Quintana Roo (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)
326-350 (937 Records)
This is an abstract from the "La Cuernavilla, Guatemala: A Maya Fortress and Its Environs" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La Cuernavilla is an ancient Maya site situated in the El Zotz Biotope in the central Petén of Guatemala. This study focuses on the paleoenvironmental changes, agricultural subsistence, and occupational trajectories of La Cuernavilla, based on data gathered from across the larger landscape between 2009 and 2017 on the Proyecto...
The Female Terracotta Sculpture at the North Carolina Museum of Art: Pastiche or Fake? (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 2" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Large-scale female terracotta sculptures were extensively produced in the Mixtequilla region of Veracruz during the Late Classic period. It is likely that numbers of these sculptures were looted and smuggled into the United States prior to the 1970 UNESCO Convention on Cultural Property. This paper focuses the female terracotta...
A Fettered Serpent? Quetzalcoatl and Classic Veracruz (2018)
Great is the conflation of Ehecatl Quetzalcoatl and Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl: a mythical player in the world creation of Mesoamerican groups vs. a semi-historical personage who presaged the arrival of Hernán Cortés. Veracruz, a region implicated via the activities of both avatars, is particularly enmeshed in this duality. The Postclassic narrative whereby Quetzalcoatl journeyed to the Gulf lowlands appears to be foreshadowed in the desacralization of Teotihuacan’s Feathered Serpent Pyramid at the...
Filled to the Brim: Estimating Lowland Maya Reservoir Capacities by Combining Survey, Soil Cores, and GIS (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the limiting factors to settlement aggregation in the Maya lowlands is the availability of potable water. With few perennial surface rivers and lakes, the ancient Maya collected water from rainfall for consumption. In areas with high population densities, such as Classic period cities, this required engineering the built landscape to funnel water for...
Filling in the Gaps: Lidar-Aided Mapping of the Smallest-Scale Sites in the Northern Lowlands (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Proyecto Arqueológico de Sitios de Pesqueña Escala en el Puuc Oriental (PASPEPO) recently completed an intensive mapping and surface collection program at three small-scale sites in the eastern Puuc Region of the northern Maya lowlands. Using lidar-derived digital terrain models (DTMs) as a baseline for settlement pattern identification, we identified...
Flayer and Flayed Figures in Central Veracruz, Mexico: Is It Xipe? (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 2" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The god Xipe Totec has been mostly analyzed from Postclassic evidence (Toltec and Aztec). He is recognized by the representations of a person wearing the skin of a flayed victim or the victim himself. While both types of figures appear in several regions of Mesoamerica, their contexts vary. In this paper I will review Classic and...
Flowers in the Religious Ideology of Contemporary Nahua of the Southern Huasteca (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Flower World: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Flowers are a central feature of religious rituals among today's Nahua of the southern Huasteca. They are associated with the sun, growing corn, life-giving water, the bounty of the living cosmos, and ancestors who visit their relatives during Day of the Dead. For the Nahua, flowers are far...
Flows of Value, Debt, and Goods in the Usumacinta River Basin (2018)
Scholars considering Classic period Maya economies have long viewed acquisition, production, and trade primarily through the dual lenses of tribute to royal courts and barter among the populace. Recent archaeological discoveries and theoretical models have broadened our perspective to allow the Classic Maya the marketplaces and market economies that were once believed to be innovations of Postclassic Mesoamerica. Yet, we still know little about notions of currency, value, and debt – well...
Forager Mobility Patterns in Southern Belize: Preliminary Results from a Holocene-Length Record (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Interdisciplinary Isotopic Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite considerable research on mobility patterns of the Classic Lowland Maya, the mobility of pre-ceramic foragers is understudied. Elsewhere, logistical mobility strategies have been documented for archaeological and ethnographic forager populations in tropical forest biomes. Most often these strategies are related to seasonally...
Formative Communities of Practice and Disjunctures in Southern Gulf Lowland Interaction with Central Mexico (2018)
Recently Stoner and Pool called for an "Archaeology of Disjuncture" to refocus attention on variation in intra- and interregional interaction, illustrating the approach with the case of the Classic period of the Tuxtla Mountains in southern Veracruz. In this paper I extend application of the disjunctive approach into the Formative Period of the southern Gulf lowlands, focusing primarily on interactions with Central Mexico, and incorporating a Communities of Practice perspective on the formation...
Fortified Capitals: Understanding Defensive Systems at Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan (2018)
Prior reconnaissance efforts in the Middle Usumacinta River region have identified a series of low walls associated with Tecolote, La Pasadita, and other border sites in the Yaxchilan kingdom. Similar defensive features have also been identified at the Piedras Negras secondary center of La Mar. These walls are interpreted as the foundations for wooden palisades, and served to protect not only immediate communities, but also the kingdom at large. However, this paper presents the first evidence...
Fragmentary Ceramic Assemblages as a Record of Ritual Practice at Las Cuevas, Belize (2018)
The most common artifacts found in Maya caves are unslipped and monochrome slipped ceramic sherds. The smashing of ceramic vessels as an element of ritual practice is recorded ethnographically among some twentieth-century Maya groups. Other Maya groups have been documented collecting sherds from domestic middens and depositing them at sacred sites. If caves were venues for the former type of behavior in antiquity, one would expect to find a high percentage of refitting sherds in their...
