Cayo (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian Chase.

Ancient Maya cities possessed a unique urban form characterized by two factors: mixed agricultural land use within residential areas and dispersed households consisting of extended family groups. These two factors contributed to the low-density nature of Maya cities, and conditioned urban form and the structure of neighborhoods and districts. The requirements of top-down administration resulted in the creation of districts to delineate areas of provisioning for the city’s urban services....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Morgan McKenna. Gabriel Wrobel. Amy Michael. Amy Commendador. Patricia McAnany.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A stable isotope based dietary study, coupled with previously collected zooarchaeological and botanical data, expands our understanding of ancient Maya dietary variation in the Late and Terminal Classic periods in the Sibun River Valley of central Belize. A food web was created based on the analysis of stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios in plants and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bradley Russell. Stanley Serafin. Eunice Uc Gonzalez. Carlos Peraza Lope.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With support from The National Geographic Society and The Waitt Foundation, the Mayapán Taboo Cenote Project conducted investigations at Cenote Sac Uayum, a sacred, water-bearing sinkhole located at the Postclassic Maya political capital of Mayapán, Yucatán, Mexico (AD 1150-1450). The work brought together an international collaboration of researchers from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neil E. Kohanski.

This is an abstract from the "Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Subterranean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper seeks to explore the pivotal role of ethnographic analogy in archaeological research, with a focus on the Maya ritual within subterranean spaces. While ethnographic analogy remains indispensable to the archaeological enterprise, it has faced significant resistance within the archaeological community. This presentation aims to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanislava Romih.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The BVAR project has been investigating peri-abandonment deposits, also known as problematic or terminal deposits, at sites located along the Belize River in Western Belize. These investigations have focused on understanding the formation of such deposits as well as their significance across sites in the Belize Valley region. The project has employed a new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanislava Romih. Rafael A. Guerra.

The BVAR project recently renewed its investigations of peri-abandonment deposits at several sites along the Belize River in Western Belize. Also referred to as de facto refuse and problematic or sheet-like deposits, these cultural remains are predominantly recovered in palace rooms and courtyards in site cores across the Maya lowlands. The purpose of the BVAR investigations is to better understand the formation of such deposits as well as their temporal and spatial significance across sites in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christian Prager.

This is an abstract from the "The Rollout Keepers: Papers on Maya Ceramic Texts, Scenes, and Styles in Honor of Justin and Barbara Kerr" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The documentation effort within the realm of Maya writing research spans nearly a century and a half, commencing with the systematic recording of Maya inscriptions during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Throughout the initial half of the twentieth century, archaeologists...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Bey. Rossana May. Tomas Gallareta Negron. Kyle Winters. Magill Grunfeld.

This is an abstract from the "The Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project: 25 Years of Research in the Puuc" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beginning around AD 800 the Puuc region experienced a major construction boom of monumental architecture, including large palace complexes. At Kiuic, in the Bolonchen region of the Puuc, the early Yaxché Palace (AD 550–800) was replaced by a much larger complex of structures, still under construction at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Nissen.

This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cities are locations of diverse human interaction where persons from different families and social affiliations can gather, exchange goods, and participate in community events. However, the management of these diverse interactions and activities requires social and political systems that do not value the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arianna Campiani.

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. In this paper I will explore the extent of planning and its social dimension at the ancient Maya city of Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico. Between the seventh and ninth centuries, during the Classic period, the plateau where Palenque is located was extensively modified resulting in a prosperous,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Zygadlo Vera.

This is an abstract from the "Hydro-Ecological System of the Maya in Petén, Guatemala" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nixtun-Ch'ich', a Middle Preclasssic settlement along Lake Peten Itza is known for its city organization. Nixtun-Ch'ich' has been surveyed in a variety of ways including a theodolite with an electronic distance measurement (EDM), total station, lidar, and photogrammetry. These various maps of Nixtun-Ch'ich' show how the central...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Mixter.

This paper begins with a question: What does it mean to live amongst ruins? The literature on ancient Maya urbanism focuses to a large extent on how urban spaces are arranged and what this says about social and political organization. However, the long occupations of many Maya centers resulted in urban centers that reflect a palimpsest of decision-making over centuries rather than a single grand plan. Indeed, evidence at many Maya sites suggests that urban plans were reworked as buildings were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Burham.

This is an abstract from the "Preclassic Maya Social Transformations along the Usumacinta: Views from Ceibal and Aguada Fénix" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations and geospatial analyses of outlying residential settlement at Ceibal, Guatemala, shed light on the relationships between ritual and urbanization during the Preclassic period. The site epicenter, which consists of an E-Group assemblage carved out of bedrock, was established around...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barry Kidder. Jacob Welch. Scott Hutson. Shannon Plank.

