Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenna Domeischel.

This is an abstract from the "Touching the Past: Public Archaeology Engagement through Existing Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological curators struggle with the growing number of collections in our repositories, a phenomenon commonly referred to as the ‘curation crisis.’ Yet ‘crisis’ is an acute term, when the problem is instead chronic. The discipline of archaeology marches on, and so must repositories, even as the quantities...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosemary Joyce.

Knowledge of Formative Period Mesoamerican archaeological sites often comes from narrow windows into buried sites. One feature has been a partial exception to this rule: burials. Groups of Formative Period burials, often accompanied by objects, have been recovered in many parts of Mesoamerica. Using models of mortuary treatment that saw burials as reflecting individual identity, burials provided one of the first ways researchers could examine the emergence of stratification within these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Celise Chilcote-Fricker.

This is an abstract from the "Centralizing Central America: New Evidence, Fresh Perspectives, and Working on New Paradigms" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The characteristics and roles of the preconquest cultures that once existed in Central America have long been the subject of debate, the main focus of which revolves around the nature of their relationships to the surrounding Mesoamerican and Chibchan cultural areas. Largely accepted that no...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Scherer.

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. Houston’s "The Life Within" is among the most perceptive and nuanced statements on Classic Maya materials and the animate quality of things. Here, I draw inspiration from this future-classic work to more deeply probe Maya understandings of bone – a material most generally treated by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only L. Antonio Curet.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For a long time, the Ceremonial Center of Tibes has been considered by many of us as evidence of incipient social stratification and monopolization of power in the Caribbean. However, a long-term project at this site has failed to find clear evidence of strong social differentiation and has forced us to begin explaining either the presence of social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Kollias.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The notion of debt pervades anthropological discussion of political economy and exchange. Often used as a descriptor of unequal relationships it also embodies notions of reciprocity, expectation, and mutuality. Debt carries with it a charged negativity in many contexts, conveying experiences of precarity and violence, pressure and visibility. However, debt can...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lane Fargher. Robert Cook.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican and Andean Cities: Old Debates, New Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The colonialist academic project has long obliterated complexity in the precontact Americas. From the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the complexity of Mesoamerican societies was erased; for example, the massive cities encountered by Cortés were deconstructed as simple villages/towns inhabited by tribes. Not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only D. Marie Weide. Maria C. Bruno. Christine A. Hastorf. Sherilyn Fritz.

As the greater project of this symposium attests, we want to become more aware of the constraints of our historical training and try to not separate culture from nature, or politics from the environment in our study of the past. Towards that end, the authors have been working on understanding water and lake level regimes of the southern Titicaca Basin, to better understand the history of this shallow lake and the people that lived around it from the Formative through the Late Horizon. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Zeidler.

This paper explores the notions of ‘material memory’ and human agency in deep time as expressed in the repetitive reconstruction of earthen platform mounds over some three millennia in the Jama Valley of coastal Manabí Province, Ecuador. Empirical evidence of repetitive mound-building is presented over a long stratigraphic record extending from approximately 2030 BCE to about 1260 CE, and special emphasis is given to the site of San Isidro, a major civic-ceremonial site and ‘persistent place’...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josue T. Guzman.

The Fort of San Diego, at Acapulco, was built and garrisoned since the early 17th-century, in order to repel pirates or naval forces of enemy countries. After the 1776 earthquake, the fortress was entirely redesigned, rebuilt and fitted, according to criteria then in use. This new structure was besieged by an insurgent army, leaded by Morelos during the Mexican Independence War in 1813. The fort was continuously occupied by military personnel until 20th-century, when it became the local...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eunice Villasenor Iribe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Terraced landscapes are the geomorphic remains of dynamic cultural processes. Terraces were constructed in a range of environmental conditions to serve a variety of ecological and social functions. In Mesoamerica, terrace use spans thousands of years and is often associated with agricultural production. This study investigates the utilization of terraced...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesús Alberto Aldana Mendoza. Carlos Del Cairo Hurtado. Carla Riera Andreu. Laura Victoria Báez Santos.

This is an abstract from the "Underwater and Coastal Archaeology in Latin America" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cartagena de Indias’ geostrategic importance for the European colonial powers in the eighteenth century led to the creation of defense infrastructures and the development of practices to strengthen and protect the coastal territory. All the infrastructures and cultural practices inherent to the “militarization” of this territory...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hernando Giraldo Tenorio.

