Yucatan (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jim Aimers. Elizabeth Graham.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maya site of Lamanai is strategically located in northern Belize on the New River, which connects the Caribbean coast to the interior of the Maya area. In the Preclassic period into the early part of the Classic, Lamanai pottery shows close connections...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Byron Smith. Marisol Cortes-Rincon.

Late Classic hinterland agronomy presents a compelling glimpse into the socioeconomic dynamics of production and demand in the Three Rivers region. This project focused on a prominent house-group located 350 meters east of the site of Dos Hombres which was known to exhibit intensive agricultural strategies as well as a specialized degree of stone working. Additionally, a series of four karst depressions bordered the site and likely leveraged moisture demand resulting from agricultural needs as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Dennis Baldwin. Thomas Garrison. Rafael Cambranes.

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. The Buena Vista Valley (BVV), encompassing the ancient Maya communities of La Cuernavilla and El Zotz, has been the subject of years of extensive archaeological survey carried out by the Proyecto Arqueológico El Zotz (PAEZ). In 2017 and 2019, the Pacunam Lidar Initiative (PLI) acquired aerial lidar data over the entirety of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Asia Alsgaard. Erin Ray. Keith M. Prufer. Seth Newsome.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Interdisciplinary Isotopic Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The impact of the agricultural transition in the Maya region is little understood. Excavations at two rockshelters in southern Belize, Mayahak Cab Pek and Saki Tzul, have uncovered intact deposits dating from Cal.12,000 to 1,100 BP with a continuous record of both human and fauna remains. Using carbon and nitrogen bulk tissue and carbon...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan O'Neil.

This is an abstract from the "Polychromy, Multimediality, and Visual Complexity in Mesoamerican Art" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Examining multiple media, this paper addresses depicted and actual surfaces in ancient Maya art in order to explore artistic engagements with surface, texture, and the sense of touch. It considers, for example, how certain artists rendered bodies, objects, and materials in manners conveying the look and feel of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Bracken.

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 physical movement of people across the terrain is implicit to notions of migration, trade, and warfare. Numerous factors determine the specific paths taken by individuals and groups in motion, some physical and others conceptual. Tracing the physical conduits and limitations to travel across a particular landscape will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justine Shaw.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following the widespread Terminal Classic florescence that saw booming occupations at every site in the Cochuah region of west-central Quintana Roo, Mexico, many settlements were entirely abandoned. However, some sites possessed late Terminal Classic populations, living in novel architecture yet continuing other Classic Maya material practices. One such round...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anabel Ford. Cynthia Ellis Topsey.

This is an abstract from the "Advancing Public Perceptions of Sustainability through Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Globally, the Mesoamerican and Maya Milpa is gravely misunderstood as primitive, called shifting cultivation by the sole focus on annual crops combined with the fallacy of fallow, accurately defined as an unseeded plowed field. The attention to the annuals ignores the intentional and patient development of perennials,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Reese-Taylor. Armando Anaya Hernández. Nicholas Dunning. Verónica Vázquez López. Fernando Flores Esquivel.

This is an abstract from the "New and Emerging Perspectives on the Bajo el Laberinto Region of the Maya Lowlands, Part 2" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2011, a multidisciplinary team of researchers has been investigating the development of dense urbanism along the southern edge of the Bajo el Laberinto. Anchored by Yaxnohcah in the east and Pared de los Reyes in the west, the area was settled at ca. 900 BCE and occupied until ca. 1500 CE,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Ruhl.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Effective water management was key to settle in the Maya Lowlands, where scarce surface water is found. While numerous investigations have showed how complex systems had been organized in Maya sites, implying a great deal of attraction to them, new data, available through LidAR for example, indicates a much more decentralized reality, where household-scale...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David McCormick. Zachary Hruby. Olivia Navarro-Farr. Michelle Rich. Keith Eppich.

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. Obsidian blades and related debitage from four elite tombs recently excavated at El Peru-Waka have the potential to answer the question of why and how the ancient Maya placed this material above, around, and sometimes within the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rex Koontz.

This presentation investigates the narrative context of a Tajín region deity whose diagnostic characteristics include a large hank of hair and an extended upper lip. The figure appears in narrative scenes with the major Tajín deities, often playing what seems to be a subsidiary role. The most important association in these scenes is with a liquid-filled temple that plays a key role scenes of ballcourt ritual. The same deity appears in pars pro toto representations of sacrificial scenes with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cara Tremain.

Ancient Maya polychrome vases, especially those that are decorated with elaborately painted scenes, fill the display cases and collection drawers of museums and galleries around the world. Unfortunately, the majority of these are unprovenienced and many also lack clear provenance. Furthermore, modern restorations and/ or falsifications further muddy our understanding and blur the line between authentic and inauthentic. In order to learn more about these ceramics, and help to restore some of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip Arnold. Wesley Stoner.

