Mesoamerica: Maya lowlands (Geographic Keyword)
726-750 (1,004 Records)
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...
Processional Architecture at Chan Chich, Belize (2018)
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...
Production and Use of Lime for Preclassic Architecture and Causeway Construction in the Mirador Karstic Basin (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. 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...
Prospección arqueológica en la Ciudad de Mérida, Yucatán: Consecuencias y oportunidades de la colaboración entre el Laboratorio de Prospección Arqueológica, el Municipio de Mérida y la Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán (2024)
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...
Provisioning the Household: Exploring Domestic Economic Integration within Two Lowland Maya Communities (2018)
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...
Public Architecture and Space at Actuncan (2018)
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...
Public Spaces and Polity Making in Maya Hinterland Communities: A Case Study from San Lorenzo, Belize (2018)
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...
Pulling it Together: Collecting, Collating, and Analyzing Quantitative Data from Written Reports using R (2024)
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...
Quality of Life Changes in an Ancient Maya Community: Longitudinal Perspectives from Altar de Sacrificios, Guatemala (2018)
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...
Quarrying, Cutting, and Shaping: A Look into the Lives of Ancient Maya Limestone Producers (2019)
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...
The Question of Sacrifice: Examining Maya Mortuary Practices through the Lens of Midnight Terror Cave (2021)
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...
Questioning “Centralization”: Ritual, Minor Temple Complexes and Social Integration at Ceibal, Guatemala (2024)
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...
Rags and Riches: Wealth Inequality at Late Classic Uxul, Campeche (2019)
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...
Raised Field Agriculture in the Maya Lowlands: Archaeobotanical Remains from Birds of Paradise (2018)
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...
Re-dissecting an Old Friend: Looking Back at the Evidence of Kiuic’s First Court (2024)
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...
A Re-evaluation of Yotholin Pattern-Burnished: Evidence of Early Preclassic Ceramics? (2018)
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...
Re-excavating Xno’ha: Aligning Maya Architecture across Seven Years of Archaeological Research (2019)
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...
Recent Archaeological Work in the Kingdom of Sak Tz’i’ and the Santo Domingo-Lacanja Valley (2023)
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...
Recent Building Excavations in the Triple-Courtyard "Palace" Group at the Ancient Maya Site of Pacbitun, Belize (2018)
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...
Recent Investigations of Maya Archaeological Site Looting in Petén, Guatemala (2023)
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...
Recent Investigations of War, Economy, and Population at Piedras Negras, Guatemala (2018)
This paper presents a synthesis of current results from the 2016 - 2017 research seasons at Piedras Negras, Guatemala with implications for understanding warfare, economy, politics, and population dynamics throughout the ancient kingdom. First, while project members had identified a series of fortified centers and palisades in the region’s hinterlands, the recent identification of fortifications in the near periphery of Piedras Negras makes it one of the rare polity capitals in the southern...
Recent Remote Sensing and Digital Documentation at Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this poster, we present the results of a program of remote sensing and the digital documentation of the art and architecture of the Maya site of Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico. An aerial lidar survey performed in 2014 has aided in creating a more accurate map of the site. Detailed photogrammetry and ground-based liar, performed in the area open for tourism,...
Recent Research on the Formative and Early Classic Periods in the Yaxhom Valley, Yucatán (2018)
Previous investigations by the Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project demonstrated that the Valle de Yaxhom, in the Puuc region of Yucatan, was a significant locus of monumental construction during the latter Middle Formative and early Late Formative. Two large acropoli, the Acropolis Yaxhom and the Acropolis Lakin, were previously mapped and tested, but the nature of accompanying residential construction remained unknown. Two other sites with megalithic architecture, Nucuchtunich and Nohoch...
Reconceptualizing Chichen Itza: The Gran Acuífero Maya Project (2018)
During the summer of 2017, the Gran Aquífero Maya (GAM) project initiated an investigation at Chichen Itza designed to define the site around its aquatic resources. The project is based on my previous work at Cenote Holtun, located 1.6 miles west of Chichen Itza, which found that a line drawn between Holtun and Cenote Kanjuyum on the east pasted through the center of El Castillo. It has long been known that El Castillo is bisected by a line drawn between the Sacred Cenote on the north and the...
Reconfiguring Communities in the Postclassic at Aventura (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. Recent excavations have revealed that Postclassic Aventura was a very different place: both reverentially remembered and a home. In this paper, we review the evidence for human activity during the Postclassic period at Aventura. From identifications of Late Postclassic incensario fragments in surface material...