Preclassic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eugenia Robinson.

Evidence of sedentism in the Antigua Valley begins in the Middle Preclassic Period at the archaeological sites of Urias and Rucal, located at the head of a corridor to the Pacific coast. This area has evidence of mobile Early Preclassic peoples as early as 1400 B.C. Middle Preclassic finds at Urias and Rucal include middens, bottle-shaped pits, stone markers, platforms, a burial, and pottery similar to Charcas types from Kaminaljuyu and Naranjo. Radiocarbon dating and stratigraphy could...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Collins.

From the placement of objects in household offerings, to monumental works of art and architecture, it is well known that the ancient Maya commemorated their cosmological center in a variety of ways. Even at the settlement level, quadripartite divisions of space are observed branching out from a central core giving modern researchers insight into the way ancient Maya peoples may have understood their world. At the Maya site of Yaxuná, Yucatan, Mexico investigations have made it apparent that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Debra Walker.

Ours is the first generation of Maya archaeologists to be fully rooted in Maya history. Thanks to our mentors, and especially cooperation between epigraphers and archaeologists, we have come to know the faces, names and life stories of important figures in our own New World history, epics that rival those of the Old World. The telling of these stories is a work in progress, however, our mentors, Linda Schele and David Freidel, provided a courageous and insightful first effort at embodying the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Glenna Nielsen-Grimm. Greg Farley. Edgar Ortega. Richard D. Hansen.

The Great Central Plaza of the West Complex at El Mirador lies on an early and important alignment for the entire city. Excavations of two small altar platforms, and test units of structures on the boundaries of the plaza and the Leon Plaza suggest that this was probably among the earliest areas of the city, and continued to have symbolic and ritual importance throughout the Middle and Late Preclassic periods at El Mirador. The Central Acropolis creates the southern boundary, the east and west...

DOCUMENT Citation Only M. Kathryn Brown. Jason Yaeger.

Twenty five years have passed since Linda Schele and David Friedel presented their thoughts on the origins and establishment of the institution of kingship in their book "A Forest of Kings." Their historical reconstruction of Cerros illustrates the steps taken by early rulers to establish and institutionalize a hierarchical social system. Through the empirical data from Cerros, they artfully illuminate how the construction and display of symbols of royal power on monumental buildings coupled...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaime Awe.

In a series of articles published in the 1980’s, and in the subsequent volume "A Forest of Kings", David Freidel, and Linda Schele and Freidel demonstrated that the institution of kingship had been firmly established in the Maya lowlands by the Late Preclassic period. Twenty five years later, ongoing research in Belize and the Peten now suggests that this level of cultural complexity may have actually arisen by the Middle Preclassic period. One line of evidence that strongly supports this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Dalton.

During the 2014 and 2015 field season excavations were carried out on a chultun at the ancient Maya site of El Mirador, Petén, Guatemala. This chultun was situated near the Grán Acrópolis, with a 10-meter pyramid located directly to the north and a large L-shaped structure directly to the east, in an elite district. Over the course of excavations the site was found to contain both Middle and Late Preclassic ceramics, including fragments of an elaborate incensario in the shape of an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evan Parker. George J. Bey III. Tomás Gallareta Negrón. Betsy Kohut.

Paso del Macho is a Middle Preclassic village settlement located in the eastern Puuc region of the Yucatán Peninsula. Excavations of mounded architecture, the main plaza, and ballcourt of the site have established a chronological range beginning in the early Middle Preclassic and ending by the Late Preclassic. The earliest architecture at the settlement includes at least three small raised platforms associated with Ek ceramics, the earliest pottery complex in Northern Yucatán. Following this,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Guernsey. Michael Love.

This paper concentrates on the vast corpus of hand modeled ceramic figurines from Preclassic Pacific slope of Mesoamerica, in particular those from Middle Preclassic La Blanca, Guatemala. We argue that, within this collection of figurines and related ones from elsewhere in Middle Preclassic Mesoamerica, one can find evidence for the concept of replication – or an emphasis on a recurring "type" or "character" – that pre-dates the invention of the mold. Although Preclassic figurine assemblages are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Callaghan. Brigitte Kovacevich.

In this paper we will discuss how ritual activities in both emergent elite and commoner Maya households contributed to the development of social complexity and hierarchy during the Preclassic period at the site of Holtun, Guatemala. Our working hypothesis at the site is that while certain households successfully manipulated traditional ritual practices and symbols related to political and religious authority, all households would have contributed to the cultural milieu in which the dominant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Paling.

From the gathering of agricultural surplus to the construction of small homes or large scale monuments, stone tools played a major role in many dimensions of everyday Formative Maya life. This presentation will examine the degree in which the production of stone tools made of chert and chalcedony were controlled by empowered political authorities or social groups at the sites of San Estevan in Northern Belize and K’o and Hamontún in the northeastern Petén region. The dynamics of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Arroyo.

Recent data has been unearthed on Kaminaljuyu during the last five years. Despite Guatemala City´s growth, much information is still under the ground. A continuous program has allowed for the piecing together of various research programs carried out at the site. An effort to integrate most of the research and rescue programs has been done to obtain a comprehensive perspective of the culture history of the site. This paper will present data on recent research, focusing on the significant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaime Awe.

