Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roberto Rosado Ramirez. Heather McKillop. E. Cory Sills.

In this paper we present the results of archaeological research at two Classic period Maya salt works currently submerged in a shallow salt-water lagoon in Paynes Creek National Park, Southern Belize. These two contexts are part of the more than 100 locations so far identified in the area where salt was produced by boiling brine over fires near wooden structures. Through the study of marine sediment recovered at excavations from sites 24 and 35, we were able to document environmental and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kurt Dilores. Heather McKillop.

Archaeological research in Paynes Creek National Park, Belize provides insight into environmental changes over time. Sea-level rise has affected coastal Maya settlements during both the Classic and Postclassic Periods. Marine sediment samples from five submerged Classic Period Maya sites were exported under permit to the Archaeology lab at Louisiana State University where the samples were analyzed using loss-on ignition and microscopic sorting. The results from loss-on ignition as well as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Pérez Pérez. Carmen Cristina Adriano-Moran. Ximena Maria Chávez Balderas.

Paleodiet analysis from individuals found inside the Great Temple ritual deposits have been succesfully conducted by analyzing carbon and nitrogen isotopes, with the aim of distinguishing between marine and terrestrial diets. Recently, we incorporated microbotanical analysis of dental calculus to these studies in order to search for plants remains, with the goal of having a broad picture of ancient diet and paramasticatory use of the oral cavity. For this purpose we selected individuals with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paris Franklin. Mitchell E. McElwain. Bradford W. Andrews. Amanda K. Taylor. Dennis Lewarch.

This poster presents a technological analysis of obsidian artifacts from two Aztec-period surface collections in the Coatlan del Rio Valley, located in what is now the modern state of Morelos, Mexico. The deposits are from residential terraces collected in 4 x 4 m units. Designs on ceramics collected with the lithics indicate primary occupation after 1400 CE. This study has two primary objectives: first, we technologically classify the artifacts in the collections; second, we evaluate whether...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Detwiler. David Lentz.

This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents an analysis of botanical remains recovered from archaeological contexts at the Aventura site, located in what is now northern Belize. A total of 478 large carbonized plant fragments, 167 flotation samples, and 10 eDNA samples were included in this analysis. Samples were recovered from a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Saldaña. Tia Watkins. Rosamund Fitzmaurice. Adam Jurský. Julie Hoggarth.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ceremonial center of Baking Pot, Belize is one of the longest occupied sites in the Belize River Valley, starting in the Late Middle Preclassic (600–300 BC) and spanning through the Terminal Classic (AD 750–900/1000) period, with some evidence of reoccupation during the Late Postclassic (AD 1200–1521) period. Considerable research efforts over the past...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Ruiz Vélez. Taylor Bowden.

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. In June 2018, excavations were conducted at Fort Amsterdam, a military fortification, on the leeward side of St. Eustatius, along the Caribbean coast. Many different types of ceramics were found during the investigations, including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George J. Micheletti.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ritual and its practice were essential mechanisms for negotiating social identity, status, and political involvement for all members of ancient Maya society. Yet, changes to ritual practices through time are often framed around the legitimization of royal elite, reifying traditional models of dominant ideology. Identifying how ritual of periphery...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aimee Alvarado.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Peri-abandonment deposits in the Maya region have been a source of contention in recent years given the varied artifact assemblages and the lack of clear understanding for their purpose. This research describes peri-abandonment deposits at Xunantunich, Group B, an elite residential plazuela group located approximately 150 meters from the site core. Excavations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guy Duke. Sarah Rowe. Sara Juengst.

This is an abstract from the "Finding Community in the Past and Present through the 2022 PARCC Field School at Buen Suceso, Ecuador" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In many ways, Buen Suceso is a unique archaeological site. Not only is it a multicomponent site, with evidence for occupation throughout almost the entirety of the ~2,200-year Valdivia sequence and specialized use by the much later Manteño culture, but it exhibits an occupational...

DOCUMENT Citation Only A. L. van Gijn. Valerio Gentile.

This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us using the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa DeLance. Jaime Awe.

Archaeologists working in Mesoamerica frequently encounter construction fill within architecture. Construction fill has been variously used as a tool for determining architectural construction sequences, as a resource for seriation dating, and occasionally as a context for radiocarbon deposits. Although much information can be gleaned from examining construction fill, material culture found within such fill is frequently mentioned in passing as little more than refuse, if it is mentioned at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Whitney Lytle.

This is an abstract from the "The Preclassic Landscape in the Mopan Valley, Belize" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancestor veneration was a cornerstone for Maya social organization and vital to the maintenance of hierarchy. As the Maya became more politically and socially complex, ritual practices involving ancestors also rose in complexity. Critical to the concept of ancestors is the recognition of the bond between ancestors and spaces. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kerry Sagebiel. Helen Haines.

