Belize (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Minneth Medina. James Callaghane. Rafael Lopez.

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El códice maya de Madrid, muestra aspectos de la vida cotidiana de los mayas, uno de ellos la meliponicultura, producción de las abejas sin aguijón. En el Puuc, la meliponicultura es una práctica desarrollada de manera secundaria después de la milpa maya, complementando el ingreso...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dorie Reents-Budet. Ronald L. Bishop. Joseph Ball. Jennifer Taschek.

The socio-political and economic interactions of Las Ruinas de Arenal, a small but architecturally rich center in the lower Mopan River Valley, are explored through a focused investigation of select Classic period (250-850 CE) pottery from general occupation and special deposits. The study combines ceramic typological data with evaluations of artistic style and paste chemical composition. Previous archaeological investigations by Taschek and Ball found scant evidence of foreign influence in Las...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Kwoka.

This is an abstract from the "Ceremonial Lithics of Mesoamerica: New Understandings of Technology, Distribution, and Symbolism of Eccentrics and Ritual Caches in the Maya World and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Late Classic, lithic artifacts, including eccentrics, served as the primary elements of many Lowland Maya caches. Despite this general pattern, technological and iconographic analyses illuminate the distinct character of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Sullivan. Eleanor King. Whitney Goodwin.

This is an abstract from the "Prehispanic Maya Marketplace Investigations in the Three Rivers Region of Belize: First Results" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The understanding of Maya marketplaces has long been hindered by the lack of archaeological data to support their identification. The ceramic data presented here serves as one aspect of an overarching project that uses a configurational approach and a set of cross-cultural marketplace...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanley Walling.

Recent research at the ball court complex and other areas of the ancient hinterland community of Chawak But’o’ob in the Rio Bravo Conservation and Management Area in northwestern Belize indicates the existence of a sophisticated interplay of environment and ideology at this agrarian site. The intersection of landscape, hydrology, and architecture here hints at mythological underpinnings of Maya commoner ritual that only partially overlap those in evidence in ancient urban contexts.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Sullivan. Ronald L. Bishop. Elizabeth H. Paris.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Classic through Postclassic transition in Central Chiapas, c. 750-900 AD, was a time of dynamic change in population, social, and political organization, some of which was incurred by the entry of the Chiapanec people into the Central Depression. The Spanish Conquistadors, arriving in the area some six centuries later, described the Chiapanec as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Santiago Juarez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Preclassic (400 B.C. – A.D. 200) site of Noh K’uh is located in the Mensäbäk basin, over 30 kilometers west of the Usumacinta. Within this understudied region, the site of Noh K’uh was an important ceremonial center during the Late Preclassic, and was composed of several hilltop aggregates that clustered around a moderate monumental core. The site’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evelyn Chan.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Research in the Petén Lakes Region, Petén, Guatemala" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological site of Nixtun-Ch’ich’, Petén, Guatemala, exhibits urban planning different from “typical” Maya cities. In addition to its urban density and gridded layout, it possesses large monumental architecture along its central axis that distinguished it as a prominent city during the Preclassic period. This axis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justine Shaw.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the course of three field seasons, eight round foundation braces supporting perishable pole-and-thatch buildings were excavated in the Cochuah region of west-central Quintana Roo, Mexico. Dating to the period immediately after the region was largely abandoned during what is known as the “Maya collapse,” the structures reveal small populations living...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elsa Menéndez. Damien Marken. Keith Eppich.

Recent archaeology at the Classic Maya city of El Perú-Waka’ has revealed a number of distinct communities making up the urban occupation. These communities possess their own cycles of settlement, florescence, and abandonment. Taken together, these cycles seem to show two distinct aspects that directly pertain to Classic Maya urbanism. One, it shows the urban landscape to be in a continuously changing state. The urban ruins encountered by researchers are the end product of centuries of such...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rhonda Quinn. Volney Friedrich. Francisco Estrada-Belli. Alexandre Tokovinine. Linda Godfrey.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La Sufricaya, a Classic Period Maya civic-ceremonial complex in the city of Holmul, Petén, Guatemala, has several epigraphic elements that potentially link it to the Maya city of Tikal and the central Mexican metropolis of Teotihuacan. The La Sufricaya area boasts elaborate elite residential buildings, plazas, a ball court, and carved stelae; rulers from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Nowakowski. M. Kathryn Brown. Katherine Nelson. Jason Yaeger.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholars have sought to identify ancient Maya spaces where specialized knowledge was transferred and acquired. Several historic accounts, including that of Bishop de Landa’s in Yucatan, mention specialized residences for youths while they were being schooled. Analogous to boarding schools, housing exclusively for acolytes creates a focused environment for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel May Castillo.

