Republic of Guatemala (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
1-25 (2,898 Records)
Sustainable accessible data storage is as important to archaeologists as tractors are to farmers. In 2001 the Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist, (OSA), was archiving 20GB of data on a 100GB server. Sixteen years later the office is serving 32TB on several server systems and plans are in place to archive 60TB over the next 4 years. In addition to space needs the office must also make this data in its many forms accessible to outside entities. In the not so distant past archaeologists...
1300 years of a Classic Maya ceramic tradition at El Perú-Waka’, Guatemala (2017)
In the course of 13 field seasons, archaeologists have carried out 23 operations across the ruined city of El Perú-Waka’. During these investigations, excavators recovered upwards of a million ceramic sherds from a wide variety of contexts; palaces, pyramids, residences, sheet middens, construction fill, ritual deposits, spoil piles, termination deposits, votive deposits, surface collections, burials, caches, and tombs. The excavation contexts are good enough, the quality of preservation...
2000 Years of Eating: Continuity and change in food practices among the Puuc Maya (2017)
This paper examines the evidence for what and how the Maya of the Puuc region ate during the long history of occupation of this region. Data collected from almost two decades of research by the Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project and covering close to two millennium of occupation are used in this exploration of eating. Household archaeology primarily from the site of Kiuic and the suburban site of Stairway to Heaven, and ceramic data from throughout the BRAP study area provide insights...
The 2012 Field Season of the 1630-31 New Spain Fleet Archaeological Project in the Gulf of Mexico (2016)
The 2012 Field season of the 1630-31 New Spain Fleet Project of the Subdirección de Arqueología Subacuática INAH, has been a success and represents a leap in many regards from previous seasons. The project started in the year 1995 and has had many people involved throughout the years implementing diverse search methods and surveys. In the case of the 2012 field season, success came from a thoroughly thought methodological process to present a search area in the Gulf of Mexico where the Admiral...
The 2016 Season at El Rayo, Nicaragua: Civic-Ceremonial Structures, Tombs, and Feasting from the Bagaces to Sapoa Transition (2017)
Expanding on prior field seasons, the 2016 field school at El Rayo, with the support of the Institute for Field Research, continued the exploration of the unique Bagaces to Sapoa transition period site, located on the Asese Peninsula, Lake Nicaragua. This season focused of the excavation of four loci, continuing to explore previous questions regarding cultural activities in Pacific Nicaragua. Loci 2 and 4, which had been studied in previous field seasons were expanded, while new Loci 6 and 7...
The 2022 Petén Lakes Lidar/GPS Georectification Project (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Research in the Petén Lakes Region, Petén, Guatemala" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Remotely sensed lidar data has proven to be a boon for Maya archaeology, from its beginnings at Caracol in Belize, Copan in Honduras, to consortiums of various archaeological projects like Salinas de los Nueve Cerros, La Corona, Holmul, and elsewhere. In a relatively simple regiment of sensing, detailed cartographic maps can be...
3D Archaeology at MAE/USP (Brazil): Practices and Perspectives (2017)
The use of digital photogrammetry and 3D scanning as tools for archaeological heritage record, analysis and dissemination has increased markedly in recent years. Using these technologies a post-doctoral project is currently in progress at the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (MAE) of São Paulo University, Brazil with the scope to document, record and analyse the animal stone figurines collection at the Museum. The objects are threefold: 1) to use photogrammetry and 3D scanner technologies to...
3D Documentation of Grave Markers for the National Cemetery Administration (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Application of Geophysical Techniques to Military Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The United States Army Corp of Engineers, Engineer Research Development Center, Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (ERDC-CERL) is home to one of the largest cultural resources research teams in the DoD. In recent years our team has assisted the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Cemetery Administration...
3D Imaging in Remote Areas, Rainforests, and Other Hostile Environments: Investigating Identity and Interaction in Eastern Honduras (2018)
Ancient eastern Honduran populations utilized foreign symbols in limited elite contexts, such as site planning and architecture, but most elements of material culture reflect clear connections to Lower Central America. Iconography seen in petroglyphs appears significantly different from that seen in other media, and may yield additional information and insights into identity formation and interactions within the region. For many reasons, these petroglyphs have not been extensively studied. While...
3D Reconstruction of Early Spanish Colonial Hybrid Ceramics from Ciudad Vieja, El Salvador (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The primary serving vessel at the sixteenth-century Spanish colonial site of Ciudad Vieja, El Salvador, is an indigenously produced brimmed plate made in the form of Italianate majolica. These vessels were produced in a Mesoamerican technological tradition and were painted with a modified version of designs found on pre-Hispanic Pipil pottery in southeastern...
4,000 years of animal translocations: Mocha Island and its zooarchaeological record (2017)
Islands are territories that allow us to assess phenomena and processes in a way that is impossible to do in the mainland. One of these concerns the human interaction with animals that are usually considered as wild. The case of Mocha Island (Chile; South Pacific, 38,36°S) is remarkable because of its small size (50 km2), proximity to the mainland (30 km), three different and independent human occupation events, and an endemic terrestrial fauna constituted only by small reptiles, amphibians,...
400 Years of History and Cross-cultural Interactions in a Ritually Mounded Landscape of South Tanna, Vanuatu (2017)
A mounded landscape in south Vanuatu provides archaeological evidence relating to chiefly performance, voyaging, and ritual transformation during a period of cross-cultural contacts spanning 400 years or more. The site of Kwaraka is located at the southern end of Tanna Island. The area has a view on clear days of the neighbouring islands Futuna and Aniwa, and there is ethnohistoric evidence of long-term patterns of interaction between Tannese people and the people of these nearby islands....
