Yucatan (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)
551-575 (948 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya city of Yaxuna was a political and economic center of the northern lowlands in the Middle to Late Preclassic periods (1000 BC–AD 250), and residents continued to occupy the city through the Classic period (AD 250–900) amid geopolitical shifts in the region tied to the rise of Coba and the Late Classic (AD 600–800) construction of a...
Microscopic Fibers and Dental Calculus from Midnight Terror Cave, Belize (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Defining Perishables: The How, What, and Why of Perishables and Their Importance in Understanding the Past" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Midnight Terror Cave human remains collection consists of over 10,000 commingled bone fragments from at least 118 Maya sacrificial victims from the Classic period (250 CE–925 CE). Microscopic examination of dental calculus was carried out on a selection of teeth as part of a...
Middens, Caches, and Burials: Contextualizing the Ceramic Assemblage of La Corona (2018)
Mundane utilitarian ware, finely decorated polychromes, fine paste and epigraphic imports, and plates bearing idiosyncratic local designs characterize La Corona’s ceramic assemblage. The ceramic chronology of La Corona is presented with emphasis on construction phases, middens, caches, burials, and special deposits in an effort to reconcile the ceramic assemblage and the political history of the site. Polychromes bearing place names highlight La Corona’s elite regional relationships while the...
A Middle Classic Horizon? Tracking Calakmul’s Rise in the Ceramics of the Central Karstic Uplands (2018)
Joe Ball’s seminal work on the ceramics of Becan, Campeche, Mexico, anchored two generations of research on the the ancient Maya. His analysis, for the most part, has stood the test of time, and his recent revisions to it reflect the breadth of his knowledge, and his ability to re-conceptualize a problem in light of subsequent research. One aspect of his Becan work that has proved elusive to other researchers is the definition of a Middle Classic. Although some have isolated a Middle Classic...
Middle Preclassic Ceramic Distribution in Western Belize: A Comparative Study from Early Xunantunich (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Preclassic Landscape in the Mopan Valley, Belize" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The value of ceramic sherds and vessels to the archaeologist extends far beyond the chronology of a site. Ceramic production and distribution data, for example, reveal information about ancient lifeways, ideologies, and movement across a landscape, ultimately telling us more about the people behind the pottery. In this paper, I will...
Middle Preclassic Chipped Stone Caches at Ceibal and Holtun, Guatemala (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 Middle Preclassic period (700-350 B.C.) at Ceibal, common objects in ritual deposits in the public plaza shifted from greenstone celt caches to other artifacts, including obsidian prismatic-blade cores. Like...
Middle Preclassic Greenstone Caches from Paso del Macho, Yucatan (2018)
Complex ritual deposits dating to the Middle Preclassic period are rarely encountered in Yucatan, and typically have only been recovered from disturbed contexts. Excavations along the center axes in the plaza of the Middle Preclassic village of Paso del Macho in the Puuc region of Yucatan have yielded a series of offerings spanning from the early Middle Preclassic to the cusp of the Late Preclassic. Three different floor sequences were each associated with several offerings. The forms of the...
Middle Preclassic Marine Shell Production and Ritual Deposition at the Sites of Blackman Eddy and Las Ruinas de Arenal, Belize (2023)
This is an abstract from the "An Exchange of Ideas: Recent Research on Maya Commodities" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Marine shell was a highly valued long-distance trade material for the ancient Maya beginning as early as the Middle Preclassic. Symbolically, marine shell represented the watery underworld and was often used in ritual offerings that reference cosmological ordering of the world. Evidence for Middle Preclassic marine shell bead...
Middle Preclassic Occupation and Architecture of the Mirador Basin, Guatemala (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. Archaeological excavations and technical analyses in the Mirador Basin of northern Guatemala have provided a new perspective of the origins and dynamics of incipient Maya civilization. Data relevant to settlement patterns, sampling strategies, demographic distributions, chronological evaluations, DNA and isotope...
Middle Preclassic Settlements in the Petén Lakes Region of Guatemala (2023)
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. Proyecto Itza has recently resurveyed a large area to the south of Lake Petén Itzá in Petén, Guatemala, extending from Lake Salpeten to Laguna Perdida. The work utilized a variety of methods including total station mapping, photogrammetry, and lidar (conducted by the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping). The goal of the...
A Midwife’s Memorial: La Venta “Tomb” C (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. One of the most elaborate tomblike deposits at La Venta may commemorate a female ritualist, possibly a midwife. This paper explores the contents and surroundings of Tomb C and relates them to the widespread imagery of women and pre-birth humans at this Middle Formative ritual and pilgrimage site. It uses analogies with Mixe ritual as evidence for...
A Millennium of Sociopolitical Transitions in the PRALC Region: The View from La Cariba (2018)
Excavations at minor centers provide us not only with a wealth of information about those sites, but they can also illuminate sociopolitical shifts over time within the broader region. The minor center of La Cariba, located four kilometers southwest of La Corona, has been investigated since 2009. A broad dataset including architectural, epigraphic, osteological, and artifactual evidence has provided a detailed narrative of political and demographic changes over a millennium at La Cariba. The...
