Corozal (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bernadette Cap. M. Kathryn Brown. Whitney Lytle.

The ancient Maya formalized avenues of movement between and within urban centers through the construction of sacbeob that both defined space and connected places on the landscape. In this paper, we discuss the ways in which a formally constructed sacbe at Xunantunich functioned as an axis connecting economic and ritual activities. The architectural arrangement of Classic Xunantunich emphasizes a north/south directionality. The site’s sacbe, however, was constructed on an east/west alignment....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorraine Williams-Beck.

In the geographic heartlands of the Yucatan Peninsula, academic literature describes the Chenes region as an "archaeological province" with a particular regional cultural character, in which sculpted monuments with glyphs or ballcourts are scarce components in urban systems, and even less frequent in most monumental cores. To date only three ballcourts had been recorded. After field seasons in 2016 and 2017 I confirm another example in Tabasqueño, the only site also to exhibit a free-standing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dmitri Beliaev. Alexandre Tokovinine. Milan Kovác.

During the 2017 field season of the Uaxactun Archaeological project new monument was excavated at Buena Vista, a minor center at Uaxactun urban periphery. It is a small carved altar or ballcourt marker, which according to its style dates to the Early Classic. High quality of the carving and the hieroglyphic inscription indicates that the altar/marker itself was a part of the monumental corpus of Uaxactun urban core; uncomplete text provides important new information on the dynastic history of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Traci Ardren.

This is an abstract from the "Textile Tools and Technologies as Evidence for the Fiber Arts in Precolumbian Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While bark cloth and paper are well known in the ethnographic and artistic records of Pacific and African cultures, due to preservation concerns these important plant based products have been challenging to investigate in the precolumbian cultures of the New World. Often our only proxy for bark...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Webster.

BECAN RECONSIDERED -- Joe Ball’s early career centered strongly on Becan, which during the early 1970’s figured prominently in many interpretations of Classic Maya society and culture history. The initial Becan research predated our effective understanding of Maya inscriptions, the large-scale conflicts and alliances that affected the southern lowlands, and also the now-widespread data for climate change and the Classic "collapse". Because of its lack of inscriptions Becan has been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Earley.

Recent study of an hacha from Classic-period Veracruz in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art reveals that hachas and palmas may have been used as costume elements in ritual performances related to the ballgame. As costume elements, these sculptures would have allowed actors to assume the identity of captives, rulers, or deities. This accords well with iconographic evidence of ballgame-related ritual performances in Veracruz, and suggests comparisons with artworks from other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sam Holley-Kline.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the history and ethnography of archaeology, only recently has archaeological labor – both administrative and physical – become an area of interest. In the Mexican context, recent historical research has dated the emergence of institutional archaeology to the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911). However, there are few site-scale studies that explore...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Newman.

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. The practice of human sacrifice is one of the defining traits of ancient Mesoamerica, at least according to the modern imagination. But painted objects, carvings, and codices reveal that nonhuman animals often served as sacrificial victims as well. Were some classes or species of animals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colleen O'Brien. Sheldon Smith. Nicole DeFrancisco.

Archaeologists have argued for numerous functions of the bench features found throughout the Maya world ranging from utilitarian to ritual. During the 2017 field season at the Late Classic site of La Obra, excavations of a centrally-located structure revealed a bench standing approximately 50 centimeters from the structure floor and extending out approximately 150 centimeters from its northern wall. La Obra is a hilltop production site located approximately one kilometer northwest of the central...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Novotny.

Working at the community level is a crucial component of an engaged, socially just discipline. Advancing archaeology towards greater inclusivity is an increasingly common conversation within the discipline. The majority of literature on this topic focuses on grassroots efforts to include marginalized descendant communities or other stakeholders in research design, implementation, knowledge dissemination and curation. An ever present and often unanalyzed aspect of research (especially abroad),...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Krista Eschbach.

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. The Port of Veracruz was significant not only as the landing site of Hernán Cortés, but also as a central gateway for European colonists and African slaves entering New Spain. First encounters between immigrants and natives had significant long-term consequences, but initial interactions were only a starting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Flavio Silva De La Mora.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation centers on the daily life of Maya commoners from the Classic Maya site of Chinikihá in Chiapas, Mexico. The excavations are part of a regional effort to understand rural communities and social complexity. The presentation will offer an intimate view of the materiality of the daily life of non-elite groups from a domestic context, offering a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Horvey Palacios. J. Marla Toyne. Michael Callaghan. Brigitte Kovacevich.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Maya area, bioarchaeological and mortuary analysis can help identify patterns of mortuary ritual and social experience of past peoples. However, there is very little bioarchaeological and mortuary evidence for the developing complexity and social experience of the Preclassic period. Major ceremonial centers like Naranjo, Tikal, and Yaxha surround...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Patterson.

