Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
276-300 (3,437 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Islands have long appeared to Western eyes as naturally bounded entities. It has been proposed that they represent ‘natural laboratories’ for understanding natural and cultural evolution. At the same time, islands are recognised as contact zones, for example historian Greg Dening has outlined the significance of...
Artisan production and morphological changes in skeletons from San Jose de Moro (North coast of Peru) (2017)
The study of occupational stress markers was an attractive investigation field some years ago, due to the alleged possibility for the identification of ancient activities through skeletal changes. Nevertheless, a critical vision of the issue evidences that this relation is not so easy to establish, because bone biology is complex and also because different activities may produce similar changes. This does not mean that this type of studies should be abandoned. On the contrary, it is a call for...
Arts and Sciences of Ancient Plants at McMaster University (2017)
Since 2013, the McMaster Paleoethnobotanical Research Facility (MPERF) has explored questions surrounding the relationship between humans and plants, including plant cultivation and collection, consumption and social uses of flora, and interactions between people and landscape. Active projects address human-plant dynamics throughout different regions of Mesoamerica, South America, and Ontario, at time periods ranging from the Late Pleistocene through historic periods. With recent support from...
Ascendancy through Ancestry: Evidence of Late Classic Sociopolitical Change at the Ancient Maya Site of Pacbitun, Belize (2017)
The ceremonial architecture of Pacbitun’s epicentral plaza was recently discovered to have underwent a drastic early Late Classic (AD 550 – 700) transformation. The assemblage, originally designated as a Southern Lowland architectural archetype known as an E Group complex, was uniquely modified physically and adopted an intensive mortuary practice that seemingly altered the group’s function. The inclusion of several Late Classic elite interments suggests that Pacbitun’s ceremonial assemblage had...
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust : the role of wood in ancient maya funerary sequences (2017)
From 2014 to 2016, the intensive excavation of the residential unit 5N6 in Naachtun (Guatemala) has yielded 13 burials intricately linked with the evolution of the architecture. Put together, these funerary contexts allow for a fine-scale reconstruction of the local dynamics and everyday life in the unit. However, funerary archaeologists often fail to consider the burial itself as a micro-context, a combination of significant gestures and actions that can be analyzed using the same principles as...
Aspectos constructivos del Grupo Cascabel (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Multidisciplinary Investigations in the Mirador Basin, Guatemala" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En la última década, el Proyecto Cuenca Mirador ha trabajado en el Grupo Cascabel ubicado al norte de la gran plaza principal del sitio El Mirador. Su meta ha sido la investigación arqueológica y consolidación arquitectónica de varios edificios de este grupo para conocer los aspectos constructivos de épocas...
Assessing Agricultural Intensification in Greater Chiriquí during the Aguas Buenas Period (2021)
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 Aguas Buenas (roughly 300 BC–AD 900) was a period characterized by the growth of small villages and the development of identifiable settlement hierarchies in certain areas. This paper applies a variant of the site catchment analysis originally articulated by Steponaitis (1981) to evaluate the relationship between...
Assessing Botanical Diversity of Late-to-Terminal Classic Households at Xunantunich, Belize (2018)
Understanding household plant use can provide a wealth of data about subsistence practices, past agricultural systems, and strategies used to mitigate climatic stress. Plant use may also vary between households. By examining this variation, botanical data may yield further information on personal preference and cuisine differences between households. Aside from consumption for subsistence, plants were used for a wide range of activities conducted by individual households. Botanical datasets may...
Assessing Classic Maya Intermediate Elite Political Strategies through Multivariate Statistical Manipulation of Settlement Pattern Data (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intermediate elites played pivotal roles in the politics of ancient complex societies across the world. In the Classic period (AD 250-900/1000) Maya lowlands, intermediate elites acted as intercessors between apical rulers and commoners. These intermediate elites and the political strategies they employed, however, have rarely taken center stage in...
Assessing Defensibility: Geospatial Analyses of Preclassic to Colonial Highland Maya Settlement Patterns (2017)
Postclassic Maya settlement patterns have long been explained in terms of the increasing defensibility in the transition from Classic period settlement patterns. Drawing on arguments for the increased militancy and conflict that characterized the Maya region in the wake of the Classic "collapse", this narrative has endured despite minimal cross-context, large scale assessment. This paper presents the results of a large-scale, in-progress diachronic geospatial analysis of Maya settlement...
Assessing Destruction Risk of Cultural Resources: Primary and Secondary Impacts of Climate Change on the Archaeological Record (2018)
Coastal archaeological and historic sites increasingly face primary impacts of climate change, including sea level rise, flooding, and erosion. As cultural sites are subjected to destructive processes, action is generally limited to mitigation and salvage of immediately threatened significant sites, while their destruction by the resettlement of affected communities has been given little attention. This secondary impact of climate change threatens sites outside of the immediate zone of flooding...
Assessing Human-Animal Interactions in Mesoamerica: Ancient Maya Use of the Black-Throated Bobwhite (Colinus nigrogularis) (2017)
This paper examines human-animal interaction between the ancient Maya and the black-throated bobwhite (Colinus nigrogularis), a small quail resident to Central America. We provide a literature review of the occurrence of bobwhite remains in Maya faunal assemblages. Unpublished faunal analyses by the primary author, in conjunction with the published literature, suggest that the bobwhite, like many animals in Mesoamerica, was of greater importance to the Maya than as a mere dietary food. We...