From Chichen Itza to Tulum: The Late Postclassic Maya Feathered Serpent of the Northern Maya Lowlands (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Tales of the Feathered Serpent: Refining Our Understanding of an Enigmatic Mesoamerican Being" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most representations of the feathered serpent at Chichen Itza depict a plumed rattlesnake, a being of wind and carrier of rain, with Central Mexican origins dating back to Early Classic Teotihuacan. In Classic Maya art, feathered serpents are not rattlesnakes and lack plumage aside from a...
From Polity to Regimes: Toward Recognizing Diversity in Ancient Maya Political Communities (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Regimes of the Ancient Maya" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we introduce the notion of “regime” to model and interpret ancient Maya political organization. We have long relied on “the polity” as a primary model to explain ancient Maya politics. However, this largely generalist core concept tends to homogenize—both temporally and geographically—the complex ancient political landscape as one populated by...
From Ritual to Domestic in a Shifting Political Landscape: Excavations in the Coronitas Group at La Corona, Guatemala (2018)
Archaeological and epigraphic evidence from the Coronitas Group at La Corona, Guatemala provides an opportunity to examine responses to changing sociopolitical conditions among the Classic Maya (AD 250-900). Architectural and material evidence suggests that the Coronitas Group was a locus of ritual and ceremonial activities by the royal court throughout the Classic period. Burials of important individuals and other ceremonial activities imply that it was a place of significant ancestral ties. At...
From Rural Hinterlands to Urban Centers: Investigating Ancient Maya Settlement in the Lower Belize River Watershed (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and the History of Human-Environment Interaction in the Lower Belize River Watershed" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the primary objectives of the Belize River East Archaeology (BREA) project has been to identify and document archaeological sites in a relatively understudied part of north-central Belize that encompasses the lower Belize River Watershed. In this area, which measures roughly 6,000...
From the Coast to the Jungle: Inventory and Record of Archaeological Sites in Puerto Morelos, Quintana Roo, Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The municipality of Puerto Morelos is located in northern Quintana Roo, Mexico. Beginning in the past century, and continuing through present day, researches have reported numerous archaeological sites in this region. However, many of them do not have a precise location, and we do not know about their conservation status. As a result of this issue and the...
Function Follows Form, Part II: Experimental Archaeology with Formative Period Mesoamerican Greenstone Tagelus Shell Facsimiles as Textile Tools (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Cordage, Yarn, and Associated Paraphernalia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many Formative period Mesoamerican greenstone artifacts are readily identifiable as ornaments, as they have clear counterparts in both form and function in later cultures. Other such artifacts, however, have proven puzzling to scholars, who initially categorized them as “miscellaneous objects,” “objects of unknown use,” or “implements for...
The Function of Ceramic Analysis in the Maya Lowlands (2018)
Why study ceramics at all? What is the point of analyzing hundreds and thousands of small, broken pieces of pottery? This paper explores these, and other questions, within the context of Classic Maya civilization. Too often, it seems, ceramic analysis is used as a loose chronological framework, used solely to construct broad frameworks of relative dating. These frameworks are then applied to archaeological assemblages, placing them within chronologically bounded "ceramic complexes" and...
The Funerary or Nonfunerary Human Assemblages from the Initial Series Group at Chichen Itza (2021)
This is an abstract from the "New Perspectives on Ritual Violence and Related Human Body Treatments in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human skeletal assemblages from Chichen Itza and its surrounding regions are complex, which makes Chichen Itza a prime location to study mortuary practices. The complexity stems most likely from Chichen Itza’s multicultural relationships with other groups not only within the Yucatán Peninsula...
Game On: Investigations of Ballcourts 1 and 2 at Xunantunich, Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the results of recent investigations of the two ballcourts at Xunantunich, Belize. Located on the Mopan branch of the Belize River, Xunantunich is primarily a Late to Terminal Classic regional center. The site’s rapid rise to power in the late 8th to 9th centuries is attributed to its political affiliation with the larger site of Naranjo,...
Games of Chance and Fate: Patolli at the Ancient Maya Site of Gallon Jug, Belize (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2019 at the ancient Maya site of Gallon Jug, in northwestern Belize, we documented several patolli boards incised into a plaster floor on a platform in an elite residential group. The patolli from Gallon Jug are in a residential context near the site center and not in monumental religious architecture or a palace, which differs from most known examples...
Games or Prehispanic Rituals? The Ball Courts of the Mirador Basin (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Multidisciplinary Investigations in the Mirador Basin, Guatemala" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ball game was one of the most widespread in Mesoamerica since the Early and Middle Preclassic periods if not earlier. This presentation will present the different ball courts detected in the Mirador Cultural and Natural zone, also known as Mirador Basin, indicating the chronology, form, contextual associations,...
A Gender Paradox? A Case Study from the Ancient Maya (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bioarchaeology engages with past behaviors to answer sex and gender roles that are influenced by biological and cultural components leading to social presentation of the individual. The skeletal sample for this study focuses on 55 individuals from Copan, Honduras by incorporating available mortuary data, ceramic phases, dental development, physiological...
Geoarchaeological Investigations of Wetlands and Waterways in Crooked Tree, Belize (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and the History of Human-Environment Interaction in the Lower Belize River Watershed" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The lagoon system around the island of Crooked Tree in northern Belize provides a compelling hydrological landscape with a strongly seasonal flood regime. The area also presents evidence of long occupation and use by the Maya. Our ongoing investigations include geoarchaeological testing...