Mesoamerica: Eastern (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucas Martindale Johnson. Adrian Chase.

This is an abstract from the "The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Household and city scales are typical units of archaeological analysis at Maya sites. More recent models of urban space include intermediate scales referred to as “neighborhoods” that encompass clusters of households and “districts” that effectively integrate neighborhoods. Using flaked stone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maline Werness-Rude. Kaylee Spencer.

Ancient Maya architecture tends to follow predictable patterns. Many structures have a single, clear façade, for instance, conceptualized as a literal face. Northern sites, with their toothy-jawed monster buildings, express this idea with particular directness. Stairways and sculptural adjuncts, like altars and stelae, are integral elements that contribute to the idea of facing, both literally and metaphorically, and, as such, are critical to the visual identity of many Maya sites. With a few...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vera Tiesler.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most Eastern Mesoamerican populations are known for their remarkable diversity and sophistication in dental works and head shaping procedures during the Classic period. Here, these permanently inscribed body modifications have come to light in thousands...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Waldo. Samantha Lorenz. Toni Gonzales.

Mul Ch’en Witz (Hill with Many Caves) was first excavated in the summer of 2017 by the Contested Caves Archaeological Project (CCAP), a subproject of the Three Rivers Archaeological Project (TRAP). The area, located just below the escarpment on which the core architecture of the ancient site of La Milpa, Belize is situated, was chosen for excavation because of the high density of chultunes encountered within a restricted area. The chultunes have similar entrance styles and diameters, and five of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Brady.

At the 1985 Maya Ceramic Workshop, Arthur Demarest noted the intense interest in the Protoclassic. Indeed, ceramists with only a mammiform support and a handful of sherds would pause to speculate on the significance of a statistically insignificant number of sherds. During the 1990s, Joseph Ball and I doggedly worked to reexamine every aspect of the Protoclassic issue. Aided by contributions of a number of colleagues, the resulting document attempted to strip the Protoclassic of association...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Coltman.

This is an abstract from the "The Rollout Keepers: Papers on Maya Ceramic Texts, Scenes, and Styles in Honor of Justin and Barbara Kerr" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is hard to overstate the rich intellectual benefits that iconographers and epigraphers have been given through the lens of Justin Kerr’s remarkable Maya Vase Database. It not only brought to light a world of gods, rulers, courts, and vivid bestiary but also revealed complex...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Sullivan. Ronald L. Bishop. Elizabeth H. Paris.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Classic through Postclassic transition in Central Chiapas, c. 750-900 AD, was a time of dynamic change in population, social, and political organization, some of which was incurred by the entry of the Chiapanec people into the Central Depression. The Spanish Conquistadors, arriving in the area some six centuries later, described the Chiapanec as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew D. Turner.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As numerous studies have noted, changes in themes, compositions, and content in Maya stone monuments from the ninth and tenth centuries present a departure from their Classic counterparts, which in turn appears to reflect changes in social structure and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Hruby.

This is an abstract from the "Mountains, Rain, and Techniques of Governance in Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lithic analysis at various sites in the Maya area, such as Plan de las Mesas, Kaminaljuyu, Copan, and Piedras Negras reveal regional differences between obsidian tool production, distribution, and consumption. Some patterns in obsidian economies were shared between these sites, as well as others more distantly located such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Mercure. Dominique Meyer. Eric Lo. Tanya Anaya. Traci Ardren.

Using aerial imagery in archaeological sites has been viewed as a powerful tool for site recordation. At the Maya site of Yaxuna, located 20km south of the ancient ruins of Chichen Itza and on the longest recorded Maya sacbe, we provide a case study of aerial survey work, combining altitude varying imagery from fixed wing and multirotor aircrafts. Combining such multi-scale imagery allows us to relate excavation scale to landscape wide architecture and layout. Features such as terrain,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Lo. Dominique Rissolo. Michael Hess. Dominique Meyer. Falko Kuester.

Photogrammetric techniques are increasingly being used for documenting cultural heritage sites for digital preservation and analysis, but the challenges of working in constrained spaces with difficult lighting conditions have encumbered widespread adoption in subterranean environments. The Proyecto Arquitectura Subterranea de Quintana Roo, coordinated by the Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative (CHEI), at the University of California San Diego, in collaboration with the Instituto Nacional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Brady. Brenna Perteet.

This is an abstract from the "Studies in Mesoamerican Subterranean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the construction of a plaza group on a 5 m high raised platform, a sascabera was excavated into the hill that formed the nucleus of the group. The original circular opening in the cap rock was carefully maintained. When the platform was completed, the northern end of the sascabera was filled with rubble and smoothed to form the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jim Aimers. Jaime Awe.

