Peten (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcello Canuto. Luke Auld-Thomas.

Located in the northwestern Petén, Guatemala, the Maya sites of La Corona and El Achiotal have been investigated since 2008 by a multi-disciplinary US and Guatemalan research project. While a primary goal of this project has been to reconstruct the region’s political history, we have also investigated the management of local resources and general human impact on the landscape. In 2016, a LIDAR survey, funded by the Pacunam Foundation and operated by NCALM, was undertaken in a 410 square km...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Bishop.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will discuss the preliminary results of excavations at La Luna, a residential group outside of the El Zotz core. Initial investigations from this Late Classic complex yielded a large volume of high-quality polychrome sherds and prestige items that are inconsistent with the simple architecture of the group. The source of these materials and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Hyde. Fred Valdez Jr..

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. With support from a National Science Foundation Grant, fieldwork was conducted at the Ancient Maya site of La Milpa, located in the northwest corner of the Three Rivers Region. Archaeological matrix samples were collected from three areas within La Milpa for soil analysis as a method for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Sullivan. Kenichiro Tsukamoto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we present new research on the lithic production community of Took’ Witz, a hinterland group near the ancient Maya polity of El Palmar in Campeche, Mexico. While previous research at Took’ Witz focused on large-scale utilitarian lithic production, recent investigations provide insight into people’s daily lives. Through excavations at three...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Dennehy. Chris Merriman. Keith M. Prufer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lithicists use various attributes of chipped stone tools to characterize hunter-gatherer technological organization, which is thought to be partly determined by mobility patterns of these groups; thus, lithic attributes serve as proxies for the amount and type of mobility practiced. In particular, lithic platform preparation has received attention as an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sebastian Salgado-Flores.

How did Postclassic Maya communities decide which tree species to harvest for firewood and timber in a diverse forest environment? Most studies of ancient tree selection have used the principles of optimal foraging to construct a baseline of expectations for interpreting archaeological charcoal datasets. This paper will explore the implications of such a model on the interpretation of wood charcoals from the site of La Punta in Chiapas, Mexico, while also considering how the political structure...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Prout.

Two chambers in Midnight Terror Cave, Belize show undeniable evidence of Maya child sacrifice. Operation V and Operation VIII are the deepest darkest chambers of the cave where some of the most important of ancient Maya rites were performed including human sacrifice. In 2009 Ann Scott proposed that sacrifices occurred in Operation VIII and, during ritual cleaning of this public space in preparation for a new ceremony, the bones were taken from their primary deposition site and moved to Operation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brett A. Houk.

The Chan Chich Archaeological Project has documented two types of terminal, above floor "problematic" artifact deposits in a number of different locations and contexts at the site of Chan Chich, Belize. The first type comprises light scatters of "exotic" ceramics and other artifacts on the steps to range buildings in epicentral courtyards. The second type is a dense artifact deposit in an ashy matrix at the base of a platform face in a hilltop, elite courtyard. Compositionally, the second type...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marieka Brouwer Burg. Eleanor Harrison-Buck. Samantha Krause.

This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There are many persistent issues that hamper archaeological interpretations of human-landscape interactions, from modern-day disturbances to more distant postdepositional processes and changing environmental conditions. These circumstances often make it a challenge to tease out cultural behaviors and the resulting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Whittaker Schroder.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Discussions of political collapse in archaeology have shifted recently to approaches that incorporate the adaptive cycles of resilience and reorganization that highlight the continuity of certain cultural practices, belief systems, and worldviews alongside the disintegration of political systems. This approach has garnered support especially in the Maya area...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Booher. Brett A. Houk.

Chan Chich is one of the dozen largest Maya ruins in Belize, reaching its apogee during the Late Classic period, ca. A.D. 750. The site has a number of notable site planning characteristics, including a massive public plaza, and two wide, radial causeways, that show connections to neighboring sites and suggest common ideas about city building. Some of these shared planning ideas reflect top-down design concepts related to specialized political and ritual functions for various buildings and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Schreiner.

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. Excavations over several decades in the Mirador Basin of northern Guatemala, combined with detailed experimental data, have revealed extraordinary use of lime products in the construction and maintenance of Maya causeways, architecture, and associated art. This paper will consider both the quantitative utilization...

DOCUMENT Citation Only José De Calasanz Ligorred Perramon.

This is an abstract from the "2024 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Luis Barba" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En nuestra ponencia presentaremos el fruto de años de relación entre el Laboratorio fundado por el doctor Luis Barba, que fue nuestro profesor en los años ochenta cursando la licenciatura en Arqueología en la ENAH de la Ciudad de México. Desde entonces, nos asomamos como arqueólogos al patrimonio invisible y/o abandonado...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Nicole Boudreaux. Laura Levi. Christian Sheumaker.

