Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edgar Carpio.

Archaeologist Stephan Borhegyi contributed significantly to the development of archeology in Guatemala in the late 1950s and early 1960s with his investigations both in the highlands and on the Pacific Coast. He was a pioneer in underwater archeology at Lake Amatitlán and carried out studies at other sites around the lake. He also made important entries on different archaeological sites in the Highlands and on the Pacific Coast, particularly on the Bilbao site. In Guatemala, his works were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ani St. Amand.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a complex climatic phenomenon that has shaped both the environment and human behavior on the North Coast of Peru for millennia. Currently, El Niño, a component of ENSO, occurs every 3-8 years. Often associated with heavy rains that penetrate this normally arid coastal desert, ENSO brings flooding, erosion, and an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia McAnany.

This is an abstract from the "Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Theory—the workhorse of evidence—is a powerful engine that can revolutionize understanding or create a huge misstep. To theorize the past is to generalize principles and processes of human practice that surpass cultural boundaries. By participating in these larger networks of meaning,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Yaeger. Bernadette Cap. M. Kathryn Brown. Rachel Horowitz.

This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists working in Belize have made signal contributions to our knowledge of Maya economies and their relationships to political processes and dynamics. In this paper, we examine the ways that archaeological research at Maya sites in Belize has advanced our understanding of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Holley Moyes. Jaime Awe. Christophe Helmke. Jon Spenard.

This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout the Maya area, caves are recognized as unambiguous ritual contexts that provide scholars with a glimpse into the ritual life of ancient people. Religious ritual was not epiphenomenal as some theoretical stances would argue, but was intertwined with the social and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Dudar.

Since the inception of the Repatriation Office at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in 1991, the documentation of Native American skeletal remains has been accomplished by the Repatriation Osteology Lab. The need for a computerized data entry system was recognized as a critical component to the success of this process along with a structured database for data access and management. The resulting software interface and SQL relational database, called Osteoware, is available to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Hoopes.

This is an abstract from the "Unraveling the Mysteries of the Isthmo-Colombian Area’s Past: A Symposium in Honor of Archaeologist Richard Cooke and His Contributions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Richard Cooke's pioneering studies in zooarchaeology of the Neotropics have redefined the way that archaeologists, art historians, ethnohistorians, and ethnographers utilize data from faunal remains, not only in the reconstruction of past environments,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Zender.

This is an abstract from the "The Rollout Keepers: Papers on Maya Ceramic Texts, Scenes, and Styles in Honor of Justin and Barbara Kerr" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paleography (from Greek παλαιό- ‘old’ and γράφε ‘writing’) was long understood as the study of the origins and development of signs (e.g., De Montfaucon, Paleaeografica Graeca, 1708), but since the welcome focus on ductus (i.e., shape, stance, and stroke-order in sign-formation)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Ranere.

This is an abstract from the "Unraveling the Mysteries of the Isthmo-Colombian Area’s Past: A Symposium in Honor of Archaeologist Richard Cooke and His Contributions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The PSM was a multidisciplinary project in Central Pacific Panama with the major fieldwork carried out during the years 1981 through 1986. The goals of the proposed research were to identify the relationships between settlement types and subsistence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gavin Davies. Tomas Barrientos Quezada.

Lake Atitlan sits within the Sierra Madre mountain chain which represents the physical divide between the Guatemalan highlands and the Pacific lowlands. It was thus ideally situated to act as a hub for cultural and economic exchanges between these two contrasting ecological zones. The three imposing volcanoes that line its southern shore, however, severely limited options for travel between these areas and commerce and settlement thus concentrated around obvious natural corridors such as those...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Wolff. Michelle Bebber. Metin Eren. Amanda Samuels. Donald Holly.

This is an abstract from the "From Hard Rock to Heavy Metal: Metal Tool Production and Use by Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recently, more attention has been focused on the assessment of convergence versus divergence of technology in the archaeological record. This ties into long-standing debates concerning our ability to recognize if similar traditions resulted from diffusion or migration, as well as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Halperin. Jose Luis Garrido Lopez. Miriam Salas. Jean Baptiste LeMoine.

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. The Maya archaeological site of Ucanal is located in Peten, Guatemala, close to the contemporary border with Belize. In Pre-Columbian times, the site also sat at the borders of some of the largest political centers, such as Caracol (Belize) and Naranjo (Peten, Guatemala)....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gloria Lara-Pinto.

This is an abstract from the "The Problem of the Monument: Widening Perspectives on Monumentality in the Archaeology of the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A couple of years ago some good meaning citizens offered to donate complete ceramic pieces along with other objects they had “collected” from their properties to the regional campus of my university in southern Honduras. These same local citizens declared themselves a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lyrsa María Torres-Vélez.

