Central America and Northern South America (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Geurds.

This is an abstract from the "The Problem of the Monument: Widening Perspectives on Monumentality in the Archaeology of the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Isthmo-Colombian Area entails an archaeology of landscape engagement. Well-attested are the material traces of shifting networks of human ideas that, through communities of practice, led to the creation of monumental landscapes and, with regional specificity, shared...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josefina Vasquez Pazmino.

This is an abstract from the "Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The oral tradition of the Chilla landscape distinguishes two main stories: the first one portrays the apparition of the Virgin Mary, and the second one narrates the Mayan origins of its inhabitants. However, Chilla is in El Oro province, where a monumental pyramid and other neighboring sites correspond to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Plew. Louisa Daggers.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology on the Edge(s): Transitions, Boundaries, Changes, and Causes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To assess Holocene dietary changes we conducted isotopic analysis of human and faunal remains from seven shell mounds in Northwestern Guyana. We used stable carbon 13C and oxygen 18O isotope compositions data to assess the degree of dietary constancy as a proxy for determining the likelihood of there being any...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Figueroa.

The physical landscape of Honduras was and continues to be home to a diverse group of indigenous groups, each with distinct cultural traditions, artistic styles, and sociopolitical configurations. In prehistory, this landscape was imbued with cultural meaning in a variety of ways, from the monumental to the perishable. This paper presents and discusses what we know about the rock art of central and southern Honduras, which contains a variety of iconographic rock art styles within a very limited...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chad Rankle. Hector Neff. Virginie Renson. Gina Buckley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Migration and mobility have long been topics of interest in Nicaraguan prehistory, but research addressing these inquiries in the Greater Nicoya has relied primarily on linguistic analyses and the comparison of artifact typologies. Archaeological science is increasingly benefiting from the use of strontium isotope analysis as a proxy for mobility and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Payson Sheets.

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. Small sedentary villages were established by about 4,000 years ago in the Arenal area of Costa Rica. The egalitarian nature of internal organization continued until the Spanish conquest, with no evidence of significant inequality developing, socially, economically, religiously, or politically. However, they were subjected to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zoe Rawski.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last decade, the Mopan Valley Preclassic Project has extensively investigated the Preclassic ceremonial center of Early Xunantunich, Belize. These excavations have yielded significant information regarding the construction of monumental architecture during the Middle and Late Preclassic periods, as well as data regarding early ritual activities and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only María Martínez-Polanco. Florent Rivals.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cervids in Neotropics played a vital role in precolumbian subsistence strategies. The study of deer remains from archaeological sites, particularly their teeth, as biomarkers offers information about their behavior, environment, feeding preferences, and important events in their life history and by extension to the human groups that could...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carly Pope.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For several thousand years before the arrival of Spanish explorers in 1502, Bocas del Toro, Panama, was home to numerous vibrant cultures. However, this area has seen only sporadic archaeological study over the past century. While surveys and excavations have revealed several multi-period settlements, with complex, multiphase ceramic assemblages, Bocas del...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juan Fernandez Diaz. Anna Cohen. Christopher T. Fisher. Ramesh Shrestha. Alicia M. Gonzalez.

In response to the widespread destruction caused by Hurricane Mitch in 1998, the US Geological Survey conducted an extensive survey of 15 modern cities in Honduras. This 2000 survey was carried out by the Bureau of Economic Geology of the University of Texas, and the resultant data were used to generate flood risk maps. The survey also produced the first lidar data collection of a Maya site; however, in the early 2000s, lidar algorithms were not capable of performing the same tasks as today. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Fitzgerald-Bernal. Alvaro Brizuela-Casimir. Freddy Rodriguez-Saza.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. New interpretations of Precolumbian Panamanian archaeological sequences and regions are provided. Results from ancient DNA (aDNA) analyses of remains from the site of Panamá Viejo, Panamá, are compared with a multiple burial found in the vicinity of La Pintada in Coclé, Panamá. The Panamá Viejo materials are classified as haplogroup A2 and include...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Palumbo.

The Bolas region presents one of the earliest steps toward the monumentality and complex social patterns that characterize later World Heritage sites in Greater Chiriquí. The forces and factors associated with these social changes remain incompletely understood. This paper shares the results from recent shovel test survey in the Bolas region and offers observations on broad social trends from the Formative period onward. Particular attention is paid to Mosca, another large and monumental site in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Debora Trein. Thomas Hart.

Terrace construction for agriculture was integral to the survival and growth of ancient Maya centers in the Lowland Neotropics. Terraces supplied communities with food for consumption and trade, materials for construction and goods production, and plants of medicinal and ritual significance. Research into ancient Maya agricultural practices has been largely situated in wetlands contexts, known to be sites of extensive landscape modification for agricultural purposes. Nevertheless, terraces are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sergio García Piedra.