611th Air Support Group Resources
Project metadata for resources within the 611th Air Support Group cultural heritage resources collection.
The Abandoned Intersection: Race and Class and the Diversification of Archaeology’s Ranks (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Hood Archaeologies: Impacts of the School-to-Prison Pipeline on Archaeological Practice and Pedagogy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists are quick to connect race and class in conversations about the dead. However, in our discussions of the living—especially on BIPOC archaeologists and their work—class takes a backseat to race, an outcome I call “wealth blindness.” I argue that, as professional...
About Face: A Head-On Examination of Pre-Columbian Social Identity (2017)
A desire for art to reflect social identity is made apparent through prolific representations of human faces in Pre-Columbian ceramics. The ceramic art of Greater Nicoya and the surrounding regions demonstrates an intrinsic drive to communicate distinct group characteristics and illustrates the importance of individuals’ bodies as instruments of both personal expression and social relationships. Physical expressions of collective identity foster a sense of belonging and satisfy the human desire...
About the Reliability of Archaeological Information (2018)
To study Mesoamerican architecture and urbanism, their graphic description is required. This description must be accurate, and it is traditionally expressed in coded and scaled drawings. For decades, archaeologists have produced extensive documentation of their excavations, which institutional services in charge of the registration of monuments have supplemented to obtain complete inventories in order to support conservation and restoration activities. However, this material has been...
Academic Jobs in Archaeology (2018)
Over the past three decades, competition for archaeology faculty jobs at North American colleges and universities has risen significantly. Although the numbers of doctorates in anthropology has increased by approximately 70%, the numbers of new faculty positions has remained relatively constant. The present study examines academic job market trends using data derived from the 2014—2015 American Anthropological Association AnthroGuide. We identify which universities are the most successful at...
Academic Museums as Instruments for Increasing BIPOC Representation in CRM (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Future of Education and Training in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Under the directorship of Dr. Albert Gonzalez, the C. E. Smith Museum of Anthropology at California State University, East Bay (CSUEB) has dedicated much of its resources and staff time to exploring creative methods by which to connect BIPOC undergraduate students and recent graduates to the CRM network and related jobs in the region....
Accelerating History and Bayesian Models: The Rapid Emergence of Agropastoralism and the Tiwanaku State in the Lake Titicaca Basin, South America (2017)
Long-term cultural change can be non-linear and punctuated by brief episodes of accelerating history. Such episodes, or emergent phenomena, have been described by a diverse set of theoretical approaches such as complexity theory, complex adaptive systems, panarchy, resilience theory, "eventful" sociology and archaeology, and the Annales School of History. These episodes can result in profound, lasting changes for large groups of people, but can happen too fast to be clearly documented without...
Accelerating the "Maddeningly Slow Work of Archaeology" in the Forested Maya Lowlands (2017)
Investigations in the thickly forested Peten region is complicated by lack of roads, water, communications, visibility and other things we often take for granted even in archaeology. In most cases the time it takes for results of such field work to reach a general audience can be measured in years. Many of us have turned to technology to alleviate this situation but the gains can be less than what is expected. The advent of GPS handheld devices have been useful to locate sites (and ourselves)...
Achieving Safe Workplaces in Cultural Resources Management (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Presidential Session: What Is at Stake? The Impacts of Inequity and Harassment on the Practice of Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we will take a three-part approach to examining and achieving safe workspaces in cultural resource management (CRM), considering demography, reports of harassment and assault in the workplace, and solutions. First, we will provide a snapshot of the participation of...
Acoustic Effects at Las Cuevas Cave (Western Belize): An Archaeoacoustic Analysis of a Maya Cave (2018)
The site of Las Cuevas (western Belize) has been identified as a mid-sized, Late Classic ceremonial and administrative center. Interestingly, given the importance of caves in Maya religion, the underneath part of the site has a large cave system. Research so far on this cave has focused on aspects that are common in cave archaeology: 1/ structures - in this case on the one hand the series of platforms built around a central, sunk cenote and on the other the walls subdiving the narrow part of...
"Across the Agua to Managua" and Beyond: Getting Past Migration in Nicaraguan Prehistory (2018)
Despite being the largest country in Central America, Nicaragua’s archaeological record remains the least explored and most ignored. One consequence of this is that reconstructions of Nicaragua’s prehistory have tended to rely overmuch on rather sparse (and not necessarily reliable) ethnohistoric accounts in which migration from Mesoamerican homelands is heavily emphasized, generally to the detriment of other kinds of cultural phenomena, including indigenous developments that are not explicitly...
The Active Materiality of Obsidian (2019)
This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When Steve Shackley informed me that over 90% of obsidian samples from Puerto Escondido, Honduras, that he had analyzed came from an unidentified source, presumably nearby, he started a process of re-education that led me to a place where he may not be comfortable, but that I deeply appreciate. This involves a...
Activist Archaeology and Queer Feminist Critiques in Mesoamerican Archaeology (2017)
One of the strengths of prehistoric archaeology is its ability to document the full range of human variation. For Latin America, activist archaeology has the potential to inform postcolonial and Third World feminist critiques that challenge white supremacist legal systems that marginalize women of color and indigenous peoples. The false universalisms and cultural essentialisms found in human rights debates ignore the diverse experiences of women’s oppression, especially the indigenous, poor,...