Orange Walk (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tucker Austin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite more than a century of intensive archaeological research, factors leading to the Classic Maya Collapse continue to be debated by Maya archaeologists. This presentation discusses the Classic Maya Collapse and its effects on the people of Xunantunich, Belize. Investigations from the 2018 field season, carried out by the Belize Valley Archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Conley. Rissa Trachman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Finding evidence of an ancient Maya marketplace is difficult due to the perishability of telltale materials such as food, textiles, and wooden stalls in the tropical environment of northwestern Belize. Therefore, multiple lines of evidence including material culture, stratigraphy, soil chemistry, and spatial analysis are essential in identifying possible...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George J. Micheletti. Terry Powis. Norbert Stanchly.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the discovery of Stela 6 in the mid-1980s, the weathered remains of this Early Classic period carved stone monument continue to lie in the main plaza at Pacbitun, displaced in antiquity. Re-exposed in 2003, epigraphic analysis verified the monument’s AD 485 Long Count date—confirming it as one of the earliest carved stelae in the Maya lowlands—and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Waldo. Samantha Lorenz. Toni Gonzales.

Mul Ch’en Witz (Hill with Many Caves) was first excavated in the summer of 2017 by the Contested Caves Archaeological Project (CCAP), a subproject of the Three Rivers Archaeological Project (TRAP). The area, located just below the escarpment on which the core architecture of the ancient site of La Milpa, Belize is situated, was chosen for excavation because of the high density of chultunes encountered within a restricted area. The chultunes have similar entrance styles and diameters, and five of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wendy Layco.

This is an abstract from the "Studies in Mesoamerican Subterranean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Some 75 m southwest of the Las Monjas complex at Chichen Itza and just west of Sacbe No. 7, lie a series of eleven sascaberas that are shown schematically on the Carnegie map. While ceiling collapse has undoubtedly occurred in the millennium since their creation, some, such as Sascabera #2, have an extensive enclosed dark zone space. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Ray. Holley Moyes.

The ancient Maya site of Las Cuevas, in Western Belize features a cave system that runs beneath the main plaza. Investigations by the Las Cuevas Archaeological Reconnaissance project suggest that the site functioned as a Late Classic ritual pilgrimage venue and that the cave was used for large public centrally-organized performances. The cathedral-like cave entrance contains monumental architecture consisting of at least 76 plastered platforms. I hypothesize that the level of managerial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yasmine Flynn-Arajdal. Katherine Miller Wolf. Carolyn Freiwald. Christina Halperin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ucanal, is an archeological site situated in the Petén area of the southern Maya Lowlands. Close to the modern-day border between Guatemala and Belize, it is situated on the Mopan River which seems to have facilitated the trade of objects between different neighboring sites. While we know that this site was a nexus for the movement of goods from afar, less is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Paine. Richard Hansen. Carlos Morales-Aguilar. Kevin Johnston.

El Mirador, in the northern Peten, has redefined our ideas about the Maya Preclassic. Its massive architecture and its complex system of sacbes compare to the largest Classic period centers. Unlike many of its smaller Preclassic neighbors, El Mirador collapsed at the dawn of the Classic. Understanding El Mirador’s organization, economy, and relationship to its environment requires detailed knowledge of the site’s population trajectory. Reconstructing El Mirador’s population trajectory, we face a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alana Pengilley. Fred Valdez Jr..

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The distribution of prehistoric artifacts across spatial and temporal realms is frequently used to investigate trade, exchange, mobility, and socioeconomic relationships in the past. In the Maya region, chert was a key component in ancient toolkits due to its widespread availability and suitability for knapping into tools. Previous studies in the Maya...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Brady.

At the 1985 Maya Ceramic Workshop, Arthur Demarest noted the intense interest in the Protoclassic. Indeed, ceramists with only a mammiform support and a handful of sherds would pause to speculate on the significance of a statistically insignificant number of sherds. During the 1990s, Joseph Ball and I doggedly worked to reexamine every aspect of the Protoclassic issue. Aided by contributions of a number of colleagues, the resulting document attempted to strip the Protoclassic of association...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donald Slater. Ryan Collins.

During 2011 excavations deep beneath the petroglyph panels in Aktun Kuruxtun, Mexico, members of the Central Yucatan Archaeological Cave Project (CYAC) uncovered a small tunnel leading into a previously unknown chamber of the cavern. The discovery came in the final days of the field season, however, and the chamber was too choked with flood sediments to be methodologically investigated. As a result, the passage was reburied. Last summer, CYAC returned to the cave and successfully explored the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomas Barrientos. Marcello Canuto. David Stuart.

This is an abstract from the "New Light on Dzibanché and on the Rise of the Snake Kingdom’s Hegemony in the Maya Lowlands" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past two decades it has become increasingly clear that the ancient Maya political landscape was permeated by regional systems of political asymmetry. These hegemonic networks fluctuated through time, but the steady presence of a few especially dominant polities shows that they were a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Douglass. Ellen Bell. Samuel Connell.

