Peten (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)
551-575 (1,039 Records)
El Mirador, in the northern Peten, has redefined our ideas about the Maya Preclassic. Its massive architecture and its complex system of sacbes compare to the largest Classic period centers. Unlike many of its smaller Preclassic neighbors, El Mirador collapsed at the dawn of the Classic. Understanding El Mirador’s organization, economy, and relationship to its environment requires detailed knowledge of the site’s population trajectory. Reconstructing El Mirador’s population trajectory, we face a...
It’s What’s on the Inside That Counts: New Approaches to Sourcing Mayan Chert Artifacts from Belize (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The distribution of prehistoric artifacts across spatial and temporal realms is frequently used to investigate trade, exchange, mobility, and socioeconomic relationships in the past. In the Maya region, chert was a key component in ancient toolkits due to its widespread availability and suitability for knapping into tools. Previous studies in the Maya...
Ixtepeque Obsidian and the Polity: a Network and Boundary Approach in Southeastern Mesoamerica (2019)
This is an abstract from the "I Love Sherds and Parasites: A Festschrift in Honor of Pat Urban and Ed Schortman" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Edward Schortman and Patricia Urban (2012) borrow theoretical approaches from Bruno Latour (1996), Giddens (1984), and Bourdieu (1977) to highlight networks of shared inter-elite interaction in southeastern Mesoamerica that interpenetrate ethnic and political boundaries. The following paper builds upon...
Joseph Ball and the Reformulation of the Protoclassic: Revisiting Critical Issues (2018)
At the 1985 Maya Ceramic Workshop, Arthur Demarest noted the intense interest in the Protoclassic. Indeed, ceramists with only a mammiform support and a handful of sherds would pause to speculate on the significance of a statistically insignificant number of sherds. During the 1990s, Joseph Ball and I doggedly worked to reexamine every aspect of the Protoclassic issue. Aided by contributions of a number of colleagues, the resulting document attempted to strip the Protoclassic of association...
Just for the Celt of It: Investigations and Discoveries Beneath the Petroglyph Panels of Aktun Kuruxtun, Yucatan (2018)
During 2011 excavations deep beneath the petroglyph panels in Aktun Kuruxtun, Mexico, members of the Central Yucatan Archaeological Cave Project (CYAC) uncovered a small tunnel leading into a previously unknown chamber of the cavern. The discovery came in the final days of the field season, however, and the chamber was too choked with flood sediments to be methodologically investigated. As a result, the passage was reburied. Last summer, CYAC returned to the cave and successfully explored the...
The Kaanul Dynasty and the Early History of the Northwest Petén (2021)
This is an abstract from the "New Light on Dzibanché and on the Rise of the Snake Kingdom’s Hegemony in the Maya Lowlands" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past two decades it has become increasingly clear that the ancient Maya political landscape was permeated by regional systems of political asymmetry. These hegemonic networks fluctuated through time, but the steady presence of a few especially dominant polities shows that they were a...
The Kenyon-Honduras Program 1988-2019: Learning from the Past About Ourselves (2019)
This is an abstract from the "I Love Sherds and Parasites: A Festschrift in Honor of Pat Urban and Ed Schortman" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the 1980s, the Kenyon-Honduras Program, under the leadership of Drs. Patricia Urban and Edward Schortman (P&E to us), has engaged students in the study of archaeology, anthropology, and life. Hundreds of students have been a part of the program over the past several decades. Being in the program...
Kept Out or Closed In? An Analysis of Civilian Fortification Strategies during the Maya Social War (2018)
In this paper, I explore the ways in which albarradas, or the dry-laid enclosure walls ubiquitous to Yucatec Maya towns, can be manipulated to become defensive structures under the threat of attack. I discuss the results of a recent study that conducted a construction analysis on a series of wall features in the now unpopulated town of Tela – an auxiliary to and key commercial throughway for the burgeoning frontier hub of Tihosuco (since repopulated) during the 19th century. This town was...
The Kingdom of Piedras Negras: A View from Mexico (2018)
Though today the Usumacinta River marks part of the boundary of Mexico and Guatemala, during the Classic period the Usumacinta would have passed through numerous kingdoms, including Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan. Alternate travel routes through the valleys to the west in Mexico crossed an even more complicated political landscape approaching the kingdoms of Palenque, Tonina, and Sak Tz’i’, as well as the plentiful minor centers and rural settlements throughout the region. While surveys between...
Knowledge Networks and Entanglements in the Crafting of Pre-Columbian Maya Ceramics and Architecture (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the underlying precepts of materiality is that, whereas people make objects, objects simultaneously and recursively make people. Objects also make objects, however, in so far as seemingly separate crafting traditions were intimately entangled with each other, stimulating and reinforcing similar procedures, practices, and...
Komkom What May: The Ancient Maya Kingdom of Komkom in Time and Place (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Making and Breaking Boundaries in the Maya Lowlands: Alliance and Conflict across the Guatemala–Belize Border" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Painted and carved pictorial pottery of the Classic Maya (250-850 CE) served primarily as ostentatious serving vessels at feasts and other principal celebrations. The vessels were masterful creations by accomplished artisans and are, for the most part, individualistic...
K’anwitznal: Six Years of Cartography at the Site of Ucanal, Guatemala (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Building on the pioneer work of the Proyecto Atlas de Guatemala, the Proyecto Arqueológico Ucanal has considerably expanded the survey and excavations of the site leading to a better comprehension of the transition of the Late to Terminal Classic periods. The site has been surveyed with a combination of approaches including a traditional total station,...
