Maya: Classic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Walden. Olivia Ellis. Claire Ebert. Julie Hoggarth. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Classic Maya polities of the Upper Belize River Valley were situated in an especially rich alluvial environment, which may have served as a breadbasket for surrounding regions. The region was also one of the most densely settled regions of the Maya lowlands, showing evidence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaylee Spencer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient Maya artists fashioned ceramic cache vessels that bear a rich array of painted imagery and iconography, making them popular subjects for scholarly investigation. Themes focusing on bloodletting and burning rites are emphasized in many of these discussions, and these themes form the foundations for interpreting the meanings and uses of this class of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Harper Dine.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya utilized a range of landscape modifications for agricultural production, including terraces and raised fields. These agricultural strategies were tied into food systems that also included taxation and tribute, all significant components of a political economy that may have reflected autonomy, exploitation, or both. Using a paleoethnobotanical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Thompson. Gary Feinman. Keith Prufer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Inequality is present in all forms of human societies, but the degree of inequality within a single city or region varies. Recently in archaeological contexts, inequality has been quantitatively evaluated based on house size using the Gini coefficient and Lorenz Curve, thus enabling the comparison of wealth measures and inequality between ancient cities of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only M. Charlotte Arnauld. Eva Lemonnier. Julien Hiquet.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican Population History: Demography, Social Complexity, and Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ideally every ancient Maya city should be characterized by its population density and its urban agricultural productivity, closely linked parameters that must be explored before tackling the issue of production/exchange relations with hinterlands. Río Bec can be characterized as a low-density urban...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Damien Marken. Charlotte Arnauld.

Following decades of debate, most scholars accept Classic Maya cities as the hearts of spatially expansive, low-density urban settlements. This introductory paper will summarize past and current perceptions of Maya urbanism, emphasizing potentially overshadowed considerations of urban planning, mobility, and community dynamics – fundamental cross-cultural features of urbanization – and their detection in lowland settlement patterns. The recent florescence of research deriving insight from urban...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco Estrada-Belli. Sandra Balanzario Granados.

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. Lidar survey of the city of Dzibanche reveals the city's settlement to be more extensive and populous than previously thought and consistent with its political reach as a hegemonic state. A closer look at the organization of public spaces within its center reveals architectural arrangements that appear to share...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanne Baron.

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. The Kerr cataloging project at Dumbarton Oaks is creating opportunities to re-examine iconographic motifs and hieroglyphic texts on Maya pottery. One avenue in which this has been fruitful is the analysis of vessels depicting wahy creatures. In modern communities, ways are powerful...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Longstaffe. Kyle Farquharson. Kathryn Reese-Taylor. Felix Kupprat. Armando Anaya Hernández.

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. Recent investigations at the Ximbal Che group at Yaxnohcah have documented intriguing new data with implications for understanding sociopolitical and economic integration in the Bajo el Laberinto region. These data include diverse cultural assemblages that show radical changes to the built...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Hoggarth. Claire Ebert. Douglas Kennett.

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. Over the past 25 years, numerous paleoclimate studies have been published across the Maya Lowlands, providing the climatic context for cultural change from Preclassic through modern times. Increasing archaeological studies have followed suit by documenting cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather McKillop. E. Cory Sills.

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 sea was important to the ancient Maya as a source of ritual paraphernalia and seafood, as a transportation and trade route, and as a desirable place of settlement. The coast of Belize includes hundreds of cays within the second longest barrier reef in the world and a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Miller. Aline Magnoni. Traci Ardren. Travis Stanton.

Time and again the application of new technologies has allowed archaeologists to rethink their understandings of ancