Orange Walk (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Cucina. Allan Ortega Muñoz.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Modern migration theories are based on a capitalistic view of economic forces for people (mostly males) to migrate in search of better economic conditions. However, the dynamics that characterize modern times are hardly applicable to prehispanic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew D. Turner.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As numerous studies have noted, changes in themes, compositions, and content in Maya stone monuments from the ninth and tenth centuries present a departure from their Classic counterparts, which in turn appears to reflect changes in social structure and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Hutson. Travis Stanton. Audrey Rosen. José Francisco Osorio León. Francisco Pérez Ruíz.

This is an abstract from the "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among the Classic and Postclassic period Maya, cacao beans were one of the most common forms of currency. Ancient Maya art depicts this money, which grows on trees, as tribute in courtly scenes most often populated by men. Yet contact period ethnohistoric documents consistently attribute ownership of trees to women. While contemporary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Lewis. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Monkeys are prominently featured in Maya creation narratives, in Maya art, and more rarely in burial contexts. Despite their apparent importance in Maya ideology, however, previous research on monkeys in the Maya world has primarily focused on their primatological, and linguistic significance. In contrast to those studies, this research investigates the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Nissen.

Previous research suggests that the ancient Maya city of Aventura, Belize thrived during the Terminal Classic to Early Postclassic periods (800 – 1100 CE). During this period, occupants of the city constructed up to 27 buildings within the confines of the site’s A plaza. This paper presents the results of the 2017 test excavations of a sample of the A plaza buildings. Maya plazas are typically conceived of as large open places for ritual and political performance. However, these excavation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaroslaw Zralka. Bernard Hermes.

Yaxha and Nakum are two important Maya centers located in northeastern part of Guatemala. Recent research carried out by different projects at both sites indicate that during the Preclassic period Yaxha and Nakum rose to power and became important polities that had many examples of monumental architecture such as E-Groups, triadic complexes, ballcourts, causeways and other constructions. The scale of monumental architecture documented at Yaxha indicates that it was one of the largest Late...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zoe Rawski.

The site of Early Xunantunich in modern day Belize provides the opportunity for a uniquely detailed case study in Preclassic Maya architecture. Thanks to a lack of Classic Period overburden, the Mopan Valley Preclassic Project has been able to conduct extensive excavations of early architecture at the site, documenting important ritual activities from this early time period which likely played a key role in the development of sociopolitical complexity in the region. This paper focuses on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Reese-Taylor. Atasta Flores Esquivel. Nicholas Dunning. Armando Anaya Hernandez. Debra Walker.

During the Preclassic, the inhabitants of Yaxnohcah, Campeche, Mexico constructed more than 13 civic architectural complexes, each at least 20 m in height. These civic complexes were situated throughout roughly a 36 km2 area in a carefully planned quadripartite arrangement. Alongside these imposing structures, the early Maya also built massive platforms for public gatherings, large centralized reservoirs, a radial network of inter- and intra-city roads, and extensive agricultural features. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Hansen. Edgar Suyuc. Carlos Morales. Beatriz Balcarcel. Stanley Guenter.

Archaeological investigations in 51 ancient sites within the geographical confines of the Mirador Basin of northern Guatemala have identified an extraordinary emphasis on monumentality in art and architecture dating well into the Middle and Late Preclassic periods of Maya occupation. The structure and format of this phenomenon is replicated in early complex societies in other parts of the world, and suggests a consistent human behavior of predictable characteristics. The analyses and forms of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tia Watkins. Jaime Awe. Claire Ebert.

This is an abstract from the "The Preclassic Landscape in the Mopan Valley, Belize" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Preclassic period (~300 BC–AD 300) witnessed some of the most important changes in social and political roles in the Maya lowlands when an emergent elite class began to use art and architecture to publicly display their elevated status in society. Recent archaeological research at the hilltop center of Xunantunich, located in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edwin Roman-Ramirez.

This is an abstract from the "Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stephen Houston’s collaborative article on the moral community and changes in settlement at Piedras Negras, Guatemala proposed that long-term Precolumbian settlement changes should not simply be analyzed in terms of "agricultural potential, land tenure, and natural increase," but should...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Céline Lamb. Joana Cetina Batún.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The lives of women have been a focus of recent research in Maya Archaeology, finding that they fulfilled important roles as mothers, wives, priestesses, members of the elite and even as rulers. Within each social stratum, women lived diverse identities, however they shared similar biological processes, such as pregnancy, which was ruled by diverse beliefs and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annie Riegert. Lucy Gill.

