Mesoamerica: Maya lowlands (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dmitri Beliaev. Monica De Leon Antillon. Sergey Vepretskiy. Camilo Luin.

This is an abstract from the "At the Interface the Use of Archaeology and Texts in Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Encanto is a peripherical site (frequently classified as a 'minor center') northeast from the Ancient Maya metropolis of Tikal. It is famous because of the stela with hieroglyphic inscription dated to AD 305-308 and mentioning the king Siyaj Chan K'awil I. Previously Simon Martin suggested that the stela originally stood...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Huchim.

This is an abstract from the "La Restauración de Monumentos Prehispánicos en México: Principios, Práctica, y Visión al Futuro" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sin lugar a duda Uxmal fue el sitio más importante de la región Puuc desde el siglo VIII hasta el X. Cuenta con un área amurallada de 2.6 km2, en los que se distribuyen 11 grupos de arquitectura monumental. A principios del siglo XX la lógica de conservación fue intervenir los edificios que...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cynthia Robin.

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. Urban households anchor the first decade of research at the Maya site of Aventura, Belize, situating the daily lives of the city’s heterogenous residents. They also illuminate social, political, economic, and environmental factors that enhanced life in the community. Summarizing research results of the Aventura...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cynthia Robin.

This is an abstract from the "Advancing Public Perceptions of Sustainability through Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As over half of the world lives in cities today, there is perhaps no more pressing question than: how can people create cities that are sustainable? Archaeology is uniquely suited to answer questions about the longevity of cities, because archaeologists excavate long expanses of human history. The social, political,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kacey Grauer.

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. Water was essential for the longevity of ancient Maya cities, and Aventura was no exception. The site’s watery landscape consists of pocket bajos, defined as karstic depressions less than 2 km2 in area. While they are seasonally inundated today, this paper presents data from excavation, oral histories, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bernadette Cap. M. Kathryn Brown. Whitney Lytle.

The ancient Maya formalized avenues of movement between and within urban centers through the construction of sacbeob that both defined space and connected places on the landscape. In this paper, we discuss the ways in which a formally constructed sacbe at Xunantunich functioned as an axis connecting economic and ritual activities. The architectural arrangement of Classic Xunantunich emphasizes a north/south directionality. The site’s sacbe, however, was constructed on an east/west alignment....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam King. Terry Powis. Sheldon Skaggs. Christina Luke. Nilesh Gaikwad.

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we discuss our recent absorbed residue study of a marble Ulúa style vase found at the Pacbitun site in Belize. In that study, we detected evidence for the consumption of the ritual drink balché dating to Terminal Classic period (800–850 CE). Consumption of balché is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorraine Williams-Beck.

In the geographic heartlands of the Yucatan Peninsula, academic literature describes the Chenes region as an "archaeological province" with a particular regional cultural character, in which sculpted monuments with glyphs or ballcourts are scarce components in urban systems, and even less frequent in most monumental cores. To date only three ballcourts had been recorded. After field seasons in 2016 and 2017 I confirm another example in Tabasqueño, the only site also to exhibit a free-standing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dmitri Beliaev. Alexandre Tokovinine. Milan Kovác.

During the 2017 field season of the Uaxactun Archaeological project new monument was excavated at Buena Vista, a minor center at Uaxactun urban periphery. It is a small carved altar or ballcourt marker, which according to its style dates to the Early Classic. High quality of the carving and the hieroglyphic inscription indicates that the altar/marker itself was a part of the monumental corpus of Uaxactun urban core; uncomplete text provides important new information on the dynastic history of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Traci Ardren.

This is an abstract from the "Textile Tools and Technologies as Evidence for the Fiber Arts in Precolumbian Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While bark cloth and paper are well known in the ethnographic and artistic records of Pacific and African cultures, due to preservation concerns these important plant based products have been challenging to investigate in the precolumbian cultures of the New World. Often our only proxy for bark...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Webster.

BECAN RECONSIDERED -- Joe Ball’s early career centered strongly on Becan, which during the early 1970’s figured prominently in many interpretations of Classic Maya society and culture history. The initial Becan research predated our effective understanding of Maya inscriptions, the large-scale conflicts and alliances that affected the southern lowlands, and also the now-widespread data for climate change and the Classic "collapse". Because of its lack of inscriptions Becan has been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angélica Márquez-Osuna.

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the role of the stingless bee Melipona beecheii in nineteenth-century Yucatán and shows how the rise of the hacienda system played a contingent role in reshaping beekeeping practices and human-bee relationships. Using primary sources such as beekeeping manuals and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabrielle Vail. Maia Dedrick.