This is an abstract from the "I Love Sherds and Parasites: A Festschrift in Honor of Pat Urban and Ed Schortman" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the 1980s, the Kenyon-Honduras Program, under the leadership of Drs. Patricia Urban and Edward Schortman (P&E to us), has engaged students in the study of archaeology, anthropology, and life. Hundreds of students have been a part of the program over the past several decades. Being in the program...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiffany Cain.

In this paper, I explore the ways in which albarradas, or the dry-laid enclosure walls ubiquitous to Yucatec Maya towns, can be manipulated to become defensive structures under the threat of attack. I discuss the results of a recent study that conducted a construction analysis on a series of wall features in the now unpopulated town of Tela – an auxiliary to and key commercial throughway for the burgeoning frontier hub of Tihosuco (since repopulated) during the 19th century. This town was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Whittaker Schroder. Socorro Jimenez Alvarez.

Though today the Usumacinta River marks part of the boundary of Mexico and Guatemala, during the Classic period the Usumacinta would have passed through numerous kingdoms, including Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan. Alternate travel routes through the valleys to the west in Mexico crossed an even more complicated political landscape approaching the kingdoms of Palenque, Tonina, and Sak Tz’i’, as well as the plentiful minor centers and rural settlements throughout the region. While surveys between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Celine Gillot. Christina Halperin.

This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the underlying precepts of materiality is that, whereas people make objects, objects simultaneously and recursively make people. Objects also make objects, however, in so far as seemingly separate crafting traditions were intimately entangled with each other, stimulating and reinforcing similar procedures, practices, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dorie Reents-Budet. Ronald L. Bishop. Christophe Helmke. Julie Hoggarth.

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. Painted and carved pictorial pottery of the Classic Maya (250-850 CE) served primarily as ostentatious serving vessels at feasts and other principal celebrations. The vessels were masterful creations by accomplished artisans and are, for the most part, individualistic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jean-Baptiste Le Moine. Christina Halperin. Jose Luis Garrido Lopez. Ryan Mongelluzzo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Building on the pioneer work of the Proyecto Atlas de Guatemala, the Proyecto Arqueológico Ucanal has considerably expanded the survey and excavations of the site leading to a better comprehension of the transition of the Late to Terminal Classic periods. The site has been surveyed with a combination of approaches including a traditional total station,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edgar Suyuc.

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. Dentro de las investigaciones del Proyecto Cuenca Mirador, se cuentan las realizadas en La Acrópolis Triádica La Pava. En los resultados se evidencian rasgos arquitectónicos relevantes de la ocupación del Preclásico Tardío en El Mirador. Durante esta presentación se expondrán los hallazgos de las excavaciones en...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Garrison. Stephen Houston.

This is an abstract from the "La Cuernavilla, Guatemala: A Maya Fortress and Its Environs" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La Cuernavilla is a recently discovered Classic Maya fortress in the central Petén of Guatemala. Situated between the major ancient kingdom of Tikal and the minor city-state capital of El Zotz, the site has a complex history tied into the broader geopolitics of the Buenavista Valley, which it overlooks. This talk introduces the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Murtha. Whittaker Schroder.

This is an abstract from the "The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Relying on the lens of ecological urbanism this paper describes the diversity of long-term patterns of urbanization and agricultural intensification on regional landscapes in the Maya lowlands of southern Mexico and Central America. Best described as a mosaic, the Maya lowlands offers an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomas Gallareta Negron. Rossana May Ciau.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes: Archaeological, Historic, and Ethnographic Perspectives from the New World / Paisajes: Perspectivas arqueológicas, históricas y etnográficas desde el Nuevo Mundo" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper combines the results of settlement and vegetation surveys in the Puuc Region of Yucatan, Mexico, with an emphasis in the Bolonchen District and the archaeological Maya site of Kiuic. The extensive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caroline Antonelli.

This paper examines shifting environmental paradigms in the Maya realm. Using Mayapán as a case study, a site long-considered to be located in a "marginal" environment for agricultural productivity, I will evaluate site resilience, sustainability, and self-sufficiency and use these concepts to create a more nuanced perspective of human-environment interactions. Data from Mayapán will be cross-referenced to other similar sites across the Maya region. I will show that assumptions about the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ross Ensley. Richard Hansen. Carlos Morales. Josie Thompson.

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. The southern Petén Plateau can be subdivided into four karst landscapes, each with a dominant karst landform. They are fluviokarst, polygonal karst, karst margin plain, and upland karst. These terrains have different proportions of uplands and low standing wetlands. Within this framework lies the Mirador-Calakmul...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hector Hernandez. Mario Zimmermann. Rani Alexander.

This is an abstract from the "After Cortés: Archaeological Legacies of the European Invasion in Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we examine how European colonization and the shift to industrial capitalism altered beekeeping in Yucatán from AD1600 to the present. Honey and wax produced from stingless bees were circulated throughout the Mesoamerican world system during the Postclassic period. In the wake of the European...