Central America and Northern South America (Geographic Keyword)
1-25 (158 Records)
Ancient eastern Honduran populations utilized foreign symbols in limited elite contexts, such as site planning and architecture, but most elements of material culture reflect clear connections to Lower Central America. Iconography seen in petroglyphs appears significantly different from that seen in other media, and may yield additional information and insights into identity formation and interactions within the region. For many reasons, these petroglyphs have not been extensively studied. While...
"Across the Agua to Managua" and Beyond: Getting Past Migration in Nicaraguan Prehistory (2018)
Despite being the largest country in Central America, Nicaragua’s archaeological record remains the least explored and most ignored. One consequence of this is that reconstructions of Nicaragua’s prehistory have tended to rely overmuch on rather sparse (and not necessarily reliable) ethnohistoric accounts in which migration from Mesoamerican homelands is heavily emphasized, generally to the detriment of other kinds of cultural phenomena, including indigenous developments that are not explicitly...
The Active Materiality of Obsidian (2019)
This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When Steve Shackley informed me that over 90% of obsidian samples from Puerto Escondido, Honduras, that he had analyzed came from an unidentified source, presumably nearby, he started a process of re-education that led me to a place where he may not be comfortable, but that I deeply appreciate. This involves a...
African Archaeology and the Ancestral Maya World (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lidar mapping has revealed extensive ancestral settlement patterns signifying a low-density urban system. Maya archaeologists are tasked with interpreting how the ancestral Maya interacted and kept this system working for over 1,000 years (ca. 100 BCE–900 CE) in the southern Maya lowlands of Central America. It was a complex...
The Ancient Maya Settlement of Waybil, Belize: Middle-Level and Hinterland Settlement Investigations (2018)
The Classic Maya, with their towering jungle temples and sprawling cities have been the focus of archaeological studies since the mid-1800s. Although numerous investigations have fostered considerable insights, important questions remain regarding the circumstances in which these settlements originated, interacted, developed, and were ultimately abandoned. The organization of Maya settlements is best conceptualized as a continuum consisting of three basic, but variable types, including:...
Ancient Population History in the Palenque Region: The Problem of the Selection of Population Proxies (2021)
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. The Proyecto Regional Palenque (PREP) has recorded a total of 653 sites within an area of 650 km2. Regional population ranges from 28,000 to 32,000 inhabitants. Mapping efforts and household excavations undertaken as part of the Proyecto Especial Palenque during the seasons of 1992–1994 identified 1,480...
Análisis geoespacial de la distribución de sitios arqueológicos en la Sub-Región Diquís, Región Gran Chiriquí (2018)
La Sub-región Diquís de la Región Gran Chiriquí posee a la fecha un total de 1.595 registros de sitios arqueológicos documentados en la Base de Datos Orígenes del Museo Nacional de Costa Rica. El presente trabajo expone los resultados logrados al aplicar un análisis geoespacial diseñado para conocer la distribución de dichos depósitos arqueológicos, en un contexto fisiográfico modelado para tal efecto mediante sistemas de información geográfica (SIG), que permite aproximarse a las...
Aportes a la Interpretación Arqueológica de la Zona Sur en Honduras. (2018)
Los departamentos de Choluteca y El Paraíso al sur de Honduras cuentan con un escaso registro arqueológico de asentamientos prehispánicos y coloniales. El desconocimiento de su historia deriva constantes saqueos y destrucción arqueológica, alterando el patrimonio cultural y generando un vacío histórico a las comunidades aledañas a estos sitios arqueológicos, desvinculándolas con su pasado. El Proyecto Arqueológico El Paraíso y Choluteca (PAPCH) comienza en el año 2016 como parte de los procesos...
The Apparent Resilience of the Dry Tropical Forests of the Nicaraguan Region of the Central American Dry Corridor to Extreme Variations in Climate over the Last c.1200 Years (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Reconstructing the Political Organization of Pre-Columbian Nicaragua" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Central American dry corridor is currently and has historically been the most densely populated area of the Central American Isthmus and is subject to the greatest covariance in precipitation between seasons. The vegetation of this region was typically composed of dry tropical forests, which are suggested to be...
The Archaeofaunal Dimension of Preceramic Human-Environment Dynamics in the Highlands of Southwestern Honduras (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of the Preceramic period (ca. 11,000–5,000 cal BP) in Mesoamerica has focused on the transition from a foraging way of life toward agriculture, plant domestication, and sedentism. Yet we know little about the processes and contexts that drove this transition, particularly the relationship between foragers and animal prey. In this paper I present...
Archaeology in and with Museums: A Case Study from Honduras (2018)
Archaeology in the US is undergoing a series of transformations, emphasizing community engaged scholarship, new research questions of contemporary relevance dealing with such things as resilience, social memory, and production of historical identity, and a shift towards non-invasive methods and intensive analyses of smaller samples from more limited excavations. Yet the normative vision of archaeological research still is original excavation of a site selected purposively to answer a question,...
The Archaeology of Travel in Greater Nicoya (2018)
Sometime before AD 1, a dynamic interaction and exchange network developed among the villages and hamlets of Greater Nicoya. The range and frequency of trade within this region is demonstrated by geochemically sourced ceramic and stone artifacts. The travel routes along which these artifacts were traded remain poorly understood. Geographic information systems (GIS) offer a means to predictively model the optimal terrestrial and aquatic travel routes that interconnected the settlements of Greater...