During the Belize Tourism Development Project (2000-2004), Awe excavated dense on-floor deposits on the stairs and stairside outsets of Structures A2 and A3 at Cahal Pech. These deposits were mainly pottery sherds but included a variety of other materials including whole and partial vessels, projectile points, obsidian blades, deer antlers, figurines and ocarinas, spindle whorls, and jade pendants. A standard interpretations of such deposits is that they represent garbage left behind by Terminal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Wolf. Elisandro Garza.

This is an abstract from the "Mountains, Rain, and Techniques of Governance in Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mesoamerican archaeological sites often take advantage of the surrounding natural landscape to enhance both the political machinations of the ruling elite and the sacred ideals of the community at large. In Guatemala, Belize, Mexico, and other highland or steep regions, archaeologists have repeatedly demonstrated the dynamic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raúl López. Gloria Hernández.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Conventional inferences of Maya mobility have been based on cultural exchange. The isotopic composition measured in human skeletal remains provides a direct measure of past peoples’ movements. Founded on published isotopic datasets across the Maya area,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeb Card.

Certain classes of material culture found in Honduras and El Salvador have long been recognized as being related to "Maya style" artwork and artifacts from Copan and Classic Maya cities to the north and west. These objects have been framed through questions of "influence", ethnicity, and boundaries. The recent re-analysis of a ceramic flask from Tazumal, with an unusual inscription tying the object to a Copan king and imagery of tribute, suggests a more distinct political lens through which to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Hirth. Susan Hirth. George Hasemann. Gloria Lata-Pinto.

This is an abstract from the "Innovations and Transformations in Mesoamerican Research: Recent and Revised Insights of Ancestral Lifeways" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Reconstructing past ritual events is always a challenge under the best of archaeological conditions. Between cal AD 238 and 352 the ancient residents of the site of Salitrón Viejo accumulated an assemblage of carved jade and marble artifacts that were used in a series of ritual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia Miller.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The striking recumbent stone figure known as a chacmool is a defining feature of the Mesoamerican Terminal Classic and Postclassic, occurring not only at Chichen Itza and Tula, where the largest number of figures is documented, but also in later Mexica...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arthur Demarest.

This is an abstract from the "Regimes of the Ancient Maya" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of regimes can be critical to the ongoing transformation of understandings of the Classic Maya economy. Currently, many scholars continue to refer to anthropomorphized mythical agents, e.g., exchange between “Tikal” and “Holmul” or between “Cancuen” and “the highlands,” as simply black boxes inhibiting economic research. With populations in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only M. Kathryn Brown. Jason Yaeger.

This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early Maya communities centered themselves within a broader sacred landscape imbued with meaning through ritual practices. Centuries of movement through the landscape converted spaces into places that were deeply rooted in cosmology and social memory. Ritual practices at the center of the community and important places in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Conner Flynt.

This is an abstract from the "Underwater Maya: Analytical Approaches for Interpreting Ancient Maya Activities at the Paynes Creek Salt Works, Belize" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya created a culture with writing, religion, and vast trade networks. These trade networks are evident on the southern coast of Belize, where archaeologists have found sites dedicated to salt making. This paper will discuss Ta’ab Nuk Na, one of these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Collins.

Recent investigations of Yaxuná, Yucatan, Mexico have provided evidence to suggest that the earliest permanent spaces, by way of the site’s E-group complex, in the Northern Lowlands were roughly contemporaneous with the early developments observed at Central Lowland sites. On the one hand, this data provides an outlet to better explore the large scale social processes impacting the early macro-region of the Maya area. However, material analysis of recovered shell, lithic, and ceramic artifacts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Collins.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores methodological opportunities for comparative settlement survey by applying ground-penetrating radar (GPR) as an augmentative remote sensing lens. In the last decade, remote sensing in Mesoamerica has undergone a renaissance through the application of Lidar to survey the landscape, providing immense quantities of data on new potential...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxine Oland.

This is an abstract from the "After Cortés: Archaeological Legacies of the European Invasion in Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is no question that colonialism in the Americas brought huge and unanticipated changes for both European and Indigenous peoples. Yet Indigenous people often contextualized colonial efforts within their own worldview, or ontology, even as they interacted with European people, things, and colonial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Holley Moyes. Kelsey Hanson. Erin Ray.

Performance theory recognizes that the boundaries between ritual and theatrical performances are often quite blurred, allowing shared methods of analysis between the two. While many have argued for a theater-state among the ancient Maya, few have ventured beyond the large ceremonies conducted in great plazas to consider the more esoteric nature of public, semi-public, and private rites taking place in the natural landscape. Ancient Maya caves were used exclusively as ritual spaces, yet there has...