Maya archaeologists commonly discover "smash-and-trash" deposits, collections consisting of large quantities of broken sherds, lithics, faunal materials, and other remains, in varying contexts on Maya sites. Interpretations of these deposits vary from simple trash or midden deposits, to remains of feasting, to termination and other rituals. These interpretations are often strongly influenced by the theoretical and analytical approaches taken by the excavators. At Ka’Kabish, Belize, a series of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Riordan. Julie Field.

This is an abstract from the "Geospatial Studies in the Archaeology of Oceania" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of landscapes of movement establishes the theoretical basis for understanding meaning behind the creation and use of roads, trails, and pathways. This meaning can be categorized by "prioritized relationships" (i.e., social, political, religious, economic) which ultimately stimulate the existence of landscapes of movement. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Halperin.

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. Ruination studies allow one to see the past not as a fixed “thing” but as living landscapes that emerge from, enliven, and incorporate temporal dimensions, ancestors, and animating forces young and old, near and far. Furthermore, over the past two decades Mesoamerican scholars have increasingly recognized that ruins were an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Kosiba. Bruce Mannheim.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond the Round House: Spatial Logic and Settlement Organization across the Late Andean Highlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholars of the Andes often assume that the social units they study—residence, community, and region—are monotonically scaled, nested from smaller to larger. This suggests universal correspondences between the analytical and observational objects through which social units are known; hence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Leon Romero.

Cacao had a transcendental role in the life of prehistoric people of Mesoamerica, becoming part of their economic, ideological and social system. Due to the morphological and environmental characteristics necessary for the growth of cacao tree, the main producers were concentrated in places like southern Mexico and Central America. However, written sources of the first colonizers in Yucatan disclose that the indigenous nobility of that time had at their disposal cacao orchards in different...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rissa Trachman.

Investigations at the ancient Maya city of Dos Hombres have been guided by an interest in social, political and economic organization, based on architecture and material culture remains. Excavations in the civic ceremonial center of Dos Hombres have been focused in the northern plaza, a very public space that likely was a place of commerce, public ritual and sacred space, thereby the prime backdrop for publicly legitimizing authority. Newly excavated data, especially architectural exposures as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Hutson.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican Population History: Demography, Social Complexity, and Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research in northwest Yucatán, Mexico, has played a large role in the development of demographic archaeology in the Maya area, beginning with Edward Thompson’s nineteenth-century investigations of housemounds at Labna and reaching a mid-twentieth-century pinnacle with maps of Mayapan and Dzibilchaltun. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Nakatsuka. Vera Tiesler. Jakob Sedig. David Reich.

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. The colonial period in Mexico was an unprecedented time when previously disparate populations began living together under Hispanic leadership and Catholic faith, often unwillingly. Immediately after the conquest, Spanish colonists established urban strongholds, often bringing African slaves and servants with them. In these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ash Matchett.

Studies into ancient DNA have advanced significantly in the last few years, but these have largely been absent in tropical environments. In the Caribbean, a number of questions still pertain as to the bioarchaeology of the indigenous pre-Columbian populations and the exact origin of these early inhabitants. Focusing on the skeletal remains of a late Saladoid population from Punta Candelero site (AD 640-1200), three correlated and simultaneous studies have been coordinated with the aim to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juan Melendez.

To date, nine greenstone mosaic masks (GMM), recovered in eight royal and one elite interment, have been found in association with other grave goods belonging to ancient Maya individuals from Tikal, El Zotz, and El Perú-Waka’. Nearly 1,000 tesserae compose these nine GMM, however to date it is unknown what the mosaic masks originally looked like as these were found unassembled. Nonetheless, prior to carrying out preliminary reintegration and restoration projects, a manufacturing study was deemed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theresa Heindel.

Recent studies on ancient Maya agriculture address differences in farming methods used within the Maya area, and the implications these differences have for larger issues within Maya studies. Excavations conducted during the Actuncan Archaeological Project 2015/2016 field seasons examined GPR anomalies in the Northern Neighborhood region of the Actuncan, Belize site; the proposed poster will discuss evidence of terracing obtained from these excavations, including how these probable terraces were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Thornton. Richard Hansen. Edgar Suyuc.

El Mirador (Peten, Guatemala) is among the largest Preclassic settlements in the Maya lowlands. The site has attracted attention due to its size and antiquity, but also for its location within a region containing few permanent or perennial water sources. This study presents a preliminary analysis of the site’s faunal remains to assess diet, ritual, habitat use and exchange. Comparison of the El Mirador data with other Preclassic faunal assemblages allows us to assess the degree to which animal...