Peten (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Nowakowski. M. Kathryn Brown. Katherine Nelson. Jason Yaeger.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholars have sought to identify ancient Maya spaces where specialized knowledge was transferred and acquired. Several historic accounts, including that of Bishop de Landa’s in Yucatan, mention specialized residences for youths while they were being schooled. Analogous to boarding schools, housing exclusively for acolytes creates a focused environment for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel May Castillo.

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. In this presentation, I argue that paganism-barbarism not only amalgamated colonial propaganda to portray the Maya Peoples as enemies of the crown for the sake of colonization but also served to legally disable any Maya who dared to claim their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shane Montgomery. Holley Moyes.

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 Las Cuevas region, situated on the southeastern edge of the Vaca Plateau in western Belize, consists of several medium-sized centers dispersed between low hills, steep ridges, and small seasonal swamps. Although occupied only briefly during the Late Classic period (700–900 CE),...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marie Kolbenstetter.

In 1966, Claude Baudez published a first attempt to compare ceramic typologies between different archeological areas of Honduras, published as Les niveaux céramiques au Honduras: une reconsidération de l'évolution culturelle (Baudez 1966). This article encompassed his research in the Gulf of Fonseca, where he spent a field season surveying and excavating sites in 1964-65. Fifty-three years later, this article still constitutes one of the most extensive descriptions of the ceramic assemblage of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrés Mejía Ramón. Jessica Munson. Jill Onken. Lorena Paiz Aragón.

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. Any sizable population must be sustained by an adequate food supply. As such, estimates for high population densities in the Maya Lowlands must be met with an equal or greater productive capacity. The “Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities” symposium seeks to understand this on a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcello Canuto. Luke Auld-Thomas.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican Population History: Demography, Social Complexity, and Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2016, the Pacunam Lidar Initiative surveyed 2,100 km2 of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the Department of Petén, Guatemala. This lidar survey provided an unprecedented scale of settlement data that attest to elevated population levels throughout the southern Maya lowlands, especially for the Late...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Reese-Taylor. Felix Kupprat. Armando Anaya Hernández. Nicholas Dunning. Adriana Velazquez Morlet.

This is an abstract from the "A Session in Memory of William J. Folan: Cities, Settlement, and Climate" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Building on the work of William J. Folan, the Bajo Laberinto Archaeological Project, initiated in 2022, is focused on investigations of urbanism centered on the city of Calakmul in southern Campeche. An initial 100 km2 lidar survey along the northern rim of the Bajo Laberinto has revealed large, elaborate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Reed Miller. Kenichiro Tsukamoto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An essential component of analyzing lidar data is adapting them to the researcher’s specific environmental situation, including the effects of local vegetation types on the identification of archaeological features. Doing so, can refine estimates of existing structures in non-surveyed areas and inform improved ground survey strategies in the future. At the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mariana Vazquez.

This is an abstract from the "New and Emerging Perspectives on the Bajo el Laberinto Region of the Maya Lowlands, Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study introduces a method for estimating aboveground biomass (AGB) in contemporary tropical forests near archaeological sites using lidar technology. Accurate AGB estimates are crucial for assessing wood resources available to the ancient Maya for city development. We propose a lidar...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marisol Cortes-Rincon. Cady Rutherford. Jason Laugesen. Michael Mcdermott. Spencer Mitchell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the last decade airborne mapping lidar has become an extremely valuable tool for archaeologists studying ancient settlement patterns. It has proven especially useful in regions covered by dense forests on which prospection with other remote sensing techniques is not possible. This paper contributes to the growing international dialogue regarding the use of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Kepecs.

This is an abstract from the "After Cortés: Archaeological Legacies of the European Invasion in Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Spaniards characterized the northeast corner of Yucatán state as being demographically depleted and possessed of unhealthy terrain and a lack of exploitable minerals. This picture has been perpetuated by historians, who lack independent lines of evidence against which to check it. Yet archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shintaro Suzuki. Fernando Gutiérrez.

This is an abstract from the "Aguada Fénix and the Middle Usumacinta Region: Interregional Interactions and Social Transformations in the Middle Preclassic Period" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We explore a Middle Preclassic skeleton from the site of Aguada Fénix, Tabasco. It is one of the scarce cases of the early temporality in the Maya area. We first describe in detail its archaeological context and osteological sex and age-at-death and infer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Cerezo-Román. Kenichiro Tsukamoto.

