Belize (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Haney.

Residential burials are useful tools that help archaeologists better understand domestic ritual practices at the household level. With the household acting as a unit of social identity, funerary practices help archaeologists relate said practices to prominent trends of the time. These include, but are not limited to social and religious structures, identity, power, and social reproduction. One of the many types of artifacts that often appear in Classic Maya burials that are significant to burial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Bacon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster will discuss the benefits of using different combinations of rasters for large scale survey and the functional usage of viewing problematic mounds in the point cloud to weed away the false positives. Maya sites around Mesoamerica have and will be scanned with LiDAR. Since the turn of the century, technology has improved and now the data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandre Tokovinine.

This is an abstract from the "Supernatural Gamekeepers and Animal Masters: A Cross-Cultural Perspective" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores a set of mythical narratives on Classic Maya pottery (550-800 C.E.), which involve Huk Si’ip, the divine keeper of animals, and Itzam Kokaaj, the celestial creator of animals. Most of these narratives form part of a larger theogony cycle where the elderly gods of animals, sky, earth, and fire...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Hruby.

This is an abstract from the "Mountains, Rain, and Techniques of Governance in Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lithic analysis at various sites in the Maya area, such as Plan de las Mesas, Kaminaljuyu, Copan, and Piedras Negras reveal regional differences between obsidian tool production, distribution, and consumption. Some patterns in obsidian economies were shared between these sites, as well as others more distantly located such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Asta Rand. Richard Madgwick.

This is an abstract from the "Integrating Isotope Analyses: The State of Play and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Death was not the end for many members of Prehispanic Maya communities (250 BC–1560 AD). Indeed, the inclusion of human remains in structures that continued to function indicates that the dead (or their significance to the living) maintained social if not biological vitality. Although there is also ample evidence that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christian Sheumaker.

This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of movement has long been relegated to the background of archaeological investigations, as its materialization proves multifarious yet equally elusive. The resulting collection of archaeological "movement studies" generally focuses on the most formalized manifestation of movement: road systems. Yet at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Messinger. Bryan Hanks. Nick Suarez. Marc Bermann. Claire Ebert.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Preclassic (~1000 BC-AD 300) marked the appearance of increased socio-political integration and the emergence of inequality in the Maya lowlands. Over the course of the Preclassic, emerging elites invested in monumental construction projects and consolidated their ritual authority with ceremonial events, which occurred in large public plazas. As one of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa DeLance.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 1988, the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance Project has actively excavated archaeological sites throughout the Belize River Valley, resulting in a plethora of archaeological material elucidating nearly 3,000 years of human occupation. Beginning during the 2017 field season, the BVAR Digital Archive Project aims to curate, consolidate, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colin Doyle. Timothy Beach. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach. Jedidiah Dale.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part II" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present preliminary results from a newly discovered Maya wetland canal and raised field system found along the Rio Bravo River in Northwest Belize using airborne LiDAR. The LiDAR data reveals canals and raised fields in a very rectilinear pattern that suggest planning and organization for many kilometers down the floodplain near...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Clarke.

This is an abstract from the "Heat, Steam, and Health: The Archaeology of the Mesoamerican Pib Naah (Sweat Baths)" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sweat baths have been used in Mesoamerica for more than a millennium for humoral medicine, childbirth, and obstetrics, not to mention rituals related to death, birth, and rebirth. During this long period of time, they have held a relatively constant place in mythology; they are ancestral grandmothers who...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachael Wedemeyer. Kenichiro Tsukamoto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The data presented in this paper are results from the 2022 field season at the López Plaza, a small plazuela group located within the site center of El Palmar. Fieldwork included test pit excavations, shovel test pits, and geophysical prospections. Lidar images show that the López Plaza has two separate plaza spaces and approximately eight structures and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mirko De Tomassi.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Weaving-related objects, mainly spindle whorls and needles, found in prehispanic Maya burials are usually interpreted as an indication of either the identity of the deceased or the activities carried out in life. Such a symbolic approach is valuable in tracking the construction of identity in funerary contexts. However, it can be misleading in some contexts....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeline Snyder.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There has been a long history of settlement and household archaeology in the Belize River valley that has added significantly to our understanding of everyday people in the Maya lowlands. This research has allowed us to examine questions related to broader cultural norms and traditions, as well as better understand the distribution of settlement across the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Borislava Simova.