The prehispanic societies from the Cauca river Valley, Colombia, have been portrayed as classical examples of the development of political complexity caused by intergroup conflict for basic resources in constrained environments. However, the existence of warfare in the region itself has not been backed by strong archaeological evidence. The re-analysis of the earth structures of the archaeological site of Malagana, in southwestern Colombia, suggest the existence of regional warfare, which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scotti Norman.

Investigations into Early Colonial Period status and identity of New World indigenous people have focused on assemblages of Spanish and indigenous goods in domestic and public contexts (Deagan 2003, Rice 2012). These studies have investigated how access to new goods and foodways may have reflected status among indigenous people, or how use of these imports in specific contexts were markers of changing identities. This paper presents excavation results at Iglesiachayoq (Ayacucho, Peru), an Inka...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eva Lemonnier. Charlotte Arnauld.

Based on the study of two Classic Maya Lowland sites, La Joyanca and Naachtun (Guatemala), this paper explores the topic of rurality through the parameters of potential land use, visible architectural variation, and plausible population mobility. La Joyanca was a medium-sized settlement surrounded by villages and hamlets all of which were recorded by means of conventional surface mapping, whereas Naachtun was a regional capital located amidst extended communities linked by causeways that have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Miller.

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. The main work areas of cultural site stewardship are easy to identify: access to authentic sites for assessment, repeat visits to heritage sites, a database to track changes in those sites over time, and volunteer training partnered with professional archaeologists. However, the “why”...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Lane.

Territory boundaries can often be difficult to identify archaeologically despite their importance in understanding the larger population process of competition between groups in the past. This analysis tests our ability to define archaeological territories on islands based on geospatial relationships between resources and fortifications. Territories are the result of historical processes of competition between groups. Testing of this method is conducted for the island of Rapa, Austral Islands,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Roos. Julie Field. John Dudgeon.

This is an abstract from the "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Remote islands in the Pacific Ocean experienced dramatic environmental transformations after initial human settlement in the last 3,000 years. Human causality of this environmental degradation has been largely unquestioned, but examination of regional records suggests a role for climate influences. Here we use charcoal and stable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karime Castillo. Patricia Fournier. Roberto Junco.

In the viceregal society of New Spain, Chinese porcelain objects were expensive objects consumed primarily by people of high status. The white porcelain objects produced in Dehua, located in the Fujian province of China, were incorporated into the household items of palaces and mansions, as indicated by archaeological evidence from Mexico City, Acapulco, Sinaloa, and some rural sites in the Otumba Valley. The production of this fine porcelain, also known as Blanc de Chine, involved complex...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xin Lin. Guopeng Chen.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The procurement and consumption of jade are conventionally thought to have been under the control of Maya elites. Through cross-cultural comparison with ancient China as a representative jade-using culture, we argue that the multidimensional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Ratcliffe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya of the Belize River Valley maintained a strong, spiritual connection with nature, one that can be explored through the layers of religious symbolism imbued into their built environments. In Xunantunich during the Late Classic period, the Maya created a sacred space by incorporating symbols—such as stelae, altars, and cache deposits—into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Corl. Kristina Solis. Robert J. Hard. Michelle Carpenter.

A series of mortuary sites on the Texas Coastal Plain provide a dataset useful for analyzing demographic change through examination of age profiles. Other archaeological data suggest that populations peaked during the Late Archaic period (4000-800 BP) and sharply declined during the Late Prehistoric period (800-350 BP). Analysis of the ratio of adults to young individuals has been used to identify rapid population growth among other populations. Hunter-gatherer groups living in the Texas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Webster.

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. Recent projects in the Buenavista region, some 25 km to the east at Tikal, reveal a landscape of probable Early Classic conflict. What seem to be large defensive features are positioned on a frontier between El Zotz and the Tikal polity. Despite the impressive size of these features, which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Newland. Alex DeGeorgey.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past seven years, Alta Heritage Foundation (AHF) has responded to nearly a dozen catastrophic fires on the west coast. AHF is a 501(c) non-profit that works with canine human remains recovery teams to identify cremains, the cremated remains of individuals who were cremated prior to the fire and stored in private residences, and retrieve them for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrés Mejía Ramón.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent availability of small multispectral sensors small enough to equip on unmanned aerial systems (UASs0 now allows archaeologists to survey the landscape at increasingly finer resolutions (10-20 cm) with topographic and compositional data. While at present the number of published archaeological studies using UAS-equipped multispectral cameras is small,...