Stann Creek (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)
101-125 (1,140 Records)
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. In her article “Saving the Other Bees,” Eve Bratman (2020) explores the successful reintroduction of beekeeping practices associated with the stingless species Melipona beecheii in the Yucatán Peninsula, which has resulted in the species thriving following near extinction. She...
Before the Aurora of Hegemony: How the La Corona Community Brooked the Kaanul Dynasty (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Rise and Apogee of the Classic Maya Kaanu’l Hegemonic State at Dzibanche" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By examining archaeological and epigraphic evidence from the northwestern Peten during the Classic period, we can gain valuable insights into the strategies used by the Kaanul dynasts to establish and maintain a unique regional hegemony in the Maya Lowlands. We focus on the site of La Corona where we have...
Before There Were Ceramics in Belize (2024)
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. The 10,000 years before ceramics first appear is the longest epoch in the human occupation of Belize, and yet the least understood. Many fundamental cultural developments are first documented in what is now known as the Maya region, including management of tropical forest...
The Beginning of a New Epoch: The Transition to Post-dynastic Life in Río Amarillo, Copán Valley, Honduras (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Pre-Columbian Cultures of Honduras after AD 900" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Contrary to what is reported for post-dynastic Copan, where evidence supports abandonment and reoccupation of the area by a new population, in the Río Amarillo area of the eastern section of the Copan Valley ceramic evidence supports a continual occupation that clearly displays an overlap of types and modes from both Late Classic and...
Beheading Bugs and Spearing Stags: Depictions of Animal Sacrifice in Mesoamerica (2019)
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...
Behemoths of the Bajo el Laberinto: The Development of Urban Reservoirs at Yaxnocah and Calakmul, Campeche, Mexico (2024)
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. The Elevated Interior Region of the Maya Lowlands, including the area surrounding the sprawling Bajo el Laberinto, faced acute water availability issues that necessitated the annual capture and storage of rain water to support urbanization. Two large urban areas dominate ancient Maya settlement...
Bench Please: A Comparative Analysis of Bench Features in Mesoamerica (2018)
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...
Beneath the Surface: Analyzing the Significance of Maya Cave Taphonomy in the Preservation of a Commingled, Fragmentary, Skeletal Assemblage (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Subterranean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cueva de Sangre is a 3.5-kilometer cave that is a highly complex, multi-cave system, in Dos Pilas, Petén, Guatemala, that includes riverine environments, seasonally inundated passages as well as dry areas. Use of the cave has been dated ceramically from the Late Preclassic to the Terminal Classic (400 BC – AD 800). This study examines the...
Between Government and Grassroots: Archaeologists and Social Justice in International Contexts (2018)
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),...
Beyond the Birds of Paradise: A Geoarchaeological Investigation of Large Ancient Maya Linear Wetland Features (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Growing scholarship since the 1980s has focused on ancient Maya–wetland interactions after raised field agriculture was revealed in northern Belize. From this, mounting evidence indicates extensive reliance on seasonal and perennial wetlands for ancient Maya farming, aquaculture, and water retention across the region. These systems would have served as major...
Beyond the Kaanul: Setting Some Questions and Initial Thoughts on the Urban Layouts of Calakmul and Its Region (2024)
This is an abstract from the "New and Emerging Perspectives on the Bajo el Laberinto Region of the Maya Lowlands, Part 2" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient city of Calakmul was the locus of important human developments throughout a period of no less than fifteen centuries, during which various social groups, ruling houses and urban palimpsests followed one another, and sometimes coexisted, until its definitive abandonment. Nowadays, lidar...
Beyond the Palace Walls: Daily Life and Domestic Activities during the Late Classic in the Maya Lowlands (600-875 CE) (2019)
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...
Big, Bigger, Biggest: Investigating Aguadas 1–3 at Calakmul, Campeche, Mexico (2024)
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. Calakmul is known to be one of the largest ancient Maya urban centers in the Elevated Interior Region of the Maya Lowlands. Thus, it is not surprising that in this water-challenged environment, the population of Calakmul invested in some of the region’s grandest reservoirs. While limited...
The Bioarchaeological and Mortuary Patterns at Holtun, Guatemala: an Analysis of Residential and Plaza Burials (2021)
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...
The Bioarchaeology of La Corona, Guatemala (2018)
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...
A Biological Profile of an Individual from Xultún Using Bioarchaeological, Starch, and Isotopic Analyses (2018)
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...
Birthing Dynasties and Raising Suns: Royal Women and Preclassic Maya Ritual (2023)
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...
Bits and Pieces: A Contextual Analysis of Portable Material Culture from the Medicinal Trail Community, Belize (2023)
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...
Bonampak Will Never Be Finished: Some Remarks in Honor of Steve Houston (2019)
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...
The Bonds that Bind Us: The Analysis of Terminus Groups in the Belize River Valley (2018)
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...
Bones and Ritual among the Ancient Maya of Calakmul and Champotón, Campeche: Celebrating the Legacy of Dr. William Folan (1931–2022) (2023)
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...
Boundaries of the Past as Viewed through the Fences of Today: Shifting Methods of Archaeological Inquiry in the Southern Maya Lowlands (2019)
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...
Boundary Dynamics between Chichen Itza and Ek Balam (2018)
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...
Breaking with Tradition? Terminal Classic and Postclassic Developments Across the Guatemala – Belize Border (2019)
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...
Breathless in the Underworld: The Effects of Low Oxygen, High Carbon Dioxide, and High Carbon Monoxide on Cave Ritual (2019)
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...