Peten (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mallory Matsumoto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The area stretching from the Usumacinta River basin in western Guatemala into the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, hosted key centers of Classic Maya political and cultural life (ca. 250–850 CE). Scribes and sculptors active across the region produced hundreds of stone monuments inscribed with texts in a common hieroglyphic script. Yet little is known about how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brett A. Houk. Elizabeth Graham. James Garber.

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. We can trace the roots of historical archaeology in Belize to 1974, when David Pendergast launched a project at a site known locally as Indian Church, not surprisingly owing to the remains there of an early church. Today, the site is known as Lamanai. Identification of Spanish...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuko Shiratori. Carolyn Freiwald.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Research in the Petén Lakes Region, Petén, Guatemala" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Petén lakes region, Guatemala, has a rich and diverse ecology and abundant locally available resources including terrestrial, amphibious, and aquatic animals. The Postclassic (1100–1525 CE) sites in this region are mainly located on the lakeshore, suggesting that the Postclassic people were attracted to the lakeshore...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Esteban Miron Marvan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Modern Maya peoples have been denied of their right to appropriate their own history and archaeological heritage. After almost three decades of multiculturalism in Mexican laws and state rhetoric there is still a lot of colonial ideas, practices, and laws that prevent the participation of indigenous communities in the heritage discourses and their involvement...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Simon Martin.

This is an abstract from the "The Rollout Keepers: Papers on Maya Ceramic Texts, Scenes, and Styles in Honor of Justin and Barbara Kerr" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The cylinder vessel paintings assembled in the Kerr Archive cover a remarkable range of themes, with many of the best-known depicting fantastical beasts and other supernatural actors. But a not insignificant portion of the corpus features scenes of courtly performance and, as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lydie Dussol. Kenneth Hirth. Timothy Scheffler.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Holocene pollen sequences have highlighted several episodes of vegetation opening in Central America since the Archaic period, which have often been related to the dispersal of nomadic slash-and-burn agriculturalists from the Central Mexican Highlands. However, few archaeobotanical data from archaeological sites have been available to date to examine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fred Valdez.

The "hinterland" communities of northwest Belize are among the most diverse and complex across the Maya lowlands. The Rio Bravo Management and Conservation area of NW Belize serves as the region of interest with more than 25 seasons of Maya archaeological research. Utilizing survey and mapping strategies, material culture analyses, and theoretical concerns, the Programme for Belize Archaeological Project (PfBAP) defines new ways of looking at and interpreting ancient Maya interactions for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Lucero. Adrian Chase.

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 rainfall-dependency of the ancestral Maya shaped their daily and seasonal existence in homes, communities, and cities. They adapted quite well to the annual wet and dry seasonal cycles—as well as extreme weather events like hurricanes, tropical storms and severe droughts,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Gonlin. David Webster. David Reed.

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. A Classic Maya rural household, Site 34C-4-2, yielded two artifacts considered unusual for this nonurban context: a manopla (a 15-pound tuff ball with a handle used in a sport similar to boxing) and a miniature sculpture of a house or altar that resembles those found in Copan’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucas Johnson. Lisa Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Classic period (250–900 CE) Maya economic systems were diverse with most lowland cities revealing a combination of intensive surplus crafting workshops and more domestic household crafting. Some craft production may have been centralized and occurring under the supervision of the state and others appear to be operating independently at the household level...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Thompson. Jillian Jordan. Keith M. Prufer.

This paper examines processes of low-density urban development through geospatial analyses of households at two Classic Period (AD 250-800) Maya communities, Uxbenká and Ix Kuku’il. Located in the southern foothills of the Maya Mountains, Toledo District, Belize, these centers were situated are similar landscapes yet exhibited distinctly different household distributions. Wherein Uxbenká had geospatially discrete districts and neighborhoods while Ix Kuku’il’s houses were more evenly distributed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Johnson. Lucas Johnson. Arianna Campiani. Rodrigo Liendo Stuardo. Rosemary Joyce.

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. Increasingly, archaeologists working in Classic period Maya cities have focused their attention on defining “neighborhoods” as a means to reconcile both a bottom-up and top-down approach. A consideration of Palenque’s urban form and patterns in the clustering of stone structures along built terraces makes the existence of neighborhoods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Molly Corr.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Starvation and malnutrition have ravaged societies for thousands of years, but the effort to leverage food insecurity has existed just as long. When faced with hunger, humans adapt and respond to the best of their abilities, which may look different according to the resources and options available to them at the time. Maya subsistence literature has a long...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Traci Ardren.