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In her article “Saving the Other Bees,” Eve Bratman (2020) explores the successful reintroduction of beekeeping practices associated with the stingless species Melipona beecheii in the Yucatán Peninsula, which has resulted in the species thriving following near extinction. She...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcello Canuto. Tomás Barrientos. Francisco Saravia. Alejandra Gonzalez. Jocelyne Ponce.

This is an abstract from the "The Rise and Apogee of the Classic Maya Kaanu’l Hegemonic State at Dzibanche" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By examining archaeological and epigraphic evidence from the northwestern Peten during the Classic period, we can gain valuable insights into the strategies used by the Kaanul dynasts to establish and maintain a unique regional hegemony in the Maya Lowlands. We focus on the site of La Corona where we have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Rosenswig. Keith Prufer.

This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 10,000 years before ceramics first appear is the longest epoch in the human occupation of Belize, and yet the least understood. Many fundamental cultural developments are first documented in what is now known as the Maya region, including management of tropical forest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Newman.

This is an abstract from the "Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The practice of human sacrifice is one of the defining traits of ancient Mesoamerica, at least according to the modern imagination. But painted objects, carvings, and codices reveal that nonhuman animals often served as sacrificial victims as well. Were some classes or species of animals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Dunning. Armando Anaya Hernández. Jeffrey Brewer. Christopher Carr. Nicolaus Seefeld.

This is an abstract from the "New and Emerging Perspectives on the Bajo el Laberinto Region of the Maya Lowlands, Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Elevated Interior Region of the Maya Lowlands, including the area surrounding the sprawling Bajo el Laberinto, faced acute water availability issues that necessitated the annual capture and storage of rain water to support urbanization. Two large urban areas dominate ancient Maya settlement...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colleen O'Brien. Sheldon Smith. Nicole DeFrancisco.

Archaeologists have argued for numerous functions of the bench features found throughout the Maya world ranging from utilitarian to ritual. During the 2017 field season at the Late Classic site of La Obra, excavations of a centrally-located structure revealed a bench standing approximately 50 centimeters from the structure floor and extending out approximately 150 centimeters from its northern wall. La Obra is a hilltop production site located approximately one kilometer northwest of the central...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Byron Smith. Timothy Beach. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Growing scholarship since the 1980s has focused on ancient Maya–wetland interactions after raised field agriculture was revealed in northern Belize. From this, mounting evidence indicates extensive reliance on seasonal and perennial wetlands for ancient Maya farming, aquaculture, and water retention across the region. These systems would have served as major...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fernando Flores Esquivel.

This is an abstract from the "New and Emerging Perspectives on the Bajo el Laberinto Region of the Maya Lowlands, Part 2" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient city of Calakmul was the locus of important human developments throughout a period of no less than fifteen centuries, during which various social groups, ruling houses and urban palimpsests followed one another, and sometimes coexisted, until its definitive abandonment. Nowadays, lidar...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Flavio Silva De La Mora.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation centers on the daily life of Maya commoners from the Classic Maya site of Chinikihá in Chiapas, Mexico. The excavations are part of a regional effort to understand rural communities and social complexity. The presentation will offer an intimate view of the materiality of the daily life of non-elite groups from a domestic context, offering a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Brewer. Nicholas Dunning. Shane Montgomery. Nicolaus Seefeld. Christopher Carr.

This is an abstract from the "New and Emerging Perspectives on the Bajo el Laberinto Region of the Maya Lowlands, Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Calakmul is known to be one of the largest ancient Maya urban centers in the Elevated Interior Region of the Maya Lowlands. Thus, it is not surprising that in this water-challenged environment, the population of Calakmul invested in some of the region’s grandest reservoirs. While limited...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Horvey Palacios. J. Marla Toyne. Michael Callaghan. Brigitte Kovacevich.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Maya area, bioarchaeological and mortuary analysis can help identify patterns of mortuary ritual and social experience of past peoples. However, there is very little bioarchaeological and mortuary evidence for the developing complexity and social experience of the Preclassic period. Major ceremonial centers like Naranjo, Tikal, and Yaxha surround...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Patterson.

Analysis of human skeletal remains has made significant contributions to the understanding of the history of La Corona and its interaction with the wider Maya world. The skeletal sample has now grown to include nearly thirty individuals, and includes single and multiples burials, non-burial deposits, and individuals from the site center and outlying sites. The study, one of the most comprehensive in northwest Peten, has focused on establishing demographic information and examining osteological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Hannigan. Shintaro Suzuki. Felipe Trabanino. Boris Beltran.

Micro and macroscopic bioarchaeological analyses enable archaeologists to generate biological profiles of past individuals, including characteristics such as diet, sex, age, occupational stress, pathologies, and social status, among others. In this paper, we discuss the significance of a Maya individual by constructing a biological profile from both micro and macroscopic analyses. The individual of interest was excavated during the 2012 field season at Xultún, Guatemala in a patio situated in...