More than 20 years of investigations at Cahal Pech have served to establish that the site has one of the longest sequence of occupation in the Maya lowlands. First settled at the end of the Early Preclassic period, the settlement gradually grew in size and affluence during the Middle and Late Preclassic periods, and eventually became one of the primary Classic period centers of the upper Belize River Valley. Cahal Pech’s rise to prominence, however, was not a product of Classic period...

DOCUMENT Citation Only M. Kathryn Brown. Carolyn Freiwald.

Ritual feasting as a practice by which sponsors create uneven social relations with other participants has been suggested to play an important role in establishing social hierarchies in many ancient societies including the ancient Maya. Feasting activities may have also been an important part of Preclassic communal building projects in the Maya lowlands. In this paper, we present data from Middle Preclassic special deposits associated with a series of early public platforms at the site of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Armando Anaya Hernandez. Kathryn Reese-Taylor.

The Preclassic (900 BCE – 150 CE) was the period during which the earliest sedentary communities in the Maya lowlands were founded. Acts that initiated these early civic charters, such as the construction of E-groups and communal platforms, were followed quickly by rapid expansion of communities throughout the landscape, involving population growth, monumental architecture, massive waterworks, and a high degree of sociopolitical complexity. It was also during this period when ideologies and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Santiago Juarez.

In many societies around the world, the concept of community plays a central role in the formation of individual identities. Communities are subject to change and the focus on community identity provides a theoretical approach in which the individual can be situated in a broader sphere of social interaction. I research community through spatial analyses of human constructions at the Preclassic site of Noh K'uh in Chiapas, Mexico. My findings revealed that house-mounds clustered on hill-tops...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fernando C. Atasta Flores Esquivel. Alejandro Uriarte.

Yaxnohcah is an important Maya settlement in the southern Campeche lowlands, which, according to what present evidence suggests, had its main civic development during the Middle and Late Preclassic periods. The city’s layout includes some features that are specific to Yaxnohcah, as well as others shared with nearby and distant centres. One of central features of the Yaxnohcah settlement, which it shares with other sites, has been described as "clustered nucleation" or "dismembered" pattern for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Bracken.

The ongoing project at Muralla de León is investigating the relationship between defensibility, water control, and emergent social complexity in the Petén Lakes Region. Located on the shores of Lake Macanché, recent excavations at the site have zeroed in on the imposing rampart which encircles it, providing evidence for the chronology, as well as the nature, of its construction. Mapping of the site has turned up strong indications of hydraulic architecture both within and outside of the rampart....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Verna Gentil. Elijah J. Hermitt. Jeffery B. Glover. Dominique Rissolo.

The site of Conil is located in the modern community of Chiquilá on the north coast of Quintana Roo, Mexico. In 1528 Francisco de Montejo, a Spanish conquistador, reported that Conil was a large town consisting of 5,000 houses. Conil was abandoned in the middle of the 17th century and was not reoccupied again until the 19th century, when it was named Chiquilá. William Sanders was the first archaeologist to work at the site in 1954, but the site core was not mapped until 2005 by Glover. Further...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zoe Rawski.

The site of Early Xunantunich in Belize provides us with a rare opportunity to conduct large scale investigations of Preclassic architecture due to its lack of Classic Period overburden. Since 2008, ongoing excavations at the site have yielded a wealth of information regarding Preclassic activities in the area. However, recent investigations of a monumental flat-topped platform at the site have illuminated issues with the ways in which we describe and classify these early structures. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco Estrada-Belli.

Research in the Holmul region of northeastern Peten has focused on Cival as its major political center during the Middle and Late Preclassic period since its rediscovery in 2001. The goals of this research continue to be inspired by several ideas expressed in Forest of Kings in 1990. Mainly, the rise of kingship in the Late Preclassic period, the interpretation of giant 'mask' sculptures on the facade of pyramids as backdrop for royal rituals as well as the interpretation of ritual caches. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Whitney Lytle.

Xunantunich Group D, an elite residential unit, has a fascinating history of construction and reuse between two temporally separated occupations. The group is set apart from other Xunantunich residential units by a sacbe connecting it to the site core and a large ancestor shrine acting as the architectural focal point of the group. The past three years of research at Group D has focused on the Late Classic ancestor shrine and the open courtyard directly in front of the structure with the goal of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Pugh.

Nixtun-Ch’ich’ in Petén, Guatemala was settled shortly before 1000 BC. Sometime between 800 and 500 BC, the settlement was reconfigured into a city with an urban grid—a form until now unknown in the Maya lowlands. As a geometric form, grids regiment a series of lines into a harmonious rhythm over a larger area. Urban grids are formed not by single-dimension lines, but by streets, which are public spaces containing traffic, communication, exchange, and social interaction. Thus, urban grids are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Norman Hammond.

In 1979, the Pulltrouser Swamp project led by Peter Harrison and B.L.Turner II shared a field camp with the Cuello Project. With one group investigating a ridge-top Preclassic Maya community exploiting some wetland resources, and the other studying Maya wetland use and the nature of swamp-edge settlements, there was ample opportunity to compare and contrast fieldwork results. With overlaps in research interests, and some ad hoc sharing of expertise, the synergism was both social and...