During the Late Classic period (A.D. 600-800), Maya non-royal elites frequently appeared in courtly scenes, which are depicted on polychrome vessels and carved monuments. While epigraphic studies over the last two decades have gradually shed light on their political and ritual roles, little is known about their life histories and mortuary practices. One group of these elites held the title of lakam, which has been reported only at three archaeological sites. We detected tangible evidence of...

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

This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the early years of Maya archaeology, Belize was considered peripheral, and the wetlands were at the far edge of this pseudo-backwater. It was not until Turner and Harrison’s seminal study of Pulltrouser Swamp in the 1970s that Belizean wetlands moved from the edge to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lilian Tejeda-Barillas. Jaime J. Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Life, Death, and Renewal: Examining the Significance of Lowland Maya Sweat Baths in the Belize River Valley. Lilian Tejeda Barillas and Jaime J. Awe Although sweat baths were an integral form of architecture in ancient Maya communities, these special architectural features have received limited attention from Maya scholars. In this poster, we address...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaime Awe. Arlen Chase. Diane 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. For more than a century, archaeological research in Belize has been at the vanguard of Maya Studies, contributing disproportionately to our knowledge of ancient Maya civilization. Yet, Belize’s archaeological contributions to the field are often overlooked in many current...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leslie Perkins. Travis Stanton.

The use of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) in Mesoamerican archaeological research been steadily increasing. Building on this knowledge, LiDAR was conducted during the summer of 2017 over a 6km2 area of the prehispanic site of San Gervasio, Isla Cozumel, Quintana Roo, Yucatan, Mexico. This was part of a larger survey and mapping project conducted by the Proyecto de Interacción Política del Centro de Yucatán (PIPCY) spearheaded by Dr. Travis Stanton. The proposed poster will discuss LiDAR...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Small.

The limited territorial control of small states, here the Classic Maya, has hindered the development of political economies in several cases. This paper looks at the issue of non-ruling elite interstate economic and political networks, and their effect on the evolution of internal political economies for the Classic Maya. Examples will be drawn from such polities as Copan, El Palmar, and Caracol. A further window into the dynamics of the effect of limited territorial control on political...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Thompson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper compares the developmental trajectories of two Classic Period (AD 300 – 800) Maya centers, Ix Kuku’il and Uxbenká, located in the southern foothills of the Maya Mountains, Toledo District, Belize. High-precision radiocarbon dates and ceramic sequences from household contexts inform the chronological development within these communities. Initial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Meanwell. Linda Seymour. Elizabeth Paris. Carlos Peraza Lope.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Elaborately decorated and painted objects, most typically murals and incense burners, were a central part of the religious and cultural life at the Postclassic period Maya capital of Mayapán. These objects required great skill to produce and requisite control over a variety of materials, including plaster, pottery, and the pigments used as colorants. One...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Hayden.

This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us using the...

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

How do subsistence-related changes impact lithic technology over the course of thousands of years? Three stratified rockshelters in Belize contain evidence of Paleoindian through Classic Maya period occupations. This span of time witnessed the initial hunting and gathering subsistence economy of the Paleoindian period, the introduction of horticulture and increasing reliance on cultivars in the Early Archaic, and the emergence of full-scale agriculture in the Late Archaic. Explaining variations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anais Levin. John Walden. Jaime Awe.

The use and production of lithic tools offers an avenue into the behavior and activities conducted in ancient residential and ritual contexts. We explore variability in the lithic assemblages of various contexts in the ancient Maya neighborhood of Tutu Uitz Na in the Late-Terminal Classic period (AD 700-900). Tutu Uitz Na is one of several neighborhoods surrounding the Lower Dover political center in the Belize River Valley. Variation in household lithic assemblages might vary based on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Monica Rodriguez. Vera Tiesler. Jeffrey B. Glover. Dominique Rissolo.

In this paper, we provide a sinopsis of the two dozen burial findings from the archaeological site of Vista Alegre, Quintana Roo, recovered during a decade (2008 to 2017). Most of the mortuary contexts from Vista Alegre were documented using detailed in situ recording (archaeothanatology), followed by macroscopic and isotopic research in a collaborative effort between the Georgia State University and the Bioarchaeology Lab of the University of Yucatan. Put in context with other burial series...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Garrison.

Conflict pervaded the civilizations of ancient Mesoamerica from an early time. In the Maya lowlands, the physical vestiges of defensive fortifications date to the Late Preclassic period, while textual evidence of conflict comes from the subsequent Early Classic period. This paper examines settlement changes within the context of a contested landscape. The Buenavista Valley, largely controlled during the Classic period by the kingdom of El Zotz, extends out west from the great city of Tikal....