Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Israel Hinojosa-Balino. Gerardo Gutiérrez.

Mapping caves has always been a daunting task, given the complexity of its forms and the usually difficult access for surveyors and their equipment. 3D modeling of the exterior and interior of some caves is now possible using photogrammetry. Here, we present how we captured the complexity of the Mesoamerican underworld using both drones and digital photography in the caves of Guerrero.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jillian Swift.

Stable isotope analysis of small commensal fauna provides a novel approach to paleoecological reconstruction and investigations of human site activities. The human translocation of rat species, especially the black rat (Rattus rattus), brown rat (R. norvegicus), and Pacific rat (R. exulans), has significantly—and often deleteriously—impacted native floral and faunal communities, particularly within island ecosystems. Rats are small-bodied omnivores with limited home ranges and highly generalized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carla Hadden. Katharine Napora.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Wiggle-match dating (WMD) of tree-ring sequences facilitates high-resolution radiocarbon dating in historical archaeology, a period notorious for an imprecise radiocarbon record. We demonstrate the application of WMD in historical archaeology with two case studies: (1) a cypress dugout logboat exhibiting a unique combination of European and Native American...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Rutecki.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As archaeologists, our ethical obligations include responsibly training future generations of practitioners. Oftentimes, we understand this responsibility as taking the form of training proper field methods, timely and complete reporting of data, and other aspects that deal specifically with the physical aspects of archaeology – artifacts, records, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anastasia Kotsoglou. Andrew Crocker.

The ceremonial center of Tzak Naab, located in the northern hinterlands of the major Maya city of La Milpa, displays many idiosyncratic and unique elements in its built environment that speak to the relationship of the site with the natural landscapes it inhabits. The site core is constructed on three large tiers which overlook the Dumbbell Bajo, a large seasonally inundated wetland. Within this area, aspects of (in)visibility are employed to control movement through—and perception of—space. We...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Ramos.

At present, human population groups in the Colombian Caribbean, in common with people from most regions of the world, face problems associated with the sustainability of resources that results to a large extent from the indiscriminate use of plant and animal species for food among other uses. The phenomenon not only impacts plant and animal species but rebounds, too, on human beings. Although governmental and non-governmental bodies have made some efforts to implement preventive programs...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Reymundo Chapa. Roger Ciuffo.

The Air National Guard (ANG) Cultural Resources Program oversees historic preservation and tribal consultation for 160+ installations throughout the United States and its Territories. One government official and one CEMML Cooperator manage the program centrally from Joint Base Andrews, MD, but the volume of work has prevented officials from managing resources in a proactive and systematic way. As such, managers are applying the Continuous Process Improvement/Lean Six Sigma methodology to focus...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Rodriguez. Nicholas Herrmann.

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 examines the relationship between the Old Church Cemetery and the Jewish Cemetery on the Dutch Caribbean island of Sint Eustatius. These cemeteries are located near each other, yet the people buried in them had different religious ideologies and social positions....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith Luze.

The Anthropology collections at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) have a long history of treatment with pesticides and contact with other materials that contain potentially hazardous elements. When the NMNH Repatriation Office began to use portable x-ray fluorescence (pXRF) technology, it focused on identifying potentially hazardous elements on archaeology, ethnology, and physical anthropology collections. If identified, the Repatriation Office attempted to determine the source of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yamile Lira-Lopez.

El valle de Maltrata se ubica en un punto intermedio de una importante ruta de comunicación, comercio e intercambio entre la Costa del Golfo y el Altiplano Central. Esto permitió que los asentamientos prehispánicos asentados en el valle contaran con la posibilidad de disponer de algunos tipos de artefactos y materiales que no se encontraban en la región cercana. En cuanto a la obsidiana se refiere, la cercanía con los yacimientos del Pico de Orizaba permiten suponer que durante todo el...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Huebert. Melinda S. Allen.

Contact-period accounts point to considerable variability in Polynesian agronomic production systems. In the Marquesas Islands, a mountainous island group in the eastern Pacific, food production in the proto-historic period was narrowly focused on tree cropping and breadfruit cultivation in particular. Early western visitors remarked on the archipelago’s large and thriving island populations, and their stable and productive arboricultural systems. In this paper, we present the results of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pamela Pascali. Kirsten Green Mink. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological sites in the United States are governed by a complex network of state and federal regulations, sovereign tribal governments, and private landowners. This often leads to difficulties managing access to heritage sites and their research potential. In contrast, extant literature describes the efforts of the Belize Institute of Archaeology and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John G. Jones. Nicholas Dunning.

