Yucatan (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)

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

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. There are many persistent issues that hamper archaeological interpretations of human-landscape interactions, from modern-day disturbances to more distant postdepositional processes and changing environmental conditions. These circumstances often make it a challenge to tease out cultural behaviors and the resulting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Whittaker Schroder.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Discussions of political collapse in archaeology have shifted recently to approaches that incorporate the adaptive cycles of resilience and reorganization that highlight the continuity of certain cultural practices, belief systems, and worldviews alongside the disintegration of political systems. This approach has garnered support especially in the Maya area...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Booher. Brett A. Houk.

Chan Chich is one of the dozen largest Maya ruins in Belize, reaching its apogee during the Late Classic period, ca. A.D. 750. The site has a number of notable site planning characteristics, including a massive public plaza, and two wide, radial causeways, that show connections to neighboring sites and suggest common ideas about city building. Some of these shared planning ideas reflect top-down design concepts related to specialized political and ritual functions for various buildings and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Schreiner.

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. Excavations over several decades in the Mirador Basin of northern Guatemala, combined with detailed experimental data, have revealed extraordinary use of lime products in the construction and maintenance of Maya causeways, architecture, and associated art. This paper will consider both the quantitative utilization...

DOCUMENT Citation Only José De Calasanz Ligorred Perramon.

This is an abstract from the "2024 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Luis Barba" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En nuestra ponencia presentaremos el fruto de años de relación entre el Laboratorio fundado por el doctor Luis Barba, que fue nuestro profesor en los años ochenta cursando la licenciatura en Arqueología en la ENAH de la Ciudad de México. Desde entonces, nos asomamos como arqueólogos al patrimonio invisible y/o abandonado...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Nicole Boudreaux. Laura Levi. Christian Sheumaker.

It is now well recognized that Late Classic Maya communities varied politically, economically, and environmentally. The corollary, however, that community and household variation went hand-in-hand in the Maya area often goes unrecognized or under problematized. Research that explores differences in household provisioning practices across a range of communities should help to rectify this situation. Referencing data from two large prehispanic Maya sites in northwestern Belize, this paper asks the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Jamison. David Mixter.

Monumental architecture and public spaces provide primary contexts for community ritual and social action. The process of construction of public architecture involves community cooperation and collective action, with the latter contributing to significant changes in the form and use of structures through time. The public architecture of Actuncan developed from the Preclassic period to constitute a nearly complete set of architectural forms devoted to ritual, administrative and community...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Ingalls. Jason Yaeger.

Public structures in the Maya region materialize ideologies and define centers of power as they create politically charged sacred landscapes. These locations are nexus points for community and polity making processes, embedding social hierarchies, ideologies, and social memories into the physical landscape. However, archaeologists have historically focused attention on monumental public spaces within large civic-ceremonial centers, and relatively little attention has been given to public spaces...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Van Oss.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Due to the nature of long-term archaeological investigations, data collection and curation methods change over time. This means that data can end up in several physical and digital locations, making the analysis of evidence challenging if it was collected years apart or by several investigators. In Lowland Maya archaeology, annual reports are required to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Munson. Jonathan Scholnick. Lorena Paiz Aragon.

Inequality is a prominent and persistent feature of all large-scale human societies that has significant impacts on everyday life. Variation in material wealth and social capital as well as differential access to specialized knowledge and other resources directly impacts household quality of life (QOL) within ancient and contemporary communities. For the ancient Maya, the establishment of political institutions centered on divine rulership significantly contributed to QOL changes during the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Clarke. Henry Perez. Boris Beltran. Heather Hurst.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The organization of labor in Classic Maya society has long been studied from a top-down approach. The construction of public works is seen as a facet of state economy, while the physical evidence of human effort—monumental constructions—are understood as visible manifestations of labor or service-based taxes. The argument for collective or rotational labor...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cristina Verdugo. Lars Fehren-Schmitz. James Brady.

This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Indigenous Culture and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As bioarchaeological interest in the question of ancient Maya ritual violence developed in the 1960s, it was generally recognized that sacrifice and related violent practices occurred within the social context of ritual. It should be expected, then, that caves would produce sacrificial osteological assemblages since they are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Burham.

This is an abstract from the "Theorizing Prehistoric Large Low-Density Settlements beyond Urbanism and Other Conventional Classificatory Conventions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maya site of Ceibal, Guatemala, became a preeminent center in the Pasión Region of the southern lowlands over the Preclassic period (ca. 950 BCE-350 CE). During the latter centuries of this period, minor temple complexes were built at regular intervals within the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Els Barnard.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many recent studies about the distribution of wealth in ancient Mesoamerican cities are revealing new insights into the ways socioeconomic processes were organized. Measures of inequality, like the Gini index, reveal patterns of wealth distribution and socioeconomic stratification, permitting research into the relationships between the rich and the poor. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Wolf. Elisandro Garza.