Puerto Rico’s culinary history is characterized by a blend of the different ethnicities that settled in the island after the Spanish Conquest, as well as the incorporation of pre-Columbian food ways. This ethnogenesis can be studied through the culinary traditions that conform what we now refer to as criollo. This presentation uses El Cocinero Puerto-Riqueño, the only cookbook available from the 19th century in Puerto Rico, as a primary source to address the material culture associated to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katelyn McDonough. Madeline Mackie.

This is an abstract from the "Hearths, Earth Ovens, and the Carbohydrate Revolution: Indigenous Subsistence Strategies and Cooking during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding how Indigenous communities used plants during the Pleistocene is fundamental to addressing questions about long-term ecological relationships, dietary practices, and adaptive strategies. Pleistocene plant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Ciofalo. Devon Graves.

Recent archaeobotanical research on the Palmetto Junction archaeological site located in Providenciales, Turks and Caicos Islands, provides new insights into the livelihoods and subsistence practices of the peoples who inhabited this coastal region from c. AD 1200-1500 Significantly, the plant microbotanical remains, identified as primarily seeds and tubers provide evidence for a continuation in the consumption and manipulation of plant resources. During the late precolonial period people used...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Novotny.

This is an abstract from the "Cooperative Bodies: Bioarchaeology and Non-ranked Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In ancient complex societies, unique social strata had differential access to food resources and likely relied on different food procurement strategies to meet their needs. This paper explores the extent to which cooperation was part of that strategy for the ancient Maya farmers of the Chan site, located in the Belize River...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Simon Martin.

The peripheral location of Copan has always raised questions about the ways in which it related to the core of the Maya world. Clearly Copan was no isolate in the Classic Maya tradition, divorced from developments elsewhere, but what did it continue to draw from the center and what were the mechanisms underlying those contacts? What do we know about the influence of centrally placed polities in this far-flung region, which held a symbolic status in the far east, but could never be a significant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandre Tokovinine.

This presentation reassesses the chronology and meaning of the inscription on the hieroglyphic step of the Ante structure at Copan, Honduras. The analysis was made possible by a high-resolution 3D scan of the step produced in 2011. The new interpretation indicates that the city of Copan underwent a re-foundation event upon the accession of its eighth ruler, Wi’ Ohl K’inich. The known contexts of similar statements are discussed along with the implications of several possible translations for our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Weston McCool.

Warfare was a significant sociopolitical practice throughout the Andes during the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000–1450). A salient research topic within broader investigations of conflict is how populations cope with chronic warfare. This article utilizes statistical and GIS-based analyses of architectural features and settlement patterns to reconstruct defensive coping mechanisms among fortified settlements in the Southern Nasca region of Peru. Specifically, this research evaluates how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Monette Bebow-Reinhard.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pre-contact copper manufacture and trade in the Americas is poorly understood. To remedy this, over the last decade I have compiled a master database of over 85,000 pre-contact copper artifacts recovered from across the Americas, with source materials from museums, online, and private collections. I present an overview of the pre-contact copper industry in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Cramb. Victor Thompson.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Polynesian atolls are often viewed as outlying provinces or "outer Islands" as compared to larger high islands. These often remote and diminutive coral islands are, and were, home to relatively small populations. Many coral island groups trace ancestry to, and had sustained contact with, high islands. These past connections and modern sociopolitical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Greig. Richard Walter.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of ‘hinterland’ encompasses ideas of distance, marginality and challenge and is often contrasted with ‘core’, which in turn implies centrality and resource richness. In this paper we address the applicability of both these concepts in New Zealand and examine their role in understanding long-term Maori history. We suggest that high...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Brady. Ann Scott.

This is an abstract from the "Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Subterranean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Petexbatun Regional Cave Survey, working for three seasons from 1990 – 1993, was the largest cave project ever conducted in the Maya area. While investigating 22 caves and 11 km of passage, the survey collected a large assemblage of human skeletal material that had the potential for clarifying the nature of human remains in caves....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tara Smith.

The formative period dwarf imagery in Mesoamerica offers an exemplary opportunity to further our understanding of the Olmec cosmovision and how their ideology spread throughout the region. This study specifically compares the three monumental sandstone dwarfs at La Venta to the portable dwarfs carved in stone and sculpted from clay found elsewhere within the Olmec exchange network. I discuss the origin of Dwarf imagery within the Olmec artistic style through an analysis of stylistic trends and...