Republic of Guatemala (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jack Corbett. Nelly Robles Garcia.

Archaeological research frequently produces material elements we seek to safeguard for the benefit of future generations, a goal that requires organizational support and a mix of resources. When the research materials pass to the responsibility of communities or groups with limited preparation and resources for management of said materials, we encounter a serious disconnect between the accomplishments of research and the long-term viability of archaeological resources. In Mexico the long...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annemarie Seiler-Baldinger.

Basler Beiträge zur Ethnologie; 9

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Simeonoff. Marie Matsuda. Breeanna Charolla.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Leaky Pipelines: Exploring Gender Inequalities in Archaeological Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many studies of women in the field of archaeology focus on academic institutions; however, more archaeologists are employed by the public and private sectors. In this paper, we examine the place of women holding positions in cultural resource management. By examining first-hand experiences of women in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Sullivan. David Hyde. Robin Robertson. Palma Buttles. Fred Valdez.

Lithics, ceramics, and other artifacts, recovered from the 2017 Colha, Belize field season, are utilized to gain insight into chronological developments and changes at the ancient Maya site. Maya material culture recovered from excavations at Colha are presented and interpreted by context. Each artifact category is briefly defined, described, and placed into a general site context. The estimated time range for the recovered material culture extends from the Late Archaic to the Late Preclassic....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cassandra Bill.

Features of material culture can be actively constructed and transparently manipulated to various sociopolitical ends, with the installation of elaborate monuments and possession of ornate goods making bold statements of power and authority. While other more common elements of material culture may provide perhaps less conspicuous commentary on the "state of the union," they can also be equally symbolic of the conditions under which they were created. This paper examines the material culture...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Fowler. Jeb C. Card.

Mapping and excavations of the Conquest-period and early colonial site of Ciudad Vieja, the ruins of the first villa of San Salvador, El Salvador, afford a view of material culture encounters and indigenous transformations in northern Central America. The Ciudad Vieja archaeological research has focused on material culture encounters between Spanish and indigenous populations in the realms of landscape, architecture, technology, economy, society, and religion. The time span for Ciudad Vieja runs...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Forde.

This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 1: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prehispanic visual sources and colonial alphabetic texts provide rich descriptions of what scholars have termed "the Flower World" in Mesoamerica. This idealized celestial realm was filled not just with flowers, but an array of other precious substances, ranging from gemstones to precious metals, to bird feathers and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valeria Bellomia.

This presentation focuses on some results of an interdisciplinary study carried out on two scraping idiophones made of human bones from ancient Mesoamerica (omichicahuaztli). Both the instruments are today on exhibit at the Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico "Luigi Pigorini" in Rome. The detailed analysis of the bone surfaces allowed us to reconstruct the taphonomic processes that affected the bones and the steps employed to transform them into musical instruments. Our research team...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Divina Perla Barrera. Julien Sion. Fiama Hernández. Jennifer Arguijo.

This is an abstract from the "Materials in Movement in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En los territorios considerados como los márgenes fronterizos entre Mesoamérica y el Área Istmo-colombiana, la transición entre el Clásico y Postclásico (siglos IX-XII dC) corresponde a un periodo de reorganización de sus sociedades. Particularmente en el noroeste de Honduras se caracterizaron notables evoluciones en los centros...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcelo Acosta.

In this paper we will be discussing the iconography of the roof tiles found in the primitive missions of Nuestra Senora de Loreto and San Ignacio Mini located in the region of the Guairá. The aim is to analyze the material and symbolic universe that circulated in the primitive Jesuits missions (1610 - 1631). In order to achieve this goal, we will first analyze the technologies of production, the iconographic types and interpret the possible meanings acquired in the representations shown on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carrie Dennett. Lorelei Platz.

Themes involving spiritual transformation have long been noted in the material culture of pre-Columbian Greater Nicoya, with standardized ritual imagery appearing in local Sapoá period (AD 800-1250) ceramic type-classes such as Papagayo and Pataky Polychromes. A recent iconographic re-evaluation suggests that at least some varieties from these ‘independent types’ were designed to work together, to complement one another in both ritual messaging and formal function. Here we focus explicitly on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maline Werness-Rude. Kaylee Spencer.

It has long been recognized that ancient Maya architecture encoded sacred ideologies and replicated primordial landscapes through building forms and structural orientations. Many studies have focused on the architecture of the Southern Maya Lowlands, where rich textual sources exist and where an abundance of archaeological data aids in efforts to understand and interpret the meanings of architectural groups. We seek to augment interpretive frameworks with respect to the Northern Maya Lowlands,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolas Delsol.

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers in Animal Management: Unconventional Species, New Methods, and Understudied Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In colonial Guatemala, cattle constituted a vital element of Hispanic lifestyles through the supply of meat but also by providing basic materials necessary to a multitude of crafts. By the mid-sixteenth century, this flowering industry was thriving thanks to the rapid growth of herds. While the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Prout.