Domestic gardens are a well-established aspect of Classic Maya residential settlement, and they are rightly considered important components of food security and even food sovereignty strategies utilized by the ninety-nine percent. Taking inspiration from the emerging field of human-plant studies, I argue daily interactions with household garden plants exerted a profound influence on not only the daily habits of ancient Maya populations, but also on their memories and sense of social identity. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Debra Walker.

This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Household pottery from recent excavations at Aventura informs our current understanding of life near Chetumal Bay, its resilient villagers situated within a larger boom-and-bust economy. Although Preclassic pottery has been found near bedrock in some household excavations, construction began in earnest about...

DOCUMENT Citation Only T. Manahan.

Across the Maya Lowlands, the Terminal Classic Period (AD 800-1000) represented a time of dramatic sociopolitical transformation. Investigation of the Northern Maya lowland site of Xuenkal, shows an abrupt break in the pattern of steady demographic growth during the Terminal Classic, associated with the center of Chichen Itza 45 km away. Xuenkal presents a unique case to evaluate this transition as it contains discrete households associated with the Late Classic zenith of local political...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica MacLellan.

Recognizing that households contribute to – rather than simply reflect – broad social changes, scholars working in the Maya lowlands and Central Mexico argue that domestic ritual played a role in the emergence of complex societies in Formative (or Preclassic) Mesoamerica (c. 1000 BC - AD 300). Certain aspects of household-level, ritualized activities are shared across Mesoamerican cultures. However, major differences within and between the two regions show that a variety of social organizations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cady Rutherford. Marisol Cortes-Rincon. Jonathan Roldan. Spencer Mitchell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hinterland households are an under-explored aspect of Maya area. Further research in this area will help to build our understanding of variation present within and between regions. This analysis looks at several households in northwestern Belize in order to better understand the variation that exists within this region. I analyze the construction methods, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julien Hiquet. Julien Sion. Divina Perla-Barrera.

At Naachtun, extensive excavation programs carried out in monumental Group B, a compact set of three large elite clusters of residential compounds located in the site epicenter, and intensive test-pitting programs applied to the residential zones which surround the monumental core, have enabled us to understand the site occupation development during the Classic phases. We identify contraction, dispersal and expansion where and when most households units were occupied. We compare these space-time...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Bracken.

This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tracking patterns of everyday movement by individuals within a local population offers deep insight into the spatialized social structure of the group, providing information such as who interacts with whom, which areas are public and which are private, and the tightness or openness of different social circles. Like most...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Dunning. Jeffrey Brewer. Christopher Carr. Kathryn Reese-Taylor. Armando Anaya Hernández.

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. The ancient inhabitants of the Elevated Interior Region of the Maya Lowlands spent centuries devising ways to capture and store rainwater in this seasonally arid environment devoid of sizeable permanent surface water bodies. Over time, varied methods were created to ensure a sufficient quantity of water to meet the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kat Fitzgerald. Kacey Grauer. Zachary Nissen. Cynthia Robin.

This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A human geography perspective provides our broadest lens to envision the entwined relationships of people, communities, and environments at Aventura. Drawing from an 18 km2 lidar survey and 1 km2 pedestrian survey, this paper presents a human geography of Aventura that links people, settlement, agriculture,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Chuchiak IV.

Upon initial contact with the lowland Yucatec Maya, the Europeans discovered that a significant number of Maya slaves existed within the Maya communities that they encountered. War captives, orphans, and forced and enslaved sexual servants from the lower classes, Maya slaves and their possession became by the late Postclassic and early colonial period the major source of wealth and power of the traditional Maya Nobility. Divorced from control over specified traditional patrimonial landholdings...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Enriquez.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation examines the 1562 confessions of Maya ritual murder (“Procesos contra los indios idólatras de Sotuta, . . .” “Processes against the idolatrous Indians of Sotuta, . . .”) obtained during the Idolatry Trials led by Friar Diego de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Bracken.

This is an abstract from the "Hydro-Ecological System of the Maya in Petén, Guatemala" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Premodern landscape modification at the northeast corner of Lake Macanché, surrounding the site of Muralla de León, predominantly consists of small hilltop settlements and hydraulic channels. These channels interact with the lake itself, as well as the juleques (pond-sized water-filled sinkholes) that cluster in the vicinity. Two...