Examination of sediments from several reservoirs at the Preclassic site of Yaxnohkah Campeche, Mexico reveals less that stellar pollen preservation, but still useful botanical data. Thus far, pollen grains show varying degrees of degradation, requiring the use of exacting extraction methods. Cultigens and economic taxa are abundant in the samples demonstrating that we are sampling in the right place, but cyclic wetting and drying has resulted in the loss of fragile taxa, skewing the botanical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Trever Duarte. Jon Tulchin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Thousands of charcoal specimens from 23 traditional Hawaiian sites throughout Ka’ūpūlehu Ahupua’a in north Kona were analyzed to see how kama’aina (“people of the land”) interacted with their environment. Fifty-one plant taxa, including 36 plants of Hawaiian origin and six Polynesian introductions, were identified. Combining charcoal identification and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Wyatt. Cameron S. Griffith. Rebecca Friedel.

The past several decades of research have identified caves as important loci for Precolumbian and historic Maya ritual activity. To the ancient Maya, caves served as portals to the underworld, functioning as sites where ritual practitioners could be in closer contact with important deities and enact rites associated with natural forces. The Belize River Valley has been a significant area for cave exploration and excavation, and Stela Cave in particular, located in the Cayo District in western...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Figueroa.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of the Preceramic period (ca. 11,000–5,000 cal BP) in Mesoamerica has focused on the transition from a foraging way of life toward agriculture, plant domestication, and sedentism. Yet we know little about the processes and contexts that drove this transition, particularly the relationship between foragers and animal prey. In this paper I present...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lane Fargher. Ricardo Antorcha-Pedemonte.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent theoretical advances emerging from Historical Ecology have reoriented thinking regarding human-environment relations in many ancient contexts. Consistent with this research program, the concept of the Maya Forest-Garden introduced by Ford and Nigh and Rivera-Núñez and Fargher’s work on Kanan Ka’ax, among others, have provided a more integrated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Vadala.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study uses a modified actor-network approach to examine and characterize the human and nonhuman relationships that produced and shaped ancient Maya caches and the corresponding ritual events wherein they were buried. This contrasts with archaeological approaches that have generally focused on defining essential properties of artifacts to define or clarify...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenichiro Tsukamoto. Javier López Camacho. Luz Evelia Campaña Valenzuela. Xanti Ceballos Pesina.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) survey has changed our perspectives on ancient Maya urbanism. In 2017, we conducted airborne lidar mapping at the Classic Maya city of El Palmar, located in southeastern Campeche, Mexico, covering a total area of 94 km2. Results show monumental architecture, possible marketplaces, causeways, vast intensive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zoè Vélez Álvarez.

This is an abstract from the "Primary Sources and the Design of Research Projects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the early 20th century, agriculture was one of the most important industries in the economy of Puerto Rico. The production of crops such as sugar cane, coffee, tobacco and minor fruits (mostly plants like plantain, tubers, rice and corn). Traditionally, archaeological research in the Caribbean, especially in Puerto Rico has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Gonzalez Lauck.

The National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City holds the largest collection of archaeological artifacts in the country. A recent survey and inventory of the objects that form the Gulf Coast cultures section has revealed a more comprehensive and detailed view of the composition of it. This paper will present an overview of this collection providing information on the site provenience of the artifacts; what private collections were incorporated into it; the types of artifacts, as well as their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Zegarra.

Ethnographic research is herein demonstrated to contribute a crucially important initial step in the re-construction of indigenous histories and to building a praxis of collaborative archaeology. Ethnographic research was conducted during two field seasons in 2015 and 2016 in and around the sprawling ruins of the capital city of the Wari Empire in the central highlands of Peru to reach an understanding of the contemporary cultural idiosyncrasies pertinent to the Peruvian historical context. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Babcock.

This is an abstract from the "Art, Archaeology, and Science: Investigations in the Guatemala Highlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The K’iche’an ethnohistoric documents posit movement of Chontal-Nahuan groups into, and conquest of, the central Guatemalan highlands. A list of K’iche’ rulers was used to establish a timeline for occupation of the archaeological sites of Chujuyub, Jakawitz, and Q’umarkaj. Accordingly coinciding with the fall of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Saldana. James Brady. Christian Mora.

This is an abstract from the "Defining Perishables: The How, What, and Why of Perishables and Their Importance in Understanding the Past" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Variations in the deposition of maize remains have been noted in different Maya caves. These vary from the discovery of small immature cobbs, 3 to 5 cm in length, which appear to represent first fruit rituals to large deposits of mature cobbs in ritual contexts that appear to have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert DeMuth. Joshua J. Wells. Kelsey Noack Myers. David Anderson. Eric Kansa.

This paper uses "big data" about archaeological sites from the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) to reflexively assess and interpret how archaeology has affected minority communities. DINAA’s data set represents an almost complete record of the current extent of archaeological site definitions, within the project’s area of effect. Therefore, collectively, these data can reveal information about archaeologists and archaeology as a discipline, as well as the past. As public...