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The Classic Maya collapse remains as both relevant and controversial a topic as ever. For over a century, dozens of researchers have proposed different causes that may have driven this complex process. The last few decades have witnessed the academic community’s opinion converge on the notion that many different social and environmental factors, operating at likewise diverse scales, somehow contributed to a temporally gradual and spatially heterogeneous disruption of the demographic, political,...
Sculpting the Landscape: Analyzing the Formative-Classic Period Built Environment at Los Guachimontones, Jalisco (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Regional and Intensive Site Survey: Case Studies from Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Los Guachimontones is the quintessential and largest archaeological site of the Teuchitlán tradition or culture. Despite this, until recently our understanding of the site has been hampered in part by an overemphasis on excavations in the largest, most monumental guachimontón (or circular architectural groups). However,...
Scylla or Charybdis? Prioritizing the Investigation of Sites Endangered by Natural Hazards (2018)
Maryland has 8,000 miles of tidal shoreline associated with the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries and more than 12-percent of its surface area in floodplains. These high risk areas for flooding and coastal erosion contain about 40-percent of Maryland’s archeological sites and presumably many more that have yet to be discovered. It is not feasible or prudent to excavate every endangered site, thus choices about which sites to investigate must be made strategically. This paper lays out a reasoned...
Sea Change: Maritime Maya Lifeways, Social Organization and Dynamics at the Port of Isla Cerritos, Yucatán (2017)
Mesoamerican archaeology typically approaches social, cultural, political, and economic dynamics from a center-periphery perspective, tracing the historical pulses of integration and disintegration through the lens of the urban centers of the social and cosmological landscape. While the coastal Maya may seem peripheral geographically, maritime communities were actually central integrative forces throughout their dynamic histories. They facilitated and motivated movements and interactions of...
Sea-Level Rise and Settlement at Ek Way Nal: Coring the Past (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Underwater Maya: Analytical Approaches for Interpreting Ancient Maya Activities at the Paynes Creek Salt Works, Belize" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations in the spring and summer of 2022 were carried out at the underwater ancient Maya salt work of Ek Way Nal in Punta Ycacos Lagoon in Paynes Creek National Park, Belize. Ek Way Nal provided salt to the ancient Maya during the Late and Terminal Classic periods...
Sea-Level Rise and Settlement at Ta’ab Nuk Na, Belize: Analyses of Marine Sediment From the I-line, 4m Transect (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Underwater Maya: Analytical Approaches for Interpreting Ancient Maya Activities at the Paynes Creek Salt Works, Belize" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya created a culture with writing, religion, and vast trade networks. These trade networks are evident on the southern coast of Belize, where archaeologists have found sites dedicated to salt making. This paper will discuss Ta’ab Nuk Na, one of these...
Sea-level Rise at an Inundated Ancient Maya Salt Work: New Information from the Eleanor Betty Site, Paynes Creek National Park, Belize (2017)
Underwater excavations were performed at Eleanor Betty in 2013 to assess sea-level rise, map preserved wooden architecture, and investigate the inundated shell midden associated with the site. A total of 39 sediment samples were subjected to loss-on ignition (the burning of sediment to obtain the percent of organic matter present) and microscopically sorted in order to identify and analyze organic and inorganic matter. All samples were high in organic content and contained an abundance of fine...
Seal images (2012)
Images of ceramic roller and stamp seals. See "Documentation of Image Archive" and "Palm Image Archive" concerning associated information.
The Search for Sierra Red: Discerning Ceramic Diversity at Late Preclassic Yaxnohcah (2017)
The principal ceramic type for the Petén Late Preclassic period, first identified by Edith Ricketson in the 1930s, and dubbed Sierra Red three decades later, has just about the widest distribution of any ceramic type in the Maya lowlands. In particular, the omnipresent simple flaring walled bowl form is virtually synonymous with the period, yet, after five years of excavation at Preclassic Yaxnohcah, Sierra Red remains an elusive minor type. Middle Preclassic Um Phase is well represented as is...
The Search for the Primary Source of Kings Canyon/La Poudre Pass Obsidian in Colorado (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During field survey in 2011, archaeologists for the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest discovered obsidian nodules contained in ancient alluvial gravels of the Miocene North Park formation in Jackson County, Colorado. The Northwest Research Obsidian Studies Laboratory in Corvallis, Oregon, analyzed this obsidian using ED-XRF and determined that it was...
Searching for Marketplaces at Blue Creek and Xnoha (2024)
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. Marketplaces are a vital component for the economic interdependence of ancient Maya kingdoms. In our view, marketplaces were also definitional components of Maya central places of power as much as the presence of ostentatious presentations of architecture were. The Blue Creek Archaeological...
Searching for the lost Marines of Guadalcanal (2017)
In early 2016, Garcia & Associates conducted forensic archaeological investigations for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) on Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands. DPAA (formerly JPAC) is the Department of Defense agency tasked with providing the fullest possible accounting for missing American service personnel from past wars. During World War II, the Battle for Guadalcanal lasted from 7 August 1942 to 9 February 1943 and included intense ground fighting to secure the airstrip known as...
A Season after Covid: Investigating Las Monjas Sascabera 2 (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Cultural Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In June 2022, the Gran Acuífero Maya resumed investigations initiated in 2018 of Las Monjas Sascabera 2 (LMS2), one of 11 sascaberas located south and west of the Las Monjas complex at Chichén Itzá. In the intervening years, rain washed out accumulated soil that had blocked access to the circular, constructed entrance and exposed...
