered from four sites (Cerros, Chau Hiix, Maax Na and El Pilar) has found that while many of the flakes may have been removed during tool manufacture, the expedient tools themselves were used in a variety of household activities especially those associated with cutting or carving bone or wood. This poster...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Hruby. Jaime Awe. Christina Halperin. Catharina Santasilia.

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. Two recently discovered ritual deposits from the eastern Maya Lowlands seem to reveal similarities in the kinds of eccentrics used in Late Classic Maya caches from different political centers. Upon closer examination, however, they...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Jackson. Genevieve Mielke.

Performing mock excavations of human skeletal material is a common practice throughout undergraduate and graduate studies in Forensic and Bioarchaeological programs. These class sessions include instruction on correct excavation methods, mapping techniques, documentation methods, and chain of custody. Inevitably however, there are differences between mock excavations within a class setting and active homicide excavations where no professor is present and the real-life ramifications of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorena Becerra-Valdivia. Thibaut Devièse. Thomas W. Stafford Jr.. Michael Waters. Tom Higham.

Found in 1968, the archaeological site of Anzick (24PA506), Montana, contains the only known Clovis burial. Here, the partial remains of a male infant (Anzick-1) were found in association with a Clovis assemblage of over 100 lithic and faunal bone artifacts—all red-stained with ochre. The incomplete, unstained cranium of a separate individual (Anzick-2), dating to ~8,600 radiocarbon years before present (BP), was also recovered. Previous chronometric work has shown an age difference between the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sire Pro. Tom Tandberg.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on Glass Beads and Ornaments in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers two collections of glass beads excavated from residential contexts in Paugvik, Alaska (nineteenth century CE) and Beatty Curve, Oregon (nineteenth–twentieth centuries CE), and housed in the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History. Using LA-ICP-MS analysis, around 30 beads from each...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Griffith. Adam Spring. Brent Woodfill.

Over a period of just a few short years there have been dramatic advancements in digital imaging and scanning technologies. Increasingly, cave archaeologists around the world are utilizing many of these new platforms and techniques to document subterranean artwork. This paper outlines two different approaches to digital imaging of ancient Maya cave art. In Guatemala, a Z+F IMAGER 5010C 3D Laser scanner, mounted on a tripod, was employed in Cueva San Juan and Hun Nal Ye to document both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brigitte Kovacevich. Duncan Cook. Michael Callaghan. Dawn Crawford.

This paper will discuss the various activities that took place on the exterior stone patio floor of the M6-12 domestic structure at Cancuen, Guatemala, and compare it to previously published findings of the M10-4 and M10-7 structures. These structures typically have a low investment in construction and appear to be non-elite in status, characterized by earthen mounds surrounded by limestone flagstone floors and perishable superstructures. These surfaces often appear to be communal activity areas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine C. Dixon. Payson Sheets.

The Loma Caldera eruption of c. AD 660 dramatically buried a sophisticated community built by craftspeople, architects, religious specialists, political leaders, and agriculturalists. As people fled for their lives, they left behind belongings and buildings. Results from decades of archaeological research at Cerén, El Salvador and in the surrounding Zapotitán Valley challenges an ethnocentric, over-simplified reconstruction of ancient socio-political organization. Cerén was not in the middle of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roberto Herrera. Francisco Corrales.

This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The development of precontact social hierarchy in southern Central America is a subject open to debate. For the Aguas Buenas period (300 BC–AD 800) of the Greater Chiriquí archaeological region, new data at the regional level (Costa Rica, Panama) indicate the appearance of centers with architectural complexity after AD 400. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa DeLance. Jaime Awe.

Mesoamerican archaeologists have traditionally, although not exclusively, viewed artifacts found in the context of construction fill as trash and devoid of primary contextual information, a view that has limited the questions that archaeologists are able to ask of these materials. This paper posits an alternative interpretation to the meaning of material culture used in construction fill, utilizing evidence from Formative period construction fill found at the site of Cahal Pech, Cayo, Belize....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ana Navas.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Panama, as in other regions of the Caribbean and Latin America, several archaeologists have reported the presence of colonial utilitarian wares, also known as Colono-Indian ware, creole ware, and coarse hand-made earthenware. Previous research on this ware focuses on refining the typologies and identifying traits that could be related to African, Spanish,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elena Sesma.