Often overshadowed by the splendor of massive monumentality to the south, Late Preclassic life in the Northern Maya Lowlands is a period of material and social experimentation, a balancing act between emerging social differentiation and an ideology of communal integration. During the latter half of this period, the secondary site of Ucanha in Yucatán was physically integrated into a micropolity via an 18-km long sacbe and experienced the creation of integrative civic spaces, a population apogee,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cristina Gonzalez Esteban. James Bacon. Angel Morales Sanchez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The advantages of LiDAR survey applied to the identification of Archaeology under forested areas has been evident since the early 21st century. Most LiDAR studies have been done by placing the laser devices on aircraft, and in more recent years, drones. However, this is still quite an expensive endeavour that relies on several variables to succeed (forest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicaela Cartagena. Sheldon Skaggs. Terry Powis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological site of Pacbitun is located in west central Belize between the ecozones of the Belize River Valley and the Mountain Pine Ridge. The ancient Maya occupied the site from the beginning of the Middle Preclassic (900 – 300 BC) and continuing through the Terminal Classic (AD 800-900). The use of geographic information systems (GIS) is becoming...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Ojeda Rodríguez. Jeffrey B. Glover.

Previous zooarcheological research has focused on knowing the patterns of wildlife exploitation in the different archaeological sites of the Maya area. In this sense, the present work intends to approach the different uses of the different species of animals in activities carried out by the pre-Hispanic Maya people located at the site of Vista Alegre, Quintana Roo, Mexico. The simple has c. 23,000 remains of fauna, coming from three architectural constructions: Structure 9 (Operation 3A),...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Rubenstein.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Puuc region of Yucatán is distinguished by its architectural style, composed primarily of low, range-type structures with limestone veneers. These building surfaces, elaborately carved with iconographic content, also served as backdrops for stucco and stone sculptures, which were placed in niches, on projecting platforms, and incorporated directly into the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Hoggarth. J. Britt Davis. Christophe Helmke. Jaime Awe.

A variety of functions have been proposed for ‘problematic deposits’ across the Maya lowlands. All of the explanations have archaeological and temporal implications that have rarely been operationalized together to gain better insights into the nature of these deposits. In this presentation, we describe these features as ‘peri-abandonment deposits’, as all proposed explanations imply that the events that led to the formation of the deposits occurred around the time (or after) ceremonial centers...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Scholnick. Viviana Amati. Jessica Munson.

This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Diffusion of innovation describes the way novel cultural traits or information spread in a population. Understanding the specific factors that account for the spread of these innovations calls for a multivariate approach. Event history analysis provides a set of statistical methods to explain and predict the occurrence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kacey Grauer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dividing the landscape into the categories of natural and cultural clouds an understanding of the relationship between humans and their ecological environment. Humans are not separate from or above the landscape they inhabit, and landscape archaeology is well-situated to address arbitrary binaries that reinforce problematic notions about human-environment...

DOCUMENT Citation Only E. Cory Sills. Heather McKillop.

This is an abstract from the "Underwater Maya: Analytical Approaches for Interpreting Ancient Maya Activities at the Paynes Creek Salt Works, Belize" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Soil chemistry is used in the Maya area to evaluate ancient activities not readily identified through architecture and artifact assemblages. We evaluate ancient activities at Ta’ab Nuk Na salt work, one of the largest underwater sites in Paynes Creek National Park, with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Horowitz. Damien Marken. Damaris Menéndez.

This is an abstract from the "An Exchange of Ideas: Recent Research on Maya Commodities" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Economic studies in the Maya region have illustrated that the Classic period Maya utilized a variety of exchange networks to circulate commodities such as market exchange, redistribution, and gifting. The study of specific types of goods provides information on how different materials circulated through these exchange mechanisms...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Max Seidita. Whittaker Schroder. Alejandra Roche Recinos. Charles Golden. Andrew Scherer.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Obsidian Studies of the Old and New Worlds" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. More than a decade of archaeological research has characterized the political landscape of the middle Usumacinta river valley as a tense political rivalry between the Classic period Maya (250 – 900 C.E.) kingdoms. Recent archaeological work in the kingdoms of Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan has sought to unravel how the internal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Harper Dine. Traci Ardren. Chelsea Fisher.

It is difficult to pin down the objective definition of a weed; rather, the idea of a weed is constructed through a set of characteristics that are, for the most part, dependent on context and relative interactions. Doody et al (2014) use Judith Butler’s (1990) concept of performativity to describe this dynamic, ongoing construction as a product of the agency of both people and plants. Here we interpret studies on ancient Maya agricultural techniques through the lens of plant agency and...