Quintana Roo (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Fisher.

Tzacauil is a small archaeological site in the hinterlands of Yaxuná, a major center in the central Yucatán region of the northern Maya lowlands. Excavations of Tzacauil’s nine house groups suggest that a community formed here twice: first during the Late Formative period (250 BCE – 250 CE) and again in the Terminal Classic period (700 – 1100 CE). Both of these occupations coincide with population peaks at nearby Yaxuná. Judging by the ample open spaces surrounding the site’s house groups,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sherman Horn. Anabel Ford.

Survey at the ancient Maya center El Pilar, along the border between Belize and Guatemala, has incorporated LiDAR imagery since 2013, allowing expansive – yet targeted – coverage of settlement beyond the monumental core. Successive field seasons have revealed a complex picture of landscape modification, resource extraction, and settlement concentration in different micro-environmental zones around the city center. Our fieldwork in 2017 had three foci: 1) explore and map the Amatal Supercluster,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only María Andrea Celis Ng Teajan. José Ignacio Hernández Juan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La región de Capoacan, al margen del río Uxpana, a pesar de ser distinguida por ser el lugar de hallazgo de la escultura conocida como "El Luchador", definida por los arqueólogos como de tradición Olmeca, ha sido un área poco estudiada. Por tal motivo, en el año 2017 dio inicio una investigación sistemática, que continuó en 2018 por medio de un programa de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeline Snyder.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th 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. Recent studies that include LiDAR provide a broader landscape perspective. LiDAR can also be useful in determining labor investment in domestic architecture through...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Meierhoff.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1879, the Guatemalan Secretary of Agriculture Salvador Valenzuela saw the damage to the temples of Tikal by the removal of many of its carved wooden lintels, and observed that; “The beams of the doors of these towers, which form the lintels of the doors, were pulled out by a foreign doctor [Gustave Bernoulli] the year before last, and that which time...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edwin Roman-Ramirez.

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. During the first centuries of the CE, the Maya Lowlands underwent many changes in its political landscape, which were caused by the abandonment of the main Formative centers, including El Palmar, which was the most powerful center in the Buenavista Valley. Taking advantage of these compulsive times, Tikal begins to become the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chrissina C. Burke. Katie K. Tappan. Gavin B. Wisner. Julie Hoggarth. J. Britt Davis.

Deciphering middens, feasting, ritual, or terminal deposits in the Maya world requires an evaluation of faunal remains. Maya archaeologists have been and continue to evaluate other artifacts classes, but often simply offer NISP values for skeletal elements recovered from these deposits. To further understand their archaeological significance, we analyzed faunal materials from deposits at the sites of Baking Pot and Xunantunich in the Upper Belize River Valley. We identified the species, bone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taylor Lawhon. David Mixter.

In 2012, excavations were conducted within a Late Classic noble palace at the ancient Maya site of Actuncan, located in western Belize. Remains of a large deposit of Terminal Classic materials were recovered from a corner of the palace’s primary courtyard. Based on its location on the courtyard surface and below collapse, the deposit was assumed to date to the period of the palace’s abandonment. The placement of this deposit was contemporary with Actuncan’s 9th-century renaissance as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Fowler.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological chronologies and material-culture evidence indicate large-scale migrations of Nahua peoples to eastern Mesoamerica in the ninth and tenth centuries CE linked to the collapse of the Toltec state at Tula Chico in about 850 CE. This event...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan O'Neil. Nawa Sugiyama. Gilberto Pérez Roldán. Laura Maccarelli. Yosi Pozeilov.

This is an abstract from the "From Materials to Materiality: Analysis and Interpretation of Archaeological and Historical Artifacts Using Non-destructive and Micro/Nano-sampling Scientific Methods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper reviews our interdisciplinary study examining a set of carved deer bones comprising what appears to be a weaving or sewing kit for an ancient Maya royal woman bearing the Sa’ emblem glyph associated with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Henderson. Kathryn Hudson.

Framing the lower Ulúa valley and adjacent regions as part of a southeastern Mesoamerican frontier has always entailed an interest in external relationships, especially those connecting frontier regions with the Maya world to which they were supposedly peripheral. The belief that the periphery was occupied by simple non-Maya societies, lightly "influenced" by their more civilized western neighbors, appeared early in the development of orthodox frameworks and continues to influence archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Borislava Simova.

This is an abstract from the "The Preclassic Landscape in the Mopan Valley, Belize" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the earliest known examples of permanent architecture in the Maya Lowlands, a distinctive plaza-structure complex known as an E Group, is also one of the most commonly encountered architectural groups present within Preclassic sites throughout the region. The rapid adoption of permanent architecture and widespread...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Esteban Herrera-Parra. Melanie Pugliese. Shanti Morell-Hart.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past few decades, understandings of cuisine in the Maya area have been radically amplified by the use of new techniques. Some methods offer the opportunity to directly connect artifacts and features with actual plant food residues. The ability to recover microscopic residues of food from sediments, artifacts, and human teeth has revealed not only...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Englehardt. Michael Carrasco.

