Republic of Guatemala (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Boyd Dixon. Mike Dega.

This is an abstract from the "When the Wild Winds Blow: Micronesia Colonization in Pacific Context" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This comparative assessment of the San Roque site in northern Saipan to other early Pre-Latte period sites in the Mariana Islands, circa 1500–1100 BC, presents far from uniform data that suggest that maritime settlers of the archipelago may have targeted a range of natural settings for survival upon arrival. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Zabecki.

This is an abstract from the "Site Stewardship Matters: Comparing and Contrasting Site Stewardship Programs to Advance Our Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Site stewardship looks different in every state based on how the archeology programs are organized. Public archaeological networks, archaeological surveys, SHPOs, state archaeologist offices, academic departments, and volunteer organizations are connected in infinite configurations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie V. Kirakosian.

This paper outlines how this open textbook moved from an idea to a reality over the past year. As a non-traditional project in archaeology, the infrastructure for such a project had to largely be framed from scratch, including a social media and marketing campaign as well as a process for co-authoring and reviewing chapters. Although the textbook is not yet completed, lessons learned along the way will be offered with the hope that sharing our model will inspire more open textbooks in our field.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophie Reilly.

Paleoethnobotanists study human-plant interactions in the past, including the role of plants in ancient foodways. Microbotanical remains (phytoliths and starch grains) enable the identification of many plants because their morphology can be diagnostic to the family, genus, and species. Microbotanical samples can be extracted from specific artifacts, such as ceramics, enabling a better understanding of their use. Paleoethnobotanists can thus discern associations between certain vessel types and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharine Williams.

Plumbate is a lustrous hard-paste ware characterized by small effigy vessels, some of which bear Central Mexican ideological influences. It was widely traded during the Terminal Classic/Early Postclassic across ethnic, political, and linguistic boundaries. Its widespread distribution and luster mark plumbate as unique among contemporaneous wares. It is sometimes found alongside locally produced wares that bear superficial resemblances, leading to the belief that they are imitations of plumbate....

DOCUMENT Citation Only W. James Stemp. Jaime Awe.

Sixteen small chert bifaces are part of a Terminal Classic (AD 800-900) peri-abandonment "problematic deposit" recovered just above the surface near the western base of Structure A2 at the ancient Maya site of Cahal Pech, Belize. The results of stylistic, technological, and use-wear analyses performed on these chert artifacts indicate: 1) production from locally available stone; 2) five different tool styles; 3) evidence for some tool curation/re-sharpening; and 4) wear patterns on some of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mario Giron-Ábrego.

This poster addresses an understudied area relevant to the initial peopling of the Americas: what are the earliest indications of human activity in Mesoamerica (particular emphasis on Guatemala)? Its geographic location and its relatively narrow expanse make the southern half of Middle America the natural stage to funnel terrestrial and coastal/riverine routes of early human migrations. Despite this consideration, archaeological research targeting Paleoamerican horizons [pre-12,800 BP] in this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arthur Demarest. Paola Torres.

Joe Ball’s research, his ceramic studies, his insistence on material culture as basis for work, and his honesty in critique of poorly grounded interpretation together provide a standard of building culture-history on solid ceramic studies, chronology, and material culture analyses. Many recent interpretations of Classic Maya society have not met that standard. Here we aspire to his bottom-up, material culture approach to interpretation in recent collaborative research in the western Peten and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Meissner. Marc Marino. Emmalea Gomberg.

This study focuses on the social aspects of craft production among outlying populations of the greater Copán Valley of Honduras during the Late Classic to Early Postclassic transition (A.D. 800-1200). Lithic data from four valley sites including Rastrojón, Río Amarillo, Quebrada Piedras Negras, and Site 29 are compared to elucidate raw material procurement strategies and methods of chert reduction by local producers. Interesting differences emerge among the sites concerning changes in raw...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Catlin.

This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Past ecological and political-economic changes are embedded in the materiality of the landscape, and investigating correlations between such changes can suggest how relationships between ecology and economy were structured and managed within past societies. Iceland was first settled in the late ninth century by wealthy...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan deFrance.

The Moquegua Valley in southern Peru was the locale where the rival early imperial states of Wari and Tiwanaku established provincial colonial centers. Both Wari and Tiwanaku colonists concentrated their settlements in the low to mid-sierra elevations of the valley, elevations that are not modern zones of camelid husbandry. The political ecology of imperial settlement at this elevation fostered the development of local systems of camelid pastoralism that were significant economic components for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marieka Arksey.

This paper investigates the use of caves as performance spaces for water and agriculturally focused rituals during the Maya Late Classic period (~ A.D. 750-900) and the events of the 'collapse'. Although the ‘collapse’ of the social, economic, and political systems during this period has been the subject of much study, the majority of research has focused on the environmental factors with little consensus as to how rulers attempted to maintain order, social solidarity, and political power...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kasey Diserens Morgan.

