Peten (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arthur Demarest.

This is an abstract from the "Regimes of the Ancient Maya" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of regimes can be critical to the ongoing transformation of understandings of the Classic Maya economy. Currently, many scholars continue to refer to anthropomorphized mythical agents, e.g., exchange between “Tikal” and “Holmul” or between “Cancuen” and “the highlands,” as simply black boxes inhibiting economic research. With populations in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Fries.

This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya settlements of the Aguacate region of western Belize feature a dispersed settlement pattern spread across a highly varied landscape. Both soil and water resources are unevenly distributed across the region, interspersed with karst outcrops and ridges. Nonetheless,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Vallejo-Caliz. Scott Hutson.

Regional integration as materialized by the connections created through sacbeob can widely transform political, economic and social institutions in the participant communities. Perceiving the process through dichotomies such as center-periphery or paramount-subordinate clouds the agency of the multiple stakeholders involved in the matter. Active manipulation of social systems by intermediate elites and the commoner population seems to have had a great influence on the general process of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tia Watkins. Rosamund Fitzmaurice. Christophe Helmke. Jaroslaw Zralka. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The precolumbian game of patolli was imbued with ideals of competition, risk, and ritual significance. The board game had a widespread presence across Mesoamerica throughout the Classic period (~ AD 250–820) and was often etched into the surfaces of monumental architecture. Recent excavations led by the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica MacLellan.

This is an abstract from the "Preclassic Maya Social Transformations along the Usumacinta: Views from Ceibal and Aguada Fénix" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent investigations at the Karinel Group, an early residential area at Ceibal, Guatemala, show that the roles household rituals played in the development of complex societies varied across the Maya lowlands during the Middle Preclassic period (c. 1000-350 BC). In northern Belize, rituals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Griffin. Kelsey Herndon. Heather Hurst. Franco Rossi. Boris Beltran.

This is an abstract from the "Innovations and Transformations in Mesoamerican Research: Recent and Revised Insights of Ancestral Lifeways" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maya sites of San Bartolo and Xultun, Guatemala, provide compelling evidence for ancient Maya agricultural interventions and shifting perspectives about the regional ecological landscape. The first line of evidence is visual: murals there catalog political and religious...

DOCUMENT Citation Only G. Van Kollias.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Frontiers and borderlands are often conceptualized as places of precarity, where uncertainty characterizes communities outside the purview of authority. In contrast, borders evoke the presence of a reinforced authority where physical and political structures have been put in place to fortify a territory. However, these approaches often simplify or distill...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsty Escalante.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While scholars have been concerned since the 1960s about the widespread looting of Maya sites to supply the international antiquities market, countless objects have been illicitly exported over the decades from Guatemala and surrounding countries. The repatriation of looted antiquities to their countries of origin has received increased attention as source...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eos López. Mauricio Obregón. Flavio Silva. Luis Barba.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Las prácticas que tienen lugar en las unidades habitacionales se relacionan profundamente con procesos que ocurren a escala local y regional (Liendo et al., 2015: 12). El Proyecto Regional Palenque, incluyó el estudio de unidades habitacionales, tomando a los residuos químicos como estrategia para acercarse a las prácticas cotidianas que transforman los...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Javier López Camacho. Luz Evelia Campaña Valenzuela. Kenichiro Tsukamoto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Proyecto arqueológico Entre bajos: Ichkabal y su entorno ha realizado intervenciones arquitectónicas en siete estructuras del Grupo Principal y excavaciones extensivas en la Plaza Poniente. En el entorno se verificó la imagen LiDAR en campo. Ichkabal se encuentra en el sur de Quintana Roo, México, a 11 km al oriente de Dzibanché. Destaca la Plaza...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Sullivan. Kenichiro Tsukamoto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the results of a multiyear research project at the lithic production community of Took’ Witz, a hinterland group located near the ancient Maya city of El Palmar (Campeche, Mexico). Our research explored the large-scale utilitarian lithic production that occurred at the site, as well as the activities and material cultures at three...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joel Palka.

This is an abstract from the "The Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum: Celebrating 20 Years Serving the Archaeological Community " session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology at Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico, recovered large amounts of green obsidian from mines at Pachuca, Hidalgo, which were managed by Mexica-Aztecs in Late Postclassic times (ca. 1300–1520 CE). Excavations in coeval Maya habitation sites at Mensabak recovered obsidian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Nuckols-Wilde.

This is an abstract from the "Teotihuacan: Multidisciplinary Research on Mesoamerica's Classic Metropolis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the mid-eighth century, Copan’s fifteenth ruler, K’ahk’ Yipyaj Chan K’awiil, oversaw the completion of Structure 10L-26 (or Temple 26), which was crowned with a stone inscription located within the superstructure. This inscription features a parallel display of Maya full-figure glyphs alongside...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Nissen.