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. El Museo del Jade y de la Cultura Precolombina del Instituto Nacional de Seguros, exhibe 2040 piezas arqueológicas de piedras verdes (*jades). A pesar de la limitada información contextual, posee un gran potencial para comprender la manufactura y uso de los colgantes de piedras verdes en Costa Rica. A partir de la última...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Powell. Zachary Hruby.

This is an abstract from the "The Pre-Columbian Cultures of Honduras after AD 900" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The rather diminutive site of Rio Amarillo, located to the north of the Copan city center, is well known as a subsidiary site that was somehow involved in the movement of goods between the Motagua and Copan Valleys. After the collapse of the Copan Dynasty, large civic-ceremonial structures were abandoned and the people that remained,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriel Wrobel. Shawn Morton.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As if by default, deposits of human remains in caves and cenotes in the southern Maya Lowlands dating to the Late and Terminal Classic periods have been interpreted by many archaeologists as sacrificial victims. The position seems predicated on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Geurds.

Authenticating relations are defined by artisanship, temporality, value-making and ethnographic authority. These relations are visible in contemporary museum settings as well as in the art world as such, and may be particularly poignant in the case of the Caribbean and Central America with its diverse manifestations of emotive styles and materials such as wood and stone. Historically deep and widespread, 19th and 20th century Central American trafficking of pre-Columbian things was tied to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Hoopes. Geoffrey McCafferty. Sharisse McCafferty.

This is an abstract from the "Postclassic Mesoamerica: The View from the Southern Frontier" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnohistoric documents pertaining to the Greater Nicoya archaeological subarea document legends in which the inhabitants of western Nicaragua and northwestern Costa Rica traced their ancestry to migrations from the north, presumably in Mexico. Linguistic data indicate that speakers of Chorotega, an Oto-Manguean language, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Lohse. Mike McBride. Sébastien Perrot-Minnot. Sergio Ayala. Victoria Pagano.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent findings have come to light from previously reported but poorly known preceramic deposits from near the village of August Pine Ridge, Belize, Central America. Years of sand quarrying have led to the recovery of hundreds of artifacts representing the entire known preceramic sequence from Central America. Present are fluted bifaces as well as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Silvia Gonzalez. David Huddart. Isabel Israde Alcantara. Gabriela Dominguez Vazquez.

During the last 20 years we have studied systematically several important Paleoindian sites from Central Mexico doing detailed stratigraphic studies, paleoenvironmental reconstructions (pollen, diatoms, tephra studies) and radiocarbon dating. The sites include: Peñon Woman III skeleton, Santa Isabel Iztapan Mammoths with associated lithics, Tlapacoya Man Skull, Tocuila Mammoths, Tequixquiac Late Pleistocene Fossils and Tepexpan Man Skeleton. We present here a general model of strong...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Sharpe. Nicole Smith-Guzmán. Luis Sánchez-Herrera. Diana Carvajal Contreras. Ilean Isaza Aizpurúa.

This is an abstract from the "Unraveling the Mysteries of the Isthmo-Colombian Area’s Past: A Symposium in Honor of Archaeologist Richard Cooke and His Contributions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the late 1980s, the Panama authorities became aware of extensive looting outside the modern city of La Villa de Los Santos. By the time archaeologists had been called to investigate, the area around the hill known locally as Cerro Juan Díaz resembled...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Lawrence. Cathy Costin. Kathleen Marsaglia. Michael Love. Hector Neff.

The Middle Preclassic (900-600 BCE) was a critical time of political and social centralization in the Guatemalan lowlands. Of particular interest is La Blanca, one of the first polities to rise and show signs of regional influence and potential urbanization. To reconstruct everyday life I am using excavated ceramic refuse to observe dynamics surrounding three households. This, in turn, elucidates elements of La Blanca’s political economy associated with the manufacturing and production of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marie Kolbenstetter.

This is an abstract from the "The Problem of the Monument: Widening Perspectives on Monumentality in the Archaeology of the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Grooved boulders seem to be an archaeological feature unique to El Tigre island in Honduras. Distributed around the small island, they are known locally as piedras rayadas, and feature in local oral histories. As durable traces, their meaning is everchanging, yet...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey McCafferty.

Ethnoshitorical sources describe migrations from central Mexico of Nahuat and Mangue speakers, known as the Pipil/Nicarao and the Chorotega, who settled along the Pacific Coast of Central America in the centuries prior to European contact. According to these accounts the new groups introduced cultural and religious traits into settlements in El Salvador, the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, and northwestern Costa Rica. Beginning in 2000, archaeologists from the University of Calgary have investigated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sheldon Skaggs. Adam King. Christina Luke. George Micheletti. Terry Powis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Late Classic Period (550–800 CE) at Pacbitun, a sequence of events took place that changed the landscape of power and sacredness in the site’s core during a tumultuous time in the Belize River Valley. The sequence of caches and burials likely began in order to consecrate a new courtyard (Court 3) and establish the new center of power at the site....