Analysis of human skeletal remains has made significant contributions to the understanding of the history of La Corona and its interaction with the wider Maya world. The skeletal sample has now grown to include nearly thirty individuals, and includes single and multiples burials, non-burial deposits, and individuals from the site center and outlying sites. The study, one of the most comprehensive in northwest Peten, has focused on establishing demographic information and examining osteological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Hannigan. Shintaro Suzuki. Felipe Trabanino. Boris Beltran.

Micro and macroscopic bioarchaeological analyses enable archaeologists to generate biological profiles of past individuals, including characteristics such as diet, sex, age, occupational stress, pathologies, and social status, among others. In this paper, we discuss the significance of a Maya individual by constructing a biological profile from both micro and macroscopic analyses. The individual of interest was excavated during the 2012 field season at Xultún, Guatemala in a patio situated in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Welch.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Women in Mesoamerican Ritual" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Underneath a Classic Maya palace at Ucanha, builders buried a Terminal Preclassic platform outfitted with monumental portraits of rain gods. Analogous architecture appears throughout the Maya lowlands from the Middle Preclassic to Early Classic periods, and several scholars suggest their role in expediting the apotheosis of royal figures into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Hyde.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster details the findings of a contextual analysis of portable material culture, commonly referred to as “small finds” artifacts, collected from 2004 to 2019 at the hinterland Maya community of Medicinal Trail, located in northwestern Belize. The collection from Medicinal Trail comes from a variety of contexts, such as middens, burials, caches, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuko Kita. Annick Daneels. Alfonso Romo de Vivar.

This is an abstract from the "Plant Exudates and Other Binders, Adhesives, and Coatings in the Americas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Investigations on monumental earthen architecture in the Classic period La Joya site in Central Veracruz led to the hypothesis that a bitumen additive was used as a stabilizer in construction. The use of bitumen resulted in increased resistance to weathering in a humid tropical environment, as well as control of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Miller.

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. One might think that the 2013 publication of Miller and Brittenham on Bonampak would have closed discussion of these paintings for a few years. But the complexity and richness of the subject continues to yield both details and to add to the big picture of the three-room program of late 8th...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Fox. Jaime Awe.

Previous archaeological investigations of terminus groups in the Maya Lowlands concluded that these architectural complexes served either cosmological, ritual, or economic purposes. In an effort to test these models, we investigated causeway terminus groups at Cahal Pech and Baking Pot. Subsequent comparisons of the Cahal Pech and Baking Pot data with that from other sites in the Belize Valley, Caracol and Tikal, strongly suggest that while there was some regional diversity in the significance...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabella Medina. Inés Zazueta. Vera Tiesler.

This is an abstract from the "A Session in Memory of William J. Folan: Cities, Settlement, and Climate" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mayanist community recalls a close colleague and tireless promoter of Maya archaeology, Dr. Folan. The Bioarchaeology Laboratory of the Autonomous University of Yucatan remembers him with great affection and a deep appreciation of a remarkable person, scholar, and student mentor. He ably led the archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Mongelluzzo. Jose Garrido. Jean-Baptiste Le Moine.

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. An exploration of how modern borders of different kinds have influenced, and sometimes impeded, our understanding of ancient borders and territories. The Guatemala-Belize border has ramifications in terms of the ways in which scholars interact and how the archaeology is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Gregory Smith. Alejandra Alonso Olvera. Soledad Ortiz. Atasta Flores.

Social boundaries of the past and present are usually nebulous, contested, and fluid. In this paper we examine the ancient towns and villages between the two Maya kingdoms of Chichen Itza and Ek Balam in northern Yucatam. We hypothesize that the boundary area between these two cities in the 9th century AD was based on Classic Maya concepts of ruler-centered polities but changed dramatically in the 10th century as Chichen Itza became a fundamentally different kind of Maya city the likes of which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleanor Harrison-Buck. Timothy Pugh.

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. Following the Classic Maya "collapse" a clustering of traits appear at sites in the Peten – Belize area of the Southern Maya Lowlands. These include new architectural forms, such as circular and colonnaded buildings and the introduction of distinctive portable goods such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allan Cobb.

This is an abstract from the "Studies in Mesoamerican Subterranean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maya explored caves with torches and burned copal with wood fires during ceremonies. These activities, in a confined space such as a cave, used up oxygen and produced carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. The effects of high carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide on the human body are well studied by OSHA and documented in environmental and...