Cayo (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Popovici.

Comalcalco displays a radical departure from traditional Maya building materials in its brick and seashell mortar construction instead of the paradigmatic Maya limestone. Incised animal, architecture, hieroglyph, and human forms adorn the brick slabs of principal buildings of Comalcalco’s ceremonial core. However, their inward-facing, or concealed, orientation rendered these markings invisible. Because monumental architecture benefited from the labor of non-elites, the purposeful placement of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only April Martinez. John Walden. Delmer Tzib. Carlos Quiroz. Frank Tzib.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Belize is rich in cultural diversity and history but has long faced a disconnect between its citizens’ knowledge and the profound legacy of its precolonial past. Belize's ancient Maya remains attracts archaeologists from around the world. Despite this extraordinary heritage, some Belizeans are disconnected from this past, leading to a diminished sense of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Sharpe. Kitty Emery. John Pfeiffer.

For over a century, the taxonomy of the Central American freshwater mussels (family Unionidae) has been the subject of numerous classifications and reclassifications, with naturalists identifying morphologically identical taxa as different genera or species, while at the same time classifying obviously distinct taxa under the same name. Zooarchaeologists at the mercy of these erratic classification schemes have been unable to effectively compare datasets. This study uses a combined...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Norbert Stanchly. Jon Spenard. Terry Powis. Christophe Helmke.

The Terminal Classic period in the southern Maya Lowlands was one of great social transition, witnessing the disruption of long-standing economic systems, and the downfall of divine kingship. The manifestation of this "collapse" in the artifactual record has been well documented at many sites throughout the Belize Valley, yet how it does so at the site of Pacbitun, on the southern rim of the Belize Valley, remains poorly understood, in spite of nearly three decades of archaeological research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Spenard. Mike Mirro. Javier Mai.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Rio Frio Regional Archaeological Project (RiFRAP) 2022 Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve regional survey resulted in documentation of the Buffalo Hill Quarries (BHQ), the first recorded ancestral Maya granitic rock quarry with a ground stone implement workshop site. Preliminary investigations indicate a complex multicomponent quarryscape with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Mixter.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For the ancient Maya, the second century B.C. was a period of growth and consolidation; populations boomed, and a common set of cultural ideas spread across the Maya Lowlands. This expansion of ideas is evident in the widespread presence of chicanel ceramics, the spread of a unified Late Preclassic figural style found on mural and carved monuments, and in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenichiro Tsukamoto. Fuyuki Tokanai. Toru Moriya.

This paper aims to refine the Maya chronology during the Classic period (A.D. 250-950) through the development of Bayesian models. In so doing, we combined radiocarbon dates with stratigraphic information, ceramic data, burials, and calendric dates from stone monuments. At the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry of Yamagata University, we ran 78 radiocarbon samples recovered from the Guzmán Group, an outlying group located 1.3km north of El Palmar in southeastern Campeche, Mexico. To...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alyce De Carteret.

In the late sixteenth century, King Philip II of Spain sent out a request to the local administrators of his overseas colonies, asking that they complete a questionnaire designed to collect information about the lands he had conquered. The responses to this questionnaire, completed primarily between 1578-1586, form a set of documents now known as the Relaciones Geográficas. Question 31 asked respondents to describe the form and construction of the local houses and the materials used to build...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terry Powis. George J. Micheletti. Kaitlin Crow. Sheldon Skaggs. Peter Cherico.

Archaeological research in the Upper Belize River Valley has recently produced information that dramatically improves our knowledge of the earliest Maya. Investigations, particularly at the site of Pacbitun, has revealed evidence of radiometrically and ceramically dated cultural stratigraphic deposits for the early and late Middle Preclassic subperiods (900-300 BC). Excavations were undertaken in the site core, principally Plazas A and B, to determine the nature and extent of these communities...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Puente. Sarah Kurnick.

This is an abstract from the "The Vibrancy of Ruins: Ruination Studies in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After Mexico declared its independence from Spain in 1821, foreign explorers began traveling throughout the Maya area and documenting sites, structures, and monuments then unknown in the United States and Europe. In photographs, drawings, and written reports, these explorers depicted Maya ruins as deserted and lifeless, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only L. Renee Hendricks.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper addresses the inclusion of women within Classic Maya works of art, consisting of, for this purpose, private-consumption ceramic vessels and large scale public monuments. Through the use of Feminist and Gender Theory, Performance Theory, and Iconographic Theory, the roles of women in iconographically depicted ceremonial performance is assessed. A...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ken Seligson. Tomás Gallareta Negrón. Rossana May. George Bey III.