Assessing hunter-gatherer mobility in Australia's Western Desert using historic aerial imagery from the 1950s (2017)
Access to water, food, and other resources is a critical factor structuring hunter-gatherer mobility, but few landscape-level studies have examined how resource availability influences where foragers go and how long they remain at one place before moving on. Using a newly available set of aerial images from the Western Desert of Australia taken in 1953, we utilize a simple ideal-free distribution model to reconstruct forager mobility by the fire footprints they leave behind. We examine three...
Assessing Knowledge of Native American Tribes and Their Heritage: An interactive Poster (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The practice of American archaeology, and the knowledge it produces, have impacts on the social, economic, and political policies and laws which affect Native American Tribes and Native American community members. Non-Native cultural heritage and resource managers, academic researchers, and museum staff who work with Tribal heritage often lack basic knowledge...
Assessing prehistoric herding strategies through stable isotope analysis: a case study from the Dry Puna of Argentina (2017)
The relationship between human groups and animal populations in the past can be studied through stable isotope analysis of zooarchaeological remains. More specifically, the isotopic analysis of domestic animals’ tissues can help us to investigate herd composition, diet and mobility strategies employed by herders in the past. However, before these methods can be applied to resolve such questions, variation in isotopic composition and its causes must be addressed and explored by a modern reference...
Assessing Stable Isotope Data from Archaeological White-tailed Deer Remains as a Palaeoenvironmental Proxy at the Site of La Joyanca, Northwestern Peten, Yucatan Peninsula (2017)
The sociopolitical reorganization of the Maya that took place during the Terminal Classic (AD 850–1050) has been interpreted as being correlated to regional environmental change, specifically drought. However, few climate reconstructions come from the southern Maya lowlands where the decline occurred during this period. While most paleoenvironmental reconstructions lack a local, site-related signature and instead reflect regional trends, stable isotope analyses of herbivore faunal remains have...
Assessing the Chronological Variation Within the Western Stemmed Tradition (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Perspectives on the Western Stemmed Tradition-Clovis Debate in the Far West" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) projectile points exhibit considerable morphological variability, which may reflect difference in function, ethnolinguistic affiliation, resharpening/rejuvenation, or age. These ideas represent hypotheses that remain to be tested, and rejecting one or more of them will...
Assessing the Population History of the Atacama Desert using 3D Geometric Morphometric Methods (2017)
Many scholarly debates in South American archaeology have centered on the discovery and cranial morphology of the earliest inhabitants known as Paleoamericans that predate 8,000 years BP. Although it was initially hypothesized that cranial differences between Paleoamericans and later populations may reflect distinct biological populations or migration patterns that occurred after the initial colonization of South America, recent genetic data show biological continuity throughout the Holocene in...
Assessing the Taphonomic Alterations of 29 Human Anatomical Specimens Confiscated in Louisiana (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Anatomical specimens used for teaching frequently become available for sale online. In one Louisiana case, authorities confiscated 29 human anatomical specimens. These specimens are used to highlight the breadth of information that can be gathered from such isolated human remains. Anatomical specimens are easily identified by the techniques used to prepare...
Assessing Threats to Coastal Sites: A Trial Run on St Croix, USVI (2018)
The International Association for Caribbean Archaeology's Endangered Sites Task Force is concerned about the threat to coastal sites by rising sea levels. In March 2017, a small team of Mercer University non-archaeology students participated in a project on ST Croix, USVI, to determine how local populations could best provide measurable information to professional archaeologists and cultural resource managers. The five-day project assessed ten sites assigned by the USVI Territorial...
An Assessment of Water Resources at Chichen Itza (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Studies in Mesoamerican Subterranean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Water has long been recognized as a critical but scarce resource in the Yucatan. At Chichen Itza, water resources have not received the attention they deserve. Traditionally, because of the focus on the Sacred Cenote, the Cenote Xtoloc became by default the profane cenote. Clearly, such a simplistic and culture-bound dichotomy tells us...
At the Gates of Xibalba: The Chultunob of El Mirador, Guatemala (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Multidisciplinary Investigations in the Mirador Basin, Guatemala" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Subterranean chambers known as chultuns or chultunob exist in great numbers in sites throughout the Maya world, with over 300 being found in the city site of El Mirador alone. Although seemingly ubiquitous, the function of these structures has yet to be fully understood, with a variety of uses having been proposed...
At the Intersection: Destabilizing White Creole Masculinity at the 18th-Century Little Bay Plantation, Montserrat, West Indies (2017)
Guided by contemporary humoral theory, 18th-century Europeans believed climate and bodily humors to be mutually influential and correlated in their effect on human temperament, appearance, and behavior. Resettlement to a new climate was understood to create humoral imbalances fundamentally affecting an individual’s character and even physical appearance including skin color. Subject to the effects of tropical climate British settlers to the West Indies thus transformed were viewed as...
At the Periphery II: Reconsidering Early Monuments in the Environs of Tikal (2019)
This is an abstract from the "At the Interface the Use of Archaeology and Texts in Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Encanto is a peripherical site (frequently classified as a 'minor center') northeast from the Ancient Maya metropolis of Tikal. It is famous because of the stela with hieroglyphic inscription dated to AD 305-308 and mentioning the king Siyaj Chan K'awil I. Previously Simon Martin suggested that the stela originally stood...
The atlatl or spear-thrower of the ancient Mexicans (1891)
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