This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 2" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Robert S. Santley was a junior, third author of the path-breaking The Basin of Mexico (Sanders et al. 1979). Nonetheless, his contribution to the volume was substantial, including co-writing almost 50% of the entire 500+ pages of text and producing almost all of the drawings and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sherman Horn.

This is an abstract from the "Where Is Provenance? Bridging Method, Evidence, and Theory for the Interpretation of Local Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle Preclassic (1000 – 400 B.C.) Maya Lowlands were peppered with autonomous communities connected by webs of socioeconomic interactions at the local and regional scales. Increasingly complex social relationships were forged in Middle Preclassic centers and later developed into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomás Gallareta Cervera. Brett A. Houk.

Research on ancient Maya cities is generally modeled after large sites with massive architecture, dynastic burials, and written records documenting the activities of divine rulers. However, the development of these cities is the exception, rather than the norm, since the majority of Maya sites did not reach such enormous proportions, yet many of them likely qualified as cities from a functional standpoint. Hence, a research on non-massive cities, "from the bottom up," is crucial to understand...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Callaghan. Brigitte Kovacevich.

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. In this paper we use frequency distributions of ceramic types and modes to identify and assess the presence and strength of permeable ceramic boundaries between sites in the northeastern Peten and west central Belize in the early Middle Preclassic through Postclassic periods. We...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roberto Lopez Bravo.

Research focused on El Lacandon, a rural community in the outer hinterland of the Late Classic Palenque polity, has allowed the understanding of shifting patterns of relationships between the urban and the rural realms in two specific times: 1) at the end of the Late Preclassic period, when Palenque developed from a rural village into a dynastic capital; and 2) at the end of the Late Classic period, when the ruling dynasty developed new political strategies for hinterland integration.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carrie Tucker. Jeffrey B. Glover. Dominique Rissolo.

Coastal communities in the Maya Lowlands played a myriad of roles in the ebb and flow of political, economic, and social formations over the past 3000 years, yet these roles have remained along the periphery of Maya studies. Though ever present, Maya coastal sites were atypical – perhaps even idiosyncratic – in terms of how they were imagined and lived-in by the Maya. Critical to our understanding of these coastal settlements is the material culture traded and utilized by the occupants of these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerald Ek.

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. Over his distinguished career William Folan made a substantive contribution to knowledge of the scale, form, and nature of Maya urbanism. Classic Maya cities are often classified as a low-density agrarian-based urban tradition, a cross-cultural concept characterized by expansive settlement zones, lack of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Mathews.

Starting in the nineteenth century, industries like henequen, chicle, hardwoods and sugarcane required the installation of narrow-gauge railroads across the Yucatán Peninsula. Mules, horses or people pulled low and flat, four-wheeled wooden carts along these rails, which connected haciendas, ports, and remote jungle camps. These rails brought supplies from "civilization" or commodities out of the forest for distribution. This paper will explore the role that railroads played during this period....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Richter.

This is an abstract from the "Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 1" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although the Huasteca belongs to the Mesoamerican culture area and the Gulf Coast region, some scholars have asserted that its culture, emblematized by its sculptural tradition, was isolated. The examination of Huastec stone sculptures from different periods reveals not only its links to other artistic traditions in Mesoamerica but...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa LeCount. Jason Yaeger. Bernadette Cap. Borislava Simova.

This is an abstract from the "Regimes of the Ancient Maya" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We explore the pragmatics of Classic Maya politics in the Mopan River valley of western Belize during the Classic period. Drawing on Okoshi-Harada’s (2012) reconstruction of sixteenth-century Maya political dynamics and Inomata’s (2006) view of polities created through the interaction among social agents in specific historical and spatial contexts, we see...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Rivas. Brent Woodfill.

Although scientific consensus was reached on the issue of human-made climate change earlier this century, it continues to be a controversial subject in the public sphere. Archaeologists, as scientists interested in a longue durée approach to human society and the environment, have thus been thrust into another ideological battlefield as hard-fought as the theory of evolution by natural selection, but with perhaps graver consequences. As we move fully into the Capitalocene, it is of the utmost...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Delande Justinvil. Jessica Leonard. Hannah Plumer. Thomas Harold Guderjan. Colleen Hanratty.

In 2013 a rescue mission to salvage and preserve details of the shrine complex at Tulix Muul, a Classic Maya site in northwestern Belize, yielded a Maya mural. While the arrangement of the mural at the shrine echoes notions of nobility, this rare landmark discovery lies in contrast to what we can infer about the social status of exhumed remains from the Tulix Muul archaeological site. This poster will address the multifaceted insights we can glean from certain aspects of the past life histories...