Mineralogical and Chemical Properties of Preclassic Maya Ceramics from Colha, Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the question of whether or not Preclassic Maya exploited volcanogenic ceramic raw materials, which have refractory properties such as thermal conductivity, resistance to thermal shock, abrasion, chemical weathering, and thermal decomposition. Scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-rays, energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence, and...
Mineralogy Without Minerals: A Proposed Methodology for Reconstructing the Original Compositions of Highly Altered Ceramic Bodies Using Thin Section Petrography (2018)
The rock and mineral fragments present in archaeological pottery, whether naturally occurring in the clay component or intentionally added as a temper, often serve as the primary geologic basis for provenance ascription in petrographic analysis. In certain contexts, however, the original compositional characteristics of pottery have been highly altered through technological or postdepositional processes. In these situations, accurate characterization and sourcing of original raw material...
Minor Temple Groups, Water Management and Community Formation at Ceibal, Guatemala (2018)
Recent investigations of reservoirs associated with minor temple groups at Ceibal, Guatemala shed light on the role of water management in intermediate-level sociopolitical organization in ancient Maya society. Over the course of the Late and Terminal Preclassic periods (ca. 350BC-AD200), as Ceibal grew into an urban center, minor temples were built at regular intervals around the site core. These temples were the centers of local communities that were integrated primarily through ritual...
Mirador Mountain, Ritual Landscapes, and the Protohistoric Maya Community at Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico (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. Mirador Mountain, or Chak Aktun for contemporary Lacandon Maya, dominates the landscape at Lake Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico. The mountain, which has a natural red stain on its east side, rises from an island. Late Preclassic Maya (ca. 200 BCE–200 CE) created temples, platforms, and plazas on the island Mountain for an...
Modeling Agricultural Production in the Mopan Valley, Belize (2023)
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. Modeling agricultural yields provides one way to examine questions of Classic Maya agricultural practices and land management, with follow-on implications regarding intensification, household sustainability, and exchange practices. In this paper, we use models to examine whether milpa...
Modeling of the Impacts and Sustainability of Ancient Maya Hunting: An Interdisciplinary Ecological and Archaeological Study (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The environmental impact of sizable Late Classic ancient Maya populations remains a persistent question in archaeology. To date, studies of ancient Maya environmental impacts have focused primarily on land-cover change and the conversion of forest to agricultural fields, orchards, and habitation areas. In contrast, few empirical studies have focused on the...
Modeling the Milpa at Tikal: New Dimensions of the Carr and Hazard Map (2023)
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. Much debate has surrounded population and land-use strategies of the Maya. Residential settlements are accepted as a proxy for population and areas without architecture would be available for subsistence. We examine the case of Tikal, where the existing map visually describes...
Modeling the Milpa-Cycle at Classic Period El Pilar: A New Method for Assessing Maya Subsistence Production (2023)
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 ancient Maya city El Pilar was founded in an ecotonal location, where the karstic ridgelands of the greater Petén grade into the alluvial Belize River Valley and coastal plain. Established early in the Middle Preclassic (ca. 1000 BCE), El Pilar grew into a major center that...
Modeling the Milpa-Cycle: A GIS-Based Approach to Envisioning Ancient Maya Land Use and Traditional Agricultural Practices (2023)
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. Traditional ecological knowledge from living Maya farmers informs us of a storied heritage of agricultural production within the tropical Maya lowlands that traces its lineage to the development and height of ancient Maya civilization. In studying the Maya milpa-cycle, a 20-year...
Molding a New Order: Ideological Transitions and Gulf Coast-Maya Lowland Interaction, AD 800–1000 (2023)
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. As numerous studies have noted, changes in themes, compositions, and content in Maya stone monuments from the ninth and tenth centuries present a departure from their Classic counterparts, which in turn appears to reflect changes in social structure and...
A Monumental Afterlife: Reconfiguration and Reuse at Aventura, Belize (2018)
Previous research suggests that the ancient Maya city of Aventura, Belize thrived during the Terminal Classic to Early Postclassic periods (800 – 1100 CE). During this period, occupants of the city constructed up to 27 buildings within the confines of the site’s A plaza. This paper presents the results of the 2017 test excavations of a sample of the A plaza buildings. Maya plazas are typically conceived of as large open places for ritual and political performance. However, these excavation...
Monumental Architecture of Yaxha and Nakum (Northeastern Guatemala) during the Middle and Late Preclassic Periods (2018)
Yaxha and Nakum are two important Maya centers located in northeastern part of Guatemala. Recent research carried out by different projects at both sites indicate that during the Preclassic period Yaxha and Nakum rose to power and became important polities that had many examples of monumental architecture such as E-Groups, triadic complexes, ballcourts, causeways and other constructions. The scale of monumental architecture documented at Yaxha indicates that it was one of the largest Late...
Monumental Displays: Ritual Performance and Preclassic Architecture at Early Xunantunich, Belize (2018)
The site of Early Xunantunich in modern day Belize provides the opportunity for a uniquely detailed case study in Preclassic Maya architecture. Thanks to a lack of Classic Period overburden, the Mopan Valley Preclassic Project has been able to conduct extensive excavations of early architecture at the site, documenting important ritual activities from this early time period which likely played a key role in the development of sociopolitical complexity in the region. This paper focuses on...