This is an abstract from the "The Conceptual and Ethical Limits of Heritage in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Political involvement in the protection of historic resources often places a façade on historic narratives that creates a distance between communities and their heritage. Often, this control reflects leftover colonial legacies, creating structures of power that do not allow communities to advance economically, socially, or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kacey Grauer.

This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Post-humanism importantly considers active roles of nonhuman entities in society. However, it is crucial that power relationships between people do not fall by the wayside when studying past societies. In this paper, I approach geological features at the ancient Maya city of Aventura, Belize, from a perspective that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marie Kolbenstetter.

This is an abstract from the "Reconstructing the Political Organization of Pre-Columbian Nicaragua" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The relationship between environment, politics, and economies has often been observed in the archaeological record. In the Gulf of Fonseca, where archaeological sites concentrate around mangrove swamps, rivers and estuaries; politics were intricately tied to the affordances of riverine systems. Based on the ceramic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann M. Scott. Judith Maxwell.

Caves and other sacred landscape features such as clefts in rocks and mountain voids embody special powers controlled by earthen, spiritual entities. To the Highland Maya that power personified by the earth owner needs to be maintained, appeased, and managed, even on a daily basis. This maintenance comes in the form of elaborate ceremonies utilizing a number of special items deemed suitable for pleasing the ancient entities. Mayan ritual specialists or daykeepers, who perform the ceremonies, are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashleigh Breske.

This theoretically-oriented project engages discussions of historical arguments for the repatriation of indigenous cultural property that ultimately led to the creation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990. I will investigate how institutions and cultural values mediated changes in repatriation policy both nationally and internationally. By examining ownership paradigms and institutional power structures, it is possible to understand the ramifications of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Simon Martin.

This is an abstract from the "Making and Breaking Boundaries in the Maya Lowlands: Alliance and Conflict across the Guatemala–Belize Border" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The region now divided by the national boundaries of Belize and Guatemala was once home to a broad range of political entities. Noticeably, large centers with monumental inscriptions in the western and southern portions contrast with smaller and far less textually verbose sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Bracken.

Dissertation fieldwork since 2014 at Muralla de León has documented, mapped, and partially excavated an integrated system of earthworks that appears to have served both large-scale defensive and hydrological functions. Located on the shores of Lake Macanché, the site sits atop a steep-sided natural rise, artificially augmented in height by an encircling stone rampart wall, or enceinte. A defensive function for the enceinte is hypothesized, though it also appears to serve as a means of water...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arlen Chase. Diane Chase. Adrian Chase.

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. The determination of accurate population numbers for ancient Mesoamerican societies is key for making interpretations about past levels of complexity. This is not only necessary for understanding how societies changed over time but also for how they were organized over space. The techniques that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Arroyo. Javier Estrada. Gloria Ajú.

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. The population estimates from the Preclassic period for the site of Kaminaljuyu located in the Maya Highlands were the result of regional surveys conducted by the Pennsylvania State University research program in the 1970s. Since then, Guatemala City urban sprawl has impacted the site conservation....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jack Broughton. Elic Weitzel.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dozens of large mammals such as mammoth, mastodon, and horse (i.e., "megafauna") disappeared in North America at the end of the Pleistocene with climate change and "overkill" the most widely-argued causes. However, the population dynamics of humans and megafauna preceding extinctions have received little attention, even though such information may...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geena Black. Jacob Freeman.

This is an abstract from the "The Socioecological Dynamics of Holocene Foragers and Farmers" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents comparative data on human bone chemistry to infer sex differences in prehistoric diets. We collected a global sample of human bone isotope data. Next, we joined these data with the global radiocarbon data set developed by the People 3000 Research Network, as well as paleoclimate models and data. Finally,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcus Hamilton. Robert Walker.

Sublinear population-area scaling relations have been documented across a range of human societies, from hunter-gatherers to both ancient and modern cities. As such, these scaling patterns seem to capture a common statistical feature of human spatial ecology. In this talk we examine the spatial ecology of both recently-contacted and uncontacted groups in the Amazon Basin. Using a combination of census data, government estimates and imagery we find sublinear scaling between the size of villages...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Smith. Ines Domingo. Didac Roman. Gary Jackson.

The rock art of Doria Gudaluk (Beswick Creek Cave) in the Northern Territory of Australia provided a valuable lesson in the difficulties of interpretation without local knowledge. Now, newly recorded motifs at the site—some only visible through digital enhancement—highlight the dangers of relating stylistic changes to population replacement. When considered in the context of local history, developments in the rock art of Doria Gudaluk during the second half of the twentieth century can be...