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. This talk will present an overview of the Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project’s contributions to the study of Maya burnt lime production, drawing on a mix of excavation, archaeometric, and spatial data. As part of their extensive Kiuic-Labná intersect pedestrian survey, Tomás Gallareta Negrón and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaitlin Ahern.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2013 and 2014, a series of excavations were conducted on Structure 9 at the Preclassic period center of Cival. Structure 9 is the western radial pyramid associated with the site’s central E-Group complex. These excavations uncovered a series of caches, termination rituals, and deliberate destruction of architectural features across five major phases of...

DATASET Rachel Horowitz.

Lithic Analysis from Callar Creek Quarry

DOCUMENT Citation Only Audrey Smith. Claire Ebert. Brett Meyer. Julie Hoggarth. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For millennia dogs (Canis familiaris) have fulfilled various biological, functional, and companionship roles, yet their use and significance in Mesoamerica varied substantially through time. Previous studies of dogs in the Maya lowlands argued that human-canid relationships involved high levels of dog consumption, though zooarchaeology and epigraphic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hector Neff.

Tohil Plumbate, defined by distinctive technology and distinctive decorative style, is found throughout Mesoamerica, with peak frequencies in the central and western highlands of Guatemala and strong representation at Terminal Classic Maya centers like Chichen Itza. INAA-based source determination and recent fieldwork link the technology to the Pacific coastal zone of eastern Soconusco, near the Chiapas-Guatemala border. Curiously, however, key stylistic features, especially effigies and fancy,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Varela.

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mesoamerica is a region with highly biodiverse ecosystems, from temperate forests to tropical jungles, and where civilizations impacted the landscape in different ways. In several Mesoamerican cities, zooarchaeologists have found evidence for animal management and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Mirro. Jon Spenard.

Since 2010, a major focus of the Pacbitun Regional Archaeological project has been a regional ritual landscape survey surrounding. In 2016, Phase II of that subproject commenced, with significant efforts geared towards experimenting with digital mapping and documentation of surface archaeological features in four poorly understood caves, Crystal Palace, Slate Cave, Tzul’s Cave, and Actun Tokbe. In this paper, we discuss our work and offer some results from our Phase II investigations. In 2016,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Rincon Mautner.

This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Cultural Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The inhabitants across the Northern Mixteca and the drier sectors of the Tehuacan Valley developed technological innovations to counter the effects of recurrent drought on subsistence. Among measures implemented to conserve soil and water there are terraces, dams, reservoirs, and canals, as well as seed selection and cultivation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Brady.

This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Cultural Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 25 years since the publication of “Settlement Configuration and Cosmology: The Role of Caves at Dos Pilas,” a number of significant discoveries of architecture constructed in relation to caves have been made. The discovery of the man-made cave constructed beneath the Pyramid of the Plumed Serpent at Teotihuacan is perhaps the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshuah Lockett-Harris.

Growing evidence suggests the ancient Maya conceptualized caves, as well as small crevices in the karstic bedrock (both natural and artificial), as sacred ch’een – portals of shamanic communication, which existed in a liminal realm between the physical world and the ancestral powers of the cave-riddled Underworld. Ch’een represented important ritual foci for the ancient Maya, as well as receptacles for sacred offerings. The interment of prominent ancestors and symbolically valuable materials...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jocelyn Acosta.

In 1910, A. Hooton Blackiston discovered a cave 25 miles from Naco containing a cache of 800 copper bells, a possible mosaic mask of turquoise, and other materials. Blackiston interpreted the cave as a place of worship dedicated to the bat god. Copper, however, has very rarely been reported from caves in Honduras. Metals enter Mesoamerican late in its history but quickly assume an importance equal to jade in the native value system. The only other cave known to have held copper bells is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wendy Layco. Jessica Strayer. Samantha Lorenz. Toni Gonzalez.

In June of 2017, the Contested Caves Archaeological Project (CCAP), explored what was thought to be a partially capped chultun at the site of La Milpa, Belize. On entering, however, it became clear that the feature was actually a small, natural cave with a classic chultun-style entrance carved into it. Two of the cave’s three chambers contained small pools of water, which receded into the porous limestone, within days of their discovery. The pools make any possibility of storage infeasible...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Fisher.

This is an abstract from the "Advancing Public Perceptions of Sustainability through Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ejido (collective agricultural landholding) of Yaxunah, Yucatán, Mexico is known among archaeologists for its pre-Hispanic archaeological sites. But among a growing contingent of food aficionados, Yaxunah is known for its cooking. Having attracted the interest of celebrity chefs like René Redzepi (Noma, Copenhagen),...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robin Robertson. Lauren Sullivan. Laura Kosakowsky. Fred Valdez.

This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For many years the notion of a core (or center) versus periphery (or edge) dominated models of prehistoric Maya development. However, in 1979 David Freidel argued against the idea that there was a center or edge, asserting that the lowland Maya belonged to an interaction sphere....