This paper explores theoretical and methodological issues associated with the etic conceptualization of Mesoamerican deity systems and the identification of individual supernaturals in cross–cultural contexts. It critically focuses on previous classificatory systems of Olmec deities. Iconographers often identify individual deities on the basis of defining attributes or material accoutrements, frequently extending these identifications across contexts (as in Covarrubias’ famous "evolution of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shane Montgomery.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past decade, aerial lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) technology has transformed understanding of prehistoric landscape modifications throughout the Maya Lowlands, including the Late Classic (A.D. 700—900) center of Las Cuevas. The site, situated on the southeastern edge of the Vaca Plateau in western Belize, is not immense, but is distinguished...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Antonia Foias.

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, I will explore how much we know about Maya politics during the Classic period (AD 250–950), in view of new perspectives that leave behind the centralization vs. decentralization debate. Rather than viewing Maya states as unitary, unchanging, and centralized or decentralized, new perspectives have revealed variation, multiple sources of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam King. Terry Powis. Jaime Awe. Gyles Iannone. Nilesh Gaikwad.

While absorbed residues are widely used to explore subsistence-related questions, more recent work has used them to examine the use of elite and ritual beverages. In this paper, we explore absorbed residues found in ceramic containers and bone tubes recovered from caves, burials, and caches in the Belize Valley. The ceramic vessels presumably held liquids consumed or otherwise used in rituals in these settings, while the bone tubes delivered substances to participants in those rituals as enemas....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Morgan-Smith.

The accumulation of debt by Maya speaking laborers has long been understood as integral to Yucatán’s hacienda system in the 19th century. Though the contexts and nature of creditor-debtor relationships are variable and contested, evidence for debt is consistently present in documents related to large, corporate estates. But what does indebtedness look like beyond the hacienda on small-scale estates? In the absence of historical documents, or evidence of a company store, can debt be observed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evan Parker. George J. Bey III. Tomás Gallareta Negrón.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Jade tadpole spoons and clamshell pendants represent some of the most symbolically charged items of wealth and power in formative Mesoamerica. The Tzimin jades are a newly discovered cache of these items from the Middle Preclassic (900 BC—350 BC) Maya village of Paso del Macho that offer additional context for assessing the function and significance of jade...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Milan Kovac.

In the beginning of the 20th Century Uaxactun was considered to be the cradle of the Maya civilization. Later, other monumental Maya centers were found and scholars lost interest for Uaxactun. The former popularity of Uaxactun was interpreted as just a coincidence because the first large excavations were carried out there. Newly identified important Maya sites were considered to be older and more interesting. The new archaeological project in Uaxactun has dealt with the Preclassic horizon of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon Plank. Rafael Burgos. Scott Hutson. Yoly Palomo. Miguel Covarrubias.

In the Late Preclassic and Classic periods, several sites in the center of the northern Maya lowlands constructed buildings with distinctive megaliths. Izamal was the largest of these sites by far, and connected itself to other important sites with stone causeways that stretched up to 30 km long. Ucí, located approximately 35km to the northwest of Izamal, had its own long distance causeway which linked it to three smaller sites with monumental architecture. This paper combines data from two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Zaragoza.

Definir una región tan antigua y compleja como la Huasteca, implica conocer las características de los grupos humanos que la habitaron; en ella existen diversas manifestaciones culturales a través del tiempo; en esta ocasión presento un primer acercamiento al mundo simbólico que encontramos durante el período Posclásico. Inicié el estudio utilizando cuatro indicadores arqueológicos: Vasijas de cerámica, Concha labrada, Pintura Mural y Escultura. Lo primero que hice fue reconocer los símbolos que...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yamile Lira-Lopez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Un basurero es parte de la vida cotidiana de una familia, allí se va depositando todos los desechos que en un tiempo fueron de utilidad, tanto restos de comida como utensilios. Por ello el hallazgo de un basurero prehispánico en un contexto habitacional es de gran importancia para reconstruir parte de la vida cotidiana de una familia: que tipos de vasija...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Ort. Lilia Lizama.

This is an abstract from the "La Práctica Arqueológica en México en Tiempos de Crisis: Escenarios, Problemáticas Claves, Actores, Acciones y Propuestas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La ciudad de Puerto Morelos, Quintana Roo se ha convertido recientemente en un municipio y se esfuerza por promover el turismo sostenible en función de sus activos naturales y culturales y evitar el turismo de masas que ha afectado a otras partes de la Riviera Maya....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hirokazu Kotegawa.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El sitio arqueológico de Estero Rabón fue uno de los centros secundarios de San Lorenzo y probablemente también de La Venta durante el Preclásico Inferior y Medio. Según los estudios previos de la cultura olmeca, los centros secundarios de estas capitales tenían su propia finalidad para sostenerlas. Así, Estero Rabón también se ubicó en un punto estratégico...