Our knowledge of Maya human sacrifice is drawn from iconographic representations and contact period Spanish sources. Unfortunately, the corpus related to child sacrifice is extremely limited. In 1971 David M. Pendergast described the burial of a child from Eduardo Quiroz Cave with traumatic perimortem holes in the parietals. Later, Brady reported on a second child with similar wounds. Both Pendergast and Brady interpreted the evidence as reflecting child sacrifice. The recovery of thousands...

DOCUMENT Full-Text John M. Weeks. Sachse Franke. Christian M. Prager.

In Maya Daykeeping, three divinatory calendars from highland Guatemala - examples of a Mayan literary tradition that includes the Popul Vuh, Annals of the Cakchiquels, and the Titles of the Lords of Totonicapan - dating to 1685, 1722, and 1855, are transcribed in K'iche or Kaqchikel side-by-side with English translations. Calendars such as these continue to be the basis for prognostication, determining everything from the time for planting and harvest to foreshadowing illness and death. Good,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Devon Howell. Jennifer Newton. Helen Haines.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research investigated the intentionally modified dentition found within chultuns at the Maya site of Ka’kabish, Belize. The site has a history spanning from the Middle Formative (800–600 BC) to the Postclassic (900–1500 AD) periods. The primary aim of this research was to closely examine the modified dentition, evaluate any dental pathologies present,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jim Aimers.

Maya E-Group architectural assemblages have attracted scholarly attention for about a century, and yet our ideas about them have become more muddled through time. Since the beginning of investigations in the 1920’s these structures have been thought to have had some astronomical function, but the exact astronomical significance suggested by archaeologists has changed though time. Today there is very little agreement about their meaning and function. In this presentation I will briefly review the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandra Roche Recinos. Mallory Matsumoto.

In recent years significant headway has been made to understand New World marketing systems. In contrast with the highly complex and easily identifiable market systems of the Mexican Highlands, ancient Maya systems of production and distribution have traditionally been assumed to have operated at the level of the household, and thus have been overlooked. However, recent work in the Maya area has shown the likely presence of production beyond the household at possible market areas. In this paper,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Simmons. Bryan Cockrell.

Investigations at the southern Maya Lowland sites of Lamanai and Tipu, Belize have yielded diverse assemblages of metal artifacts. These metals are from the Postclassic and Colonial (12th to 17th century) occupations at Lamanai and Colonial (mid-16th to early 18th century) contexts at Tipu. As a rare occasion to look at the similarities and differences between artifacts made of the same material from different sites, this research compares the forms, contexts, and technologies of metal artifacts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emmett Nahil. Mary Clarke.

Analyses of sculptural practices of the Ancient Maya have centered on the final stages of production, namely the identities of sculptors, the locations of production, and the techne of sculptural practice. While the contributions of these analyses cannot be contested, there remains a poorly resolved understanding of when in the process of sculpture limestone gains its cultural significance. This paper presents data from recent excavations at a quarry workshop at Xultun where a stela still...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Green.

Mortuary practices are created to convey something about the deceased individual, as well as their surviving relatives, but can also give insight into the religious, social, and political structure of the community. This paper focuses on Maya mortuary practices in Belize, and how/why those practices changed over the transition from the Formative period (2000 BC – AD 300) to the Classic Maya florescence (AD 300-800). Comparing differences of mortuary characteristics within and between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Garay Herrera.

This is an abstract from the "Mountains, Rain, and Techniques of Governance in Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among the Maya of northwestern Guatemala, modern populations continue to use the mountains found in their territories as places of worship. Often altars are located directly on the peaks of hills and mountains, while in other cases they are found on pilgrimage routes in or around these high sacred points, such as on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Takeshi Inomata.

Royal palaces at the medium-sized centers of Aguateca and Ceibal appear to represent a basic template for the spatial and functional configurations of Maya palaces. They exhibit simple square forms resembling smaller residential groups of lower status, indicating their primary function as residential complexes of the royal families. Administrative and ceremonial functions were likely merged with domestic ones. These palaces also provide information on the degree of spatial mobility. While the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William J. Folan. Maria del Rosario Dominguez C.. Joel D. Gunn.

The Palaces of the Peten Campechano and the remainder of the Yucatan Peninsula represent single and composite, royal multipurpose households of varying shapes and sizes often associated with triadic relationships representing religious, civic, and military responsibilities. These relationships are manifest in structures at Calakmul, Oxpemul, Becan, Santa Rosa Xtampak, the triadic Monjas Quadrangle of Uxmal, Structure #385 of Dzibilchaltun, the triad of Noh Cah Chan Santa Cruz, El Palacio de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mario Zimmermann.

For several years, peasant communities on the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, have not produced high enough maize-yields to sustain populations in the area. This is despite the fact that modern-day demographics are considerably lower than population estimates for the heights of Maya cultural development during the pre-Columbian era. Some scholars have argued that maize was not the sole staple for the ancient Maya. Root and tree crops are among the candidates for alternative staples given their...