This is an abstract from the "Reinvent, Reclaim, Redefine: Considerations of "Reuse" in Archaeological Contexts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Farmers and gardeners in the Bahamas have long practiced swidden agriculture to replenish the thin soil layers sitting atop limestone bedrock. These methods recycle the organic materials of the landscape to produce something new and generative. In similar fashion, the historical materials that dot the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phil C. Riris.

Archaeologists have long sought to explain the distribution of rock art traditions across Amazonia and circum-Amazonia with reference to stylistic variability in the iconography, often as a proxy for exploring shared concepts of symbolic representation, mediated through local cultural norms. Where it has been possible, cross-referencing this kind of data with the ethnographic and archaeological records has engendered valuable new interpretations of indigenous symbolic repertoires in a variety of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Savannah Newell. Krystiana Krupa.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Across institutions nationally, willed-body (or cadaver donation) programs use language that, although often vague, typically provides some level of detail regarding what exactly donors are consenting to. This poster assesses use and recovery of the collected body in anthropological contexts, framed using the language of modern body donation. In reviewing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wilhemina Colón Loder. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach. Timothy Beach.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Wetlands played a crucial role in the subsistence methods of early complex polities, including the ancient Maya. The scale of canal development in the Birds of Paradise wetland field complex reflect the status, technological power, and agronomic wealth that wetlands provided to the ancient Maya in this region during the Maya Late Preclassic to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Verenice Heredia Espinoza. Christopher Beekman.

During the Late Postclassic, the Tequila region was home to multiple small, ethnically, and linguistically diverse polities, which both competed and cooperated with one another. This period was highly conflictive due to attempts by the Tarascan Empire to push its way into the valleys, wreaking havoc in several towns along the way. To the north, bellicose, nomadic groups were also a threat to Tequila’s population. Therefore, we hypothesize that Late Postclassic settlement patterns reflect this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Brokaw. Sheila Ward.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part I" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Some archaeologists believe that a key to the success of ancient Maya civilization was sophisticated tailoring of agriculture and forestry to varied environments. Some archaeologists and ecologists also think that ancient forestry is reflected in the tree species composition of modern forests. Based on studies in northwest Belize we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathrin Naegele. Silvia Teresita Hernandez Godoy. Yadira Chinique de Armas.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of ancient Caribbean communities through archaeogenomic methods has seen an increased interest in recent years. In our study in 2020, we demonstrated that the Archaic Age Communities in the Greater Antilles exhibit a different genetic signal from the Ceramic Age communities in the Greater and Lesser Antilles. Still, we could not add more detail...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Hare.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I present an analysis of the landscape connecting shifting ceremonial groups and settlement distributed across the Terminal Classic and Postclassic landscapes in the Mayapán region. Mayapán is the largest Postclassic urban center in the Maya Lowlands and has been the focus of previous research in the area. Traditional and lidar surveys at Mayapán reveal a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Miller.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster offers an introduction to the Proyecto Sacbe Yaxuna-Coba, which is concerned with understanding how social and material life changed for people living along the longest causeway in the ancient Maya world. Up until now, much of the research on Maya sacbeob has focused on the morphology and spatial layout of these monumental features. This project,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruna Rocha. Vinicius Oliveira.

The first millennium AD saw an increase in population density throughout much of Amazonia; this is testified by an increase in the number and size of coeval archaeological sites, many of which include anthropogenic dark earths, widely considered as proxies for intensive and continuous human habitation and alteration of the environment. The Terra Preta do Mangabal and Sawre Muybu sites were village settlements occupied from c.700AD and c.900AD respectively, located along the rapids of the upper...