This is an abstract from the "Mountains, Rain, and Techniques of Governance in Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mesoamerican archaeological sites often take advantage of the surrounding natural landscape to enhance both the political machinations of the ruling elite and the sacred ideals of the community at large. In Guatemala, Belize, Mexico, and other highland or steep regions, archaeologists have repeatedly demonstrated the dynamic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martha Wendel. David Lentz. Susan E. Allen. Timothy Beach. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach.

Up until the late 1990s, researchers believed the Maya were solely reliant on slash and burn agricultural practices. However, discoveries of rectangular canal patterns in the margins of wetlands in the Maya lowlands of Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico shined light on a new agricultural practice: raised wetland fields. One example of wetland fields is found at the site Birds of Paradise (BOP) in the Rio Bravo region of northwestern Belize. The macrobotanicals recovered from the raised fields and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomás Gallareta Cervera. George Bey III. Rossana May.

This is an abstract from the "The Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project: 25 Years of Research in the Puuc" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 2007 to 2016, a team of archaeologists under the direction of George J. Bey III excavated Structure N1065E1025, a pyramid temple dated to the Terminal Classic period and located at the Yaxché group in the heart of the archaeological site of Kiuic, Yucatán. The structure had a complex construction...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Betsy Kohut. George J. Bey III. Tomás Gallareta Negrón.

In 1958, Brainerd first described "the earliest deposits yet to come from Yucatan"—composed primarily of narrow-mouthed jar fragments recovered from the lowest strata of excavations at the Mani cenote. This type, classified as Yotholin Pattern-Burnished, has a medium-fine paste and unslipped surfaces that had been smoothed or burnished in decorative patterns. Since then, similar wares have been recovered from Preclassic contexts at a number of other sites. Although Brainerd originally described...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Austin. Benjamin Baaske. Robert Warden.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part II" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maya architecture at Xno’ha has been recorded digitally every field season since 2012 by the Blue Creek Archaeological Project in conjunction with the Center for Heritage Conservation at Texas A&M University. Through the application of preservation technologies such as laser scanning, it is now possible to juxtapose completely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amilcar Vargas. Álvaro Brizuela Absalón.

The Pre-Hispanic city of El Tajin (Mexico) was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1992. Late on in the same decade UNESCO encouraged State Parties to foster "informed awareness on the part of the population… whose active participation [in conservation]…is essential". Using the Rapid Ethnographic Assessment Procedures method (REAP) on fieldwork in Mexico, this paper aims to contrast global and local policies to improve participation of local communities generally and in particular of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raúl López. Gloria Hernández.

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 II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Conventional inferences of Maya mobility have been based on cultural exchange. The isotopic composition measured in human skeletal remains provides a direct measure of past peoples’ movements. Founded on published isotopic datasets across the Maya area,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeb Card.

Certain classes of material culture found in Honduras and El Salvador have long been recognized as being related to "Maya style" artwork and artifacts from Copan and Classic Maya cities to the north and west. These objects have been framed through questions of "influence", ethnicity, and boundaries. The recent re-analysis of a ceramic flask from Tazumal, with an unusual inscription tying the object to a Copan king and imagery of tribute, suggests a more distinct political lens through which to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Scherer. Charles Golden.

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. The Santo Domingo-Lacanja Valley hosted a number of small but important Classic period centers, including Bonampak, Lacanha, Plan de Ayutla, and Lacanja Tzeltal (seat of the Sak Tz’i’ dynasty). It was also an important corridor of travel between the major polities of Yaxchilan, Tonina, and Palenque, among others. Here, we review the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Pierce. Mike Lawrence.

Adjacent to Plaza B at Pacbitun is a Classic Period "palace" complex consisting of three conjoined courtyards each ringed by elevated range structures, likely serving elite-residential and administrative functions. Previous excavations indicated initial construction in the Early Classic period with numerous modifications made in the Late Classic, and preliminary evidence of occupation or use into the Terminal Classic period. The Pacbitun Regional Archaeological Project has begun to explore this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsty Escalante.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological looting in the Maya area has been an enduring concern for over 60 years. While many individual archaeological projects have worked diligently to record looting within their respective project areas, the recent application of lidar in archaeology facilitates the large-scale study of illicit digging in the forested Maya region for the first...