Central America and Northern South America (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Venicia Slotten.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leila Character. Tim Beach. Takeshi Inomata. Thomas Garrison. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Byron Smith. Lara Sanchez-Morales. Samantha Krause. Timothy Beach. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valentine Wauters. Aurore Mathys.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological collection of the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels gathers more than 377 pre-Columbian objects from Ecuador. Among these are twenty wind musical instruments (flutes and ocarinas) in ceramic from the Carchi-Nariño culture. These objects, which joined the collections in the 1990s, had remained dormant in the museum’s storage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Benitez.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Whitney Goodwin.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Bruhns.

This is an abstract from the "Centralizing Central America: New Evidence, Fresh Perspectives, and Working on New Paradigms" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cihuatan, El Salvador, appears to have been the southeasternmost Maya city. Dating to the Early Postclassic, it shows clearly the internationalizing tendencies of the time period in its ceramics. Although most are local versions of widespread Early Postclassic Mesoamerican types (or actually...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ana Navas-Méndez. Brandi MacDonald. Daniel Pierce.

This is an abstract from the "Materials in Movement in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present the results of an exploratory pigment characterization of the Mendoza and Cortezo Red-Buff ceramics. These ceramic styles produced from CE 1300 until the first part of the Spanish colonization tend to appear in association (Mendoza-Cortezo complex). Mendoza, distinguished for the ceramic plates decorated with polychrome...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Palumbo.

This is an abstract from the "Centralizing Central America: New Evidence, Fresh Perspectives, and Working on New Paradigms" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation explores interpretations of past Indigenous political complexity in the Isthmo-Colombian Area. The paper argues that a preoccupation with hierarchy carries unforeseen consequences for the epistemology of the area and proposes a critique; that the various societies of the area...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucy Gill. Natalia Donner.

This is an abstract from the "Centralizing Central America: New Evidence, Fresh Perspectives, and Working on New Paradigms" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past three decades, archaeologists and Indigenous communities throughout the Americas have developed varied approaches to collaborative archaeological research. In North America, where there is some legislative recognition of Indigenous sovereignty over cultural heritage, such...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katrina Kosyk.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ana Navas-Méndez. Daniel Pierce. Mary Ownby. Brandi MacDonald. Michael D. Glascock.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper deals with the production of Panamanian majolica in comparison with other colonial ceramics. Chemical and mineralogical characterization show the use of a distinctive recipe for the production of this colonial ware. These results are consistent with previous interpretations that imply the community of potters controlled the production of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Forward.

The city-state of Minanha, located in west central Belize, reached its zenith and most culturally complex stage by the Late Classic period, 675-810 AD. Only a century later, its royal court had "collapsed". Contreras Valley is a small farming community in the settlement region of Minanha. Decades of research at Minanha and the analysis of artifact frequencies from commoner households allows for a better understanding of the the intra- and inter-community social practices occurring at the site of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roberto Herrera. Francisco Corrales.

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 development of precontact social hierarchy in southern Central America is a subject open to debate. For the Aguas Buenas period (300 BC–AD 800) of the Greater Chiriquí archaeological region, new data at the regional level (Costa Rica, Panama) indicate the appearance of centers with architectural complexity after AD 400. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ana Navas.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Panama, as in other regions of the Caribbean and Latin America, several archaeologists have reported the presence of colonial utilitarian wares, also known as Colono-Indian ware, creole ware, and coarse hand-made earthenware. Previous research on this ware focuses on refining the typologies and identifying traits that could be related to African, Spanish,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Brokaw. Sheila Ward.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part I" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Some archaeologists believe that a key to the success of ancient Maya civilization was sophisticated tailoring of agriculture and forestry to varied environments. Some archaeologists and ecologists also think that ancient forestry is reflected in the tree species composition of modern forests. Based on studies in northwest Belize we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. Jeffrey Frost.

Chiriquí Period (700-1500 CE) archaeological sites have been the subject of systematic scientific research for more than 50 years. However, archaeologists are only recently beginning to define and understand regional and temporal variations in artistic styles, settlement patterns, and village organization.  In this paper, I summarize emerging patterns in village placement, cemetery organization, and the construction of public space. Continuities in the elements of constructed spaces, such as the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Hoopes.

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. Richard Cooke's pioneering studies in zooarchaeology of the Neotropics have redefined the way that archaeologists, art historians, ethnohistorians, and ethnographers utilize data from faunal remains, not only in the reconstruction of past environments,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Ranere.

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. The PSM was a multidisciplinary project in Central Pacific Panama with the major fieldwork carried out during the years 1981 through 1986. The goals of the proposed research were to identify the relationships between settlement types and subsistence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia Ochoa-Winemiller.

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. This paper focuses on the regional role that two artisan communities, Chichicaste and Dos Quebradas, played as producers of pottery and obsidian blades within regional exchange networks. Chichicaste pottery has been recovered from many Honduran sites as well as from El Salvador and northern Nicaragua. The wide distribution of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Waka Kuboyama.

The "axe-god" jade pendants form the majority of Costa Rican jade artifacts. These pendants were valued for their "celt like shape" and did not function as real axes. Interestingly, some pendants do have abrasions on their axe edges. Because of that, it has been proposed that prior to being reworked into a corporal accessory, some of these pendants had been used as real axes or other tools. The "axe-god" pendants consist of two parts; the superior part with decoration of human or animals, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Bauer. Olivia Navarro-Farr.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological research on problematic deposits has provided a generic category for otherwise unexplainable bodies of evidence for ritual activity. This research focuses on data from two similarly constituted problematic deposits in the Maya area, one very well known from the North Acropolis at Tikal, and one lesser known from civic ceremonial structure M13-1...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fabiana María Martin. Francisco Juan Prevosti. Luis Alberto Borrero.

Cueva Nordensjkold is a cave located in the Cerro Benitez, at Ultima Esperanza, Chile, above 150 masl, and accordingly beyond the highest stand of the Late Glacial Consuelo paleolake. The study of its Late Pleistocene faunal remains -Mylodontinae, Hippidion saldiasi, Camelidae, Panthera onca mesembrina and a large undetermined carnivore- is crucial for the understanding of the process of biological colonization of the Cerro Benitez area, where ephemeral Late Pleistocene human occupations were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Franziska Fecher. Markus Reindel. Peter Fux.

The Postclassic settlement of Guadalupe is located on the northeastern coast of Honduras, near Trujillo. With its location inside the interaction sphere between Mesoamerica, Lower Central America and the Caribbean, it lies within a culturally dynamic region that has received influences from various areas during different times. With respect to the Postclassic period, it has been demonstrated that access and distribution patterns of resources and goods changed and new networks of interaction...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Hansell.

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. The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama has become a key repository for archaeological materials collected within the country over the past 50 years. A number of these collections are also currently housed outside of the country at...