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. In this presentation, I argue that paganism-barbarism not only amalgamated colonial propaganda to portray the Maya Peoples as enemies of the crown for the sake of colonization but also served to legally disable any Maya who dared to claim their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shane Montgomery. Holley Moyes.

This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Las Cuevas region, situated on the southeastern edge of the Vaca Plateau in western Belize, consists of several medium-sized centers dispersed between low hills, steep ridges, and small seasonal swamps. Although occupied only briefly during the Late Classic period (700–900 CE),...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrés Mejía Ramón. Jessica Munson. Jill Onken. Lorena Paiz Aragón.

This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Any sizable population must be sustained by an adequate food supply. As such, estimates for high population densities in the Maya Lowlands must be met with an equal or greater productive capacity. The “Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities” symposium seeks to understand this on a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcello Canuto. Luke Auld-Thomas.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican Population History: Demography, Social Complexity, and Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2016, the Pacunam Lidar Initiative surveyed 2,100 km2 of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the Department of Petén, Guatemala. This lidar survey provided an unprecedented scale of settlement data that attest to elevated population levels throughout the southern Maya lowlands, especially for the Late...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Reese-Taylor. Felix Kupprat. Armando Anaya Hernández. Nicholas Dunning. Adriana Velazquez Morlet.

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. Building on the work of William J. Folan, the Bajo Laberinto Archaeological Project, initiated in 2022, is focused on investigations of urbanism centered on the city of Calakmul in southern Campeche. An initial 100 km2 lidar survey along the northern rim of the Bajo Laberinto has revealed large, elaborate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Reed Miller. Kenichiro Tsukamoto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An essential component of analyzing lidar data is adapting them to the researcher’s specific environmental situation, including the effects of local vegetation types on the identification of archaeological features. Doing so, can refine estimates of existing structures in non-surveyed areas and inform improved ground survey strategies in the future. At the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mariana Vazquez.

This is an abstract from the "New and Emerging Perspectives on the Bajo el Laberinto Region of the Maya Lowlands, Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study introduces a method for estimating aboveground biomass (AGB) in contemporary tropical forests near archaeological sites using lidar technology. Accurate AGB estimates are crucial for assessing wood resources available to the ancient Maya for city development. We propose a lidar...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marisol Cortes-Rincon. Cady Rutherford. Jason Laugesen. Michael Mcdermott. Spencer Mitchell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the last decade airborne mapping lidar has become an extremely valuable tool for archaeologists studying ancient settlement patterns. It has proven especially useful in regions covered by dense forests on which prospection with other remote sensing techniques is not possible. This paper contributes to the growing international dialogue regarding the use of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Kepecs.

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 Spaniards characterized the northeast corner of Yucatán state as being demographically depleted and possessed of unhealthy terrain and a lack of exploitable minerals. This picture has been perpetuated by historians, who lack independent lines of evidence against which to check it. Yet archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shintaro Suzuki. Fernando Gutiérrez.

This is an abstract from the "Aguada Fénix and the Middle Usumacinta Region: Interregional Interactions and Social Transformations in the Middle Preclassic Period" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We explore a Middle Preclassic skeleton from the site of Aguada Fénix, Tabasco. It is one of the scarce cases of the early temporality in the Maya area. We first describe in detail its archaeological context and osteological sex and age-at-death and infer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Cerezo-Román. Kenichiro Tsukamoto.

During the Late Classic period (A.D. 600-800), Maya non-royal elites frequently appeared in courtly scenes, which are depicted on polychrome vessels and carved monuments. While epigraphic studies over the last two decades have gradually shed light on their political and ritual roles, little is known about their life histories and mortuary practices. One group of these elites held the title of lakam, which has been reported only at three archaeological sites. We detected tangible evidence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleanor Harrison-Buck. Marieka Brouwer Burg. Samantha Krause.

This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the early years of Maya archaeology, Belize was considered peripheral, and the wetlands were at the far edge of this pseudo-backwater. It was not until Turner and Harrison’s seminal study of Pulltrouser Swamp in the 1970s that Belizean wetlands moved from the edge to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lilian Tejeda-Barillas. Jaime J. Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Life, Death, and Renewal: Examining the Significance of Lowland Maya Sweat Baths in the Belize River Valley. Lilian Tejeda Barillas and Jaime J. Awe Although sweat baths were an integral form of architecture in ancient Maya communities, these special architectural features have received limited attention from Maya scholars. In this poster, we address...