Traces of veneration are sedimented within the landscape and the collective memory of its occupants, transforming these spaces into places. Such palimpsests become potent, which, in the case of mortuary landscapes, can manifest in increasingly complex burial rituals through time. The 2017 excavations at Colha revealed a series of 9 interments in the main plaza of the 2000 sector, yielding a minimum number of 13 individuals. This mortuary area initially utilized during the Middle Preclassic was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Burham. Juan Manuel Palomo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent investigations in the Amoch Group of Ceibal, a minor ceremonial complex located outside of the site epicenter, have provided new insights into the transition from the Preceramic to the Middle Preclassic periods in the Maya lowlands (ca. 1000 BC). Previous investigations in the civic-ceremonial core of Ceibal revealed an E Group dating to around 950...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Haney.

Residential burials are useful tools that help archaeologists better understand domestic ritual practices at the household level. With the household acting as a unit of social identity, funerary practices help archaeologists relate said practices to prominent trends of the time. These include, but are not limited to social and religious structures, identity, power, and social reproduction. One of the many types of artifacts that often appear in Classic Maya burials that are significant to burial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Bacon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster will discuss the benefits of using different combinations of rasters for large scale survey and the functional usage of viewing problematic mounds in the point cloud to weed away the false positives. Maya sites around Mesoamerica have and will be scanned with LiDAR. Since the turn of the century, technology has improved and now the data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandre Tokovinine.

This is an abstract from the "Supernatural Gamekeepers and Animal Masters: A Cross-Cultural Perspective" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores a set of mythical narratives on Classic Maya pottery (550-800 C.E.), which involve Huk Si’ip, the divine keeper of animals, and Itzam Kokaaj, the celestial creator of animals. Most of these narratives form part of a larger theogony cycle where the elderly gods of animals, sky, earth, and fire...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Hruby.

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. Lithic analysis at various sites in the Maya area, such as Plan de las Mesas, Kaminaljuyu, Copan, and Piedras Negras reveal regional differences between obsidian tool production, distribution, and consumption. Some patterns in obsidian economies were shared between these sites, as well as others more distantly located such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Asta Rand. Richard Madgwick.

This is an abstract from the "Integrating Isotope Analyses: The State of Play and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Death was not the end for many members of Prehispanic Maya communities (250 BC–1560 AD). Indeed, the inclusion of human remains in structures that continued to function indicates that the dead (or their significance to the living) maintained social if not biological vitality. Although there is also ample evidence that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christian Sheumaker.

This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of movement has long been relegated to the background of archaeological investigations, as its materialization proves multifarious yet equally elusive. The resulting collection of archaeological "movement studies" generally focuses on the most formalized manifestation of movement: road systems. Yet at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Messinger. Bryan Hanks. Nick Suarez. Marc Bermann. Claire Ebert.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Preclassic (~1000 BC-AD 300) marked the appearance of increased socio-political integration and the emergence of inequality in the Maya lowlands. Over the course of the Preclassic, emerging elites invested in monumental construction projects and consolidated their ritual authority with ceremonial events, which occurred in large public plazas. As one of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa DeLance.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 1988, the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance Project has actively excavated archaeological sites throughout the Belize River Valley, resulting in a plethora of archaeological material elucidating nearly 3,000 years of human occupation. Beginning during the 2017 field season, the BVAR Digital Archive Project aims to curate, consolidate, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colin Doyle. Timothy Beach. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach. Jedidiah Dale.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part II" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present preliminary results from a newly discovered Maya wetland canal and raised field system found along the Rio Bravo River in Northwest Belize using airborne LiDAR. The LiDAR data reveals canals and raised fields in a very rectilinear pattern that suggest planning and organization for many kilometers down the floodplain near...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Clarke.

This is an abstract from the "Heat, Steam, and Health: The Archaeology of the Mesoamerican Pib Naah (Sweat Baths)" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sweat baths have been used in Mesoamerica for more than a millennium for humoral medicine, childbirth, and obstetrics, not to mention rituals related to death, birth, and rebirth. During this long period of time, they have held a relatively constant place in mythology; they are ancestral grandmothers who...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachael Wedemeyer. Kenichiro Tsukamoto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The data presented in this paper are results from the 2022 field season at the López Plaza, a small plazuela group located within the site center of El Palmar. Fieldwork included test pit excavations, shovel test pits, and geophysical prospections. Lidar images show that the López Plaza has two separate plaza spaces and approximately eight structures and...