Architecture of Pre-Columbian Northeast Honduras (2018)
In 2017, the postclassic settlement of Guadalupe on the north-east coast of Honduras revealed remnants of wattle and daub (bajareque) constructions. This was an important finding as information on precolonial architecture in north-east Honduras has been scant, due not only to the low number of archeological investigations in the area, but to the use of highly perishable materials in these constructions. Despite this, recent ethnographic reports have provided indispensable information about...
Arquitectura Habitacional: Sistema Constructivo y Organización Espacial en el Sitio Finca 6, Delta del Diquís, Costa Rica (2018)
El Delta del Diquís en el sureste de Costa Rica se ha postulado como un centro diferenciado en la producción de bienes (cerámica, oro, esculturas de piedra) durante el Periodo Chiriquí (800 – 1550 d.C.) como parte de una sociedad jerárquica. La arquitectura y la configuración interna que presentan los sitios reflejan manifestaciones particulares donde destaca la construcción de montículos de tierra compactada con mampostería de cantos rodados y ornamentación de rocas calizas. Las estructuras...
Assessing Agricultural Intensification in Greater Chiriquí during the Aguas Buenas Period (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Aguas Buenas (roughly 300 BC–AD 900) was a period characterized by the growth of small villages and the development of identifiable settlement hierarchies in certain areas. This paper applies a variant of the site catchment analysis originally articulated by Steponaitis (1981) to evaluate the relationship between...
Authorship and Practice in Guatemalan Archaeology through an Intersectional Lens (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond Leaky Pipelines: Exploring Gender Inequalities in Archaeological Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This intersectional study explores gender and nationality in the production and dissemination of knowledge in Guatemalan archaeology. We examine publication trends in the memoirs of Guatemala’s annual archaeology symposium between 1990 and 2019. As the country’s main venue of dissemination of archaeological...
Aventura’s Households from Commoners to Elites (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Household archaeology provides a powerful lens to understand people, their daily lives, and the myriad social, political, economic, and environmental relations that link people, households, and communities to broader societies. For its first decade of research, the Aventura Archaeology Project conducted a study...
Bioarchaeological Analysis of Preclassic Human Remains Recovered from a Lime Kiln, El Mirador, 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. This paper presents the preliminary findings pertaining to the exhumation and bioarchaeological examination of a collection of Preclassic period human remains recovered from a lime kiln in El Mirador Basin, Guatemala. The disarticulated and fragmented skeletal remains of nine individuals were compressed into a...
The Bioarchaeology of Greater Chiriquí: Challenges, Finds, and Future Directions (2018)
Greater Chiriquí, the pre-Columbian cultural sphere encompassing western Panama and southern Costa Rica, has been subjected to intense looting activities since the mid-19th century. Nevertheless, archaeological exploration of the area to date has successfully contextualized the nature and transitions of non-perishable material culture. However, organic remains rarely survive in funerary contexts due to the high acidity of the soil, high humidity, and high precipitation in this region. Human...
Botanical Resources in Ancient Costa Rican Cloud Forests (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Tropical Montane Cloud Forests" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paleoethnobotanical investigations at domestic contexts in Arenal, Costa Rica, reveal the plant resources utilized by past peoples living in a tropical montane cloud forest setting. Macrobotanical remains recovered through horizontal excavations of household structures at G-995 La Chiripa and G-164 Sitio Bolivar and flotation of soil...
Broadscale Machine Learning Model for Archaeological Feature Detection in the Maya Area (2023)
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Comprehensive maps of ancient structures across the Maya area of Central America can help archaeologists to deepen knowledge of past settlement patterns and regional interactions, potentially leading to enhanced understanding of thousands of years of Maya civilization. However, most Maya archaeological sites are not...
Buried Soils and Human-Environment Interactions within the Three Rivers Region of Northwest Belize (2023)
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper reports on recent excavations from the Birds of Paradise wetland field complex where we studied an ancient ancillary structure situated among wetland fields along the lower Rio Bravo of northwest Belize. Here we synthesize previous studies from this broader wetland field complex that includes...
The Central American Ceramics Research Project: A Case Study on How to Make Old Museum Collections Relevant Again (2018)
The Central American Ceramics Research Project, a student driven and collaborative research program carried out between 2009-2013, completed a scholarly survey of more than 13,000 ceramic objects in the collections of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). The project originated as an effort to update old catalog information and bring to light important but largely forgotten collections of ceramics. However, it quickly developed into a major collaborative research effort that brought...
Ceramics Inside and Out: Food, Style, and Identity in Coastal Northeastern Honduras during the Selin Period (AD 300–1000) (2018)
Prehispanic populations of northeastern Honduras were positioned at the border of Mesoamerica and Lower Central America. Previous research on ceramic style suggests local affiliation shifted over time from north to south as part of an adept strategy to navigate the complex political and social landscape of the region through the promotion of an inclusive group identity. This study explores the actual implementation of that strategy by investigating communal feasting contexts where symbolically...
Communities of Engaged Performance: Investigating Soundscapes and the Sonorous Past (2018)
The relationship between individuals and urban soundscapes can tell us about the personhood and sonic practices of people in the past. To reconstruct the interaction between a musician and audience in archaeological contexts, I introduce a novel theoretical framework called ‘communities of engaged performance’ (CEP). CEP is defined as the transmission of knowledge through performance resulting in variable group-specific sound practices. CEP is derived and builds upon theories of ‘communities of...