Seasonal Rhythms and Quotidian Duties: Insights into the Impact of Environment on Structuring Daily Life Using El Eden Wetland, Quintana Roo, Mexico as a Case Study (2017)
All cultural groups must respond to and adapt within their surrounding environment, as was the case for the ancient Maya. The Maya area consists of various distinct ecological zones, from volcanic highlands through swampy bajos and across a dry karstic plain punctuated by wetlands, each providing distinct adaptation opportunities. Seasonal fluctuations provide further texture to the flow of each landscape. This paper explores and attempts to characterize the temporality of the ancient Maya...
The Second Chapter: Further Analysis of Granite Ground Stone Tools from the Belize River East Archaeology Project, 2015–2022 (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Ground Stone Studies in the Eastern Maya Lowlands" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Granite was a preferred raw material for ground stone tool production in many parts of the Maya Lowlands. However, granite outcrops are spatially restricted within the Maya Mountains of Belize, and access to this material was limited. The movement of raw and/or finished tools would have required various mechanisms of...
Second-hand? Paint chemistry and the age, authenticity and conservation/management of hand stencils from the Sunshine Coast, Qld, Australia. (2017)
The materials used to created rock art preserve information regarding how, and in some instances when, it was made. Here we outline the field based, geochemical study of three white hand stencils on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, Australia. Portable X-Ray Fluorescence analysis determined that the stencils were made using a titanium dioxide pigment, almost certainly commercially produced white paint. Significantly, this helped us assign a chronology as the rock art must have been produced...
Sedimentary and Taphonomic Contexts of Quaternary Vertebrate Fossils in the Northern Rocky Mountains (2018)
Quaternary vertebrate assemblages from the northern Rocky Mountains can be used to understand the biogeographic consequences of climate change. Some localities contain strata from before the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), while others consist mostly of Late Glacial and Holocene deposits. The Merrell Local Fauna is from a stratigraphic sequence in Centennial Valley. Radiocarbon dates range from >52,000 to 19,000 BP and fossils are in lacustrine deposits, fluvial sediments, and a debris flow. The...
Seeds for the gods: chía (Salvia hispanica) in Teotihuacan ritual offerings (2017)
Over the last decades, as a result of archaeological research inside of the Sun and the Moon pyramids in Teotihuacan, significant concentrations of chía (Salvia hispanica) seeds have been recovered in association with ritual contexts. This is particularly true in Offering 2, pit 59 of the Sun Pyramid and in Burial 6 of the Moon Pyramid. The archaeological artifacts were similar in both contexts, for example Tlaloc vessels, projectile points, pyrite disks and faunal remains, among others. In this...
Seeds that Germinate: Models, Paleobotanical, and Archaeological Evidence for Colha’s Early Inhabitants (2018)
The archaeological site of Colha, located within the northern Belize chert-bearing zone, is well-known for being one of the largest Maya lithic production sites in Mesoamerica. The site has occupation dating to the Archaic Period as well as the Middle Preclassic through the Early Postclassic. Pollen and geomorphologic evidence suggest intensive forest clearance, wetland soil manipulation, swamp margin, and upland manipulation dating as early as the Archaic Period. Evidence for intensive blade...
Seeking Justice in Black Spaces: The Geography, Memory, and Power of Race Massacres in the United States (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Many urban centers bear the scars of anti-Black violence and race massacres. Predominately Black spaces have been especially susceptible to various forms of racial unrest at the hands of their white counterparts. Massacres such as those in the Snowtown neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island in 1831 and the...
seibalSim: toward modeling communities (not populations) of Early Formative Mesoamerica (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 Forms of Capital," Pierre Bourdieu writes: “[t]he social world is accumulated history, and if it is not to be reduced to a discontinuous series of instantaneous mechanical equilibria between agents who are treated as interchangeable particles, one must reintroduce into it the notion of capital and with it, accumulation and all its effects.” His attempt...
Selection-Driven Range Expansion Explains Lapita Colonisation of Remote Oceania (2017)
Archaeological explanations of colonization often focus on presumed human motivations. What drives humans when faced with the potentially risky and rewarding colonization of unoccupied island regions: curiosity, wanderlust, opportunity, escape? At best, human motivation is only a partial explanation for colonization and one that is difficult to evaluate with archaeological data. In contrast, archaeologically visible, population-scale patterns of human colonization are explicable by the natural...
Selective Surplus: Material Networks in Formation at Yaxuná, Yucatan, Mexico (900 to 350 BCE) (2018)
Recent investigations of Yaxuná, Yucatan, Mexico have provided evidence to suggest that the earliest permanent spaces, by way of the site’s E-group complex, in the Northern Lowlands were roughly contemporaneous with the early developments observed at Central Lowland sites. On the one hand, this data provides an outlet to better explore the large scale social processes impacting the early macro-region of the Maya area. However, material analysis of recovered shell, lithic, and ceramic artifacts...
Semetabaj and Its Role in Commercial and Ideological Interaction in the Guatemalan Highlands and Beyond (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Semetabaj site in the Guatemalan Highlands is one of the earliest sites in the region and the largest. Research carried out by E. Shook in 1978 revealed an interesting pattern of interaction with the northern Highlands and the south coast of Guatemala. The new research offers a review of the data and new proposals, which include its role as an economic...
Seminole Canyon: The Art and Archeology (1982)
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