It is now well recognized that Late Classic Maya communities varied politically, economically, and environmentally. The corollary, however, that community and household variation went hand-in-hand in the Maya area often goes unrecognized or under problematized. Research that explores differences in household provisioning practices across a range of communities should help to rectify this situation. Referencing data from two large prehispanic Maya sites in northwestern Belize, this paper asks the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pedro Ramon Celis.

El proyecto arqueológico "Cerro del Gallo", se desprende de los trabajos de investigación realizados en el Conjunto Monumental de Atzompa, dentro del sitio arqueológico de Monte Albán. La participación de diversos actores de la población civil, gubernamentales y de la iniciativa privada ha podido concatenarse de tal forma que, se ha podido construir de manera satisfactoria un ambicioso proyecto de investigación, que involucra además de un objetivo académico como lo es el discernir los procesos...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Jamison. David Mixter.

Monumental architecture and public spaces provide primary contexts for community ritual and social action. The process of construction of public architecture involves community cooperation and collective action, with the latter contributing to significant changes in the form and use of structures through time. The public architecture of Actuncan developed from the Preclassic period to constitute a nearly complete set of architectural forms devoted to ritual, administrative and community...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Ingalls. Jason Yaeger.

Public structures in the Maya region materialize ideologies and define centers of power as they create politically charged sacred landscapes. These locations are nexus points for community and polity making processes, embedding social hierarchies, ideologies, and social memories into the physical landscape. However, archaeologists have historically focused attention on monumental public spaces within large civic-ceremonial centers, and relatively little attention has been given to public spaces...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Van Oss.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Due to the nature of long-term archaeological investigations, data collection and curation methods change over time. This means that data can end up in several physical and digital locations, making the analysis of evidence challenging if it was collected years apart or by several investigators. In Lowland Maya archaeology, annual reports are required to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Munson. Jonathan Scholnick. Lorena Paiz Aragon.

Inequality is a prominent and persistent feature of all large-scale human societies that has significant impacts on everyday life. Variation in material wealth and social capital as well as differential access to specialized knowledge and other resources directly impacts household quality of life (QOL) within ancient and contemporary communities. For the ancient Maya, the establishment of political institutions centered on divine rulership significantly contributed to QOL changes during the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Clarke. Henry Perez. Boris Beltran. Heather Hurst.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The organization of labor in Classic Maya society has long been studied from a top-down approach. The construction of public works is seen as a facet of state economy, while the physical evidence of human effort—monumental constructions—are understood as visible manifestations of labor or service-based taxes. The argument for collective or rotational labor...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cristina Verdugo. Lars Fehren-Schmitz. James Brady.

This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Indigenous Culture and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As bioarchaeological interest in the question of ancient Maya ritual violence developed in the 1960s, it was generally recognized that sacrifice and related violent practices occurred within the social context of ritual. It should be expected, then, that caves would produce sacrificial osteological assemblages since they are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Burham.

This is an abstract from the "Theorizing Prehistoric Large Low-Density Settlements beyond Urbanism and Other Conventional Classificatory Conventions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maya site of Ceibal, Guatemala, became a preeminent center in the Pasión Region of the southern lowlands over the Preclassic period (ca. 950 BCE-350 CE). During the latter centuries of this period, minor temple complexes were built at regular intervals within the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Els Barnard.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many recent studies about the distribution of wealth in ancient Mesoamerican cities are revealing new insights into the ways socioeconomic processes were organized. Measures of inequality, like the Gini index, reveal patterns of wealth distribution and socioeconomic stratification, permitting research into the relationships between the rich and the poor. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Wolf. Elisandro Garza.

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. Mesoamerican archaeological sites often take advantage of the surrounding natural landscape to enhance both the political machinations of the ruling elite and the sacred ideals of the community at large. In Guatemala, Belize, Mexico, and other highland or steep regions, archaeologists have repeatedly demonstrated the dynamic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martha Wendel. David Lentz. Susan E. Allen. Timothy Beach. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach.

Up until the late 1990s, researchers believed the Maya were solely reliant on slash and burn agricultural practices. However, discoveries of rectangular canal patterns in the margins of wetlands in the Maya lowlands of Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico shined light on a new agricultural practice: raised wetland fields. One example of wetland fields is found at the site Birds of Paradise (BOP) in the Rio Bravo region of northwestern Belize. The macrobotanicals recovered from the raised fields and...