This is an abstract from the "Reinvent, Reclaim, Redefine: Considerations of "Reuse" in Archaeological Contexts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper traces histories of reused stone and space at ancient Maya cities. Space/Place theorists have documented the ways that physical spaces have layers of meaning tied to their history of use. In the Maya area, archaeologists have documented myriad ways in which Maya individuals have engaged with and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fernando Armstrong-Fumero.

This is an abstract from the "Politics of Heritage Values: How Archaeologists Deal with Place, Social Memories, Identities, and Socioeconomics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Laws for the preservation of tangible heritage posit historical and cultural significance as a form of intrinsic value that makes objects worth preserving. In the nineteenth century, arguments for this sort of preservation were meant to counteract vernacular practices that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Ogaz. Samantha Lorenz. Toni Gonzalez.

Excavations at Mul Ch’en Witz uncovered a series of chultunes just below the escarpment on which the ceremonial core of La Milpa is located. Of the six chultunes identified during the 2017 field season, Chultun 3 has produced the most cultural material. In addition to several complete vessels excavated, human bone fragments were recovered. The remains, found next to the chultun capstone, revive questions surrounding the mortuary function of chultunes. Dennis Puleston, among others, considered...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Saldaña. Elizabeth Graham.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A significant assemblage of Late to Terminal Classic stucco was discovered at the archaeological site of Lamanai in northern Belize. Originally forming a frieze adorning the upper facade of the palatial Structure N10-28, the stucco fragments are remarkable for their overall preservation and their extensive polychromatic pigmentation. In 2023 a new phase of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brent Woodfill.

This is an abstract from the "Dynamic Frontiers in the Archaeology of Chiapas" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In spite of the intensity of interest in the ancient Maya, very little research has been conducted to date in lowland eastern Chiapas. This region, crossed by several important rivers and trade routes, connects multiple important areas, including the southern Maya lowlands, the Guatemalan and Caribbean highlands, and the Gulf and Caribbean...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frank Tzib.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster introduces a community engagement program I designed to teach Classic Maya epigraphy to members of my community, Ox Mul Kah (San Antonio, Belize). While the Classic Maya ancestors left us with an elaborate culture, which was passed on to modern communities like Ox Mul Kah, many Maya today are unaware of the ancestral achievements like...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edy Barrios. Cameron McNeil. Mauricio Díaz García.

This is an abstract from the "Heat, Steam, and Health: The Archaeology of the Mesoamerican Pib Naah (Sweat Baths)" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2014, rescue excavations in a residential group on the outskirts of Río Amarillo, 20 km from the ancient center of Copan, revealed the presence of a Pib Naah (temazcal/sweat bath), with clear ties to women’s rituals and Maya concepts of fertility. This evidence led the author to name this structure...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clayton Meredith. Keith M. Prufer.

Derived from lipid-rich plant tissues (primarily leaf waxes), long chain n-alkanes are a durable organic biomarker whose relative abundance is used in paeloecological studies as a proxy marker of plant species composition, and as an indicator of biomass burning. Isotopic composition of individual n-alkane components preserves signals that reflect both hydroclimate and canopy height. These properties can be employed to examine spatially integrated signals of anthropogenic land clearance in lake...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dominique Rissolo. Jeffrey B. Glover. Travis W. Stanton.

Seminal and persistently relevant work by Ball has shaped and reshaped our understanding of Middle to Late Preclassic population movements on the Yucatan Peninsula and the establishment of local potting communities and traditions. Evidence of Middle Preclassic ceramic production in the northeastern-most Maya Lowlands had remained elusive until the mid 1990s. Early Nabanche affinities observed in the locally produced pottery of northern Quintana Roo suggested an expansion of peoples across the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Safronov. Dmitri Beliaev. Milan Kovác.

This is an abstract from the "At the Interface the Use of Archaeology and Texts in Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The dynastic history of Uaxactun is one of the most ancient among the political centers of the Maya Lowlands in the Preclassic and Classic periods. The beginning of history of a dynasty concerns to the III cent. BC, and its end to the final years of the IX cent. AD. On an extent more than a thousand-year history the dynasty...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Renee Collins. Rafael Guerra.

Since 2010, the BVAR Project has conducted intensive research at the recently discovered site of Lower Dover, located directly across the Belize River from Barton Ramie. A major part of the BVAR investigations is to determine the socio-political relationship between Lower Dover, Barton Ramie, Blackman Eddy, and Baking Pot. Other research questions have focused both on the monumental architecture of the site core, and on plazuela groups in the periphery of site’s epicenter. One such peripheral...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Ebert. M. Kathryn Brown. Lauren Sullivan. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Preclassic period (1200/1100 BC–AD 300) represents one of the most significant cultural transitions for lowland Maya societies. Over the course of ~1,500 years, communities settled permanently on the landscape, committed to agriculture, and began building monumental...