La arquitectura preclásica de El Mirador: Vista desde la Acrópolis La Pava (2021)
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. Dentro de las investigaciones del Proyecto Cuenca Mirador, se cuentan las realizadas en La Acrópolis Triádica La Pava. En los resultados se evidencian rasgos arquitectónicos relevantes de la ocupación del Preclásico Tardío en El Mirador. Durante esta presentación se expondrán los hallazgos de las excavaciones en...
La Cuernavilla, Guatemala: A Fortress and Its Environs (2023)
This is an abstract from the "La Cuernavilla, Guatemala: A Maya Fortress and Its Environs" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La Cuernavilla is a recently discovered Classic Maya fortress in the central Petén of Guatemala. Situated between the major ancient kingdom of Tikal and the minor city-state capital of El Zotz, the site has a complex history tied into the broader geopolitics of the Buenavista Valley, which it overlooks. This talk introduces the...
Land Systems Architecture and Ecology as Infrastructure in Cities and Regions across the Maya Lowlands (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Relying on the lens of ecological urbanism this paper describes the diversity of long-term patterns of urbanization and agricultural intensification on regional landscapes in the Maya lowlands of southern Mexico and Central America. Best described as a mosaic, the Maya lowlands offers an...
Landfalls, Sunbursts, and the Capacha Problem: The Case for a Pacific Coastal Interaction Community in Early Formative Period Mesoamerica (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 1960s, Ford argued that the first Pacific coastal Mexican pottery should more closely resemble that of northern South America than of early highland Mexican wares of the Tehuacán tradition. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kelly argued that Colima’s Capacha phase represented one of several "landfalls" of technological and...
Landscape and Settlements in the Bolonchen District, Puuc Region, Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Landscapes: Archaeological, Historic, and Ethnographic Perspectives from the New World / Paisajes: Perspectivas arqueológicas, históricas y etnográficas desde el Nuevo Mundo" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper combines the results of settlement and vegetation surveys in the Puuc Region of Yucatan, Mexico, with an emphasis in the Bolonchen District and the archaeological Maya site of Kiuic. The extensive...
Landscape Modification Seen from Above: Remote Sensing Analysis at Postclassic Mayapan (2018)
This paper examines shifting environmental paradigms in the Maya realm. Using Mayapán as a case study, a site long-considered to be located in a "marginal" environment for agricultural productivity, I will evaluate site resilience, sustainability, and self-sufficiency and use these concepts to create a more nuanced perspective of human-environment interactions. Data from Mayapán will be cross-referenced to other similar sites across the Maya region. I will show that assumptions about the...
Landscape of the Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin (2021)
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. The southern Petén Plateau can be subdivided into four karst landscapes, each with a dominant karst landform. They are fluviokarst, polygonal karst, karst margin plain, and upland karst. These terrains have different proportions of uplands and low standing wetlands. Within this framework lies the Mirador-Calakmul...
Landscape with Bees: Apiculture in Yucatán after the Spanish Invasion (2019)
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. In this paper we examine how European colonization and the shift to industrial capitalism altered beekeeping in Yucatán from AD1600 to the present. Honey and wax produced from stingless bees were circulated throughout the Mesoamerican world system during the Postclassic period. In the wake of the European...
Landscapes of Inequality in Ebtun, Yucatán, 1800–1890 (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Place-Making in Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities Past and Present" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I examine the postcolonial social transformations of Yucatec-speaking communities located southwest of Valladolid, Yucatán, occasioned by the Caste War (1847–1901), a violent rebellion and revitalization movement intricately related to processes of decolonization following Independence. How did Native...
Las mujeres en los rituales de final de periodo durante el Clásico maya (250-900 dC) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Role of Women in Mesoamerican Ritual" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Durante el periodo Clásico se esculpieron dinteles y estelas donde algunas mujeres de sitios específicos desempeñaron un papel relevante en las ceremonias de final de periodo. Así lo atestiguan inscripciones de varias ciudades del Usumacinta y de la región de Petén, entorno geográfico en el que se centrará nuestro trabajo. La escritura...
Las Ruinas de Arenal and the Buenavista del Cayo Polity: Political Dynamics in the Western Belize River Valley (2018)
The socio-political and economic interactions of Las Ruinas de Arenal, a small but architecturally rich center in the lower Mopan River Valley, are explored through a focused investigation of select Classic period (250-850 CE) pottery from general occupation and special deposits. The study combines ceramic typological data with evaluations of artistic style and paste chemical composition. Previous archaeological investigations by Taschek and Ball found scant evidence of foreign influence in Las...
Late Classic Lithics Caches in Northwestern Belize: Technology and Symbolism (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ceremonial Lithics of Mesoamerica: New Understandings of Technology, Distribution, and Symbolism of Eccentrics and Ritual Caches in the Maya World and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Late Classic, lithic artifacts, including eccentrics, served as the primary elements of many Lowland Maya caches. Despite this general pattern, technological and iconographic analyses illuminate the distinct character of...
Late Classic Maya Commoner Myth, Ritual, and Landscape at Chawak But’o’ob, Belize. (2018)
Recent research at the ball court complex and other areas of the ancient hinterland community of Chawak But’o’ob in the Rio Bravo Conservation and Management Area in northwestern Belize indicates the existence of a sophisticated interplay of environment and ideology at this agrarian site. The intersection of landscape, hydrology, and architecture here hints at mythological underpinnings of Maya commoner ritual that only partially overlap those in evidence in ancient urban contexts.