Our understanding of the ancient Maya is informed to a great extent by the material remains of ritual performance in both domestic and public contexts. Maya populations throughout Mesoamerica were united by a shared cosmology patterning the timing, location, and material aspects of ritual performance. Yet, ritual was not a static or rigid construct, dutifully replicated across populations. At the site of Actuncan, Belize, we find that aspects of domestic ritual cycles, - including form, content,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Walden. Michael Biggie. Kyle Shaw-Müller. Anaïs Levin. Rafael Guerra.

One relatively understudied aspect of neighborhood integration in ancient cities relates to the divergent trajectories along which cities form. In some ancient cities, the urban periphery appeared as autonomous communities prior to the development of a center, representing an ‘outside-in’ model of urbanism. Such contexts provide a valuable case study for investigating neighborhood integration into cities, due to a clear comparative temporal threshold (before and after incorporation). This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Welch. Scott Hutson.

Archaeologists working on the question of integration of neighborhoods within cities or polities often begin by assuming the existence of centralized authority. Next, they move to consider the relationship between neighborhoods and such authorities. Researchers typically see this relationship as one of domination, independence, or something in between. The case of Chunchucmil, a large Maya site located in northwest Yucatan, Mexico, challenges this common approach to neighborhood integration. At...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Doyle. Griselda Pérez Robles. Edwin Pérez Robles.

In 2016, a pilot project began for the conservation of sculpted monuments including stelae, altars, and panels at the site of Piedras Negras, Guatemala. Since then, a team in conjunction with the international Proyecto Paisaje Piedras Negras-Yaxchilan has constructed new platforms with roofs to house the monuments, protecting them from further weathering, moisture, and biological agents. The results of the implementation of the innovative system—platforms of powdered lime and local stones,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy A Sabloff.

This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us using the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Pugh.

The site of Nixtun-Ch’ich’ in Petén, Guatemala is the only known lowland Maya site with an urban grid. Such grids are composed of perpendicular streets forming quadrilateral city blocks. They are common elements of city planning as they increase the legibility of city space and the interconnectivity of occupants. The urban grid at Nixtun-Ch’ich’ is the earliest known in the Americas (ca. 800-500 BCE) and was built when social complexity was emerging in the Maya region. Like many Preclassic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Munson. Andrés Mejía-Ramón. Lorena Paíz Aragon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last decade, the use of lidar has dramatically changed our understanding of the size and extent of ancient settlements in the Maya lowlands. This technology, however, has yielded equivocal results in secondary-forest growth and recently deforested environments. In these settings, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) surveys facilitate a more effective and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Reed.

This is an abstract from the "Innovations and Transformations in Mesoamerican Research: Recent and Revised Insights of Ancestral Lifeways" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sex and age factor into ancient diets. This poster revisits the largest single Maya polity paleodiet study using approaches that have been developed since the original data were collected, and to incorporate newer knowledge of Maya foodways in developing a better reconstruction of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Saldana. Michele Bleuze. James Brady.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1993, a previously unknown composite material made of layers of finely woven cotton fabric saturated in ceramic slip were recovered by the Petexbatun Regional Cave Survey in the Cueva del los Quetzales, Petén, Guatemala. An analysis of the sherds was conducted by the Smithsonian Institution's Conservation Analytical Laboratory (now the Smithsonian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Jolie. W. Rex Weeks.

This is an abstract from the "The Ties That Bind: Cordage, Its Sources, and the Artifacts of Its Creation and Use" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnographic, iconographic, and archaeological records attest to the sophisticated and sumptuous textiles produced by Maya peoples in ancient and contemporary times. However, historical neglect of cordage industries in archaeology, combined with poor organic preservation and gaps in the ethnographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Merideth Paxton.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Symbolism in Postclassic Mesoamerica: Papers in Honor of Cecelia Klein" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Dresden Codex is a Postclassic Maya document that is thought to have originated in the Yucatán Peninsula. The opossum figures in the panels at the tops of its section on the New Year (pages 25-28) are associated with the uayeb, the five nameless, unlucky days that mark the ends of the 365-day haabs. A...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Markus Eberl. Sven Gronemeyer. Claudia Marie Vela González.

In Classic Maya society, termination rituals were conducted to ‘kill’ buildings and artifacts, predominantly in elite contexts. The resulting deposits were rapidly deposited in intentionally damaged buildings. They contain dense artifact assemblages with exotic objects and refittable ceramic sherds. After burning them, the artifacts were covered with white marl. Here, we report the extensive excavation of non-elite Structure 5PS-12 at the outskirts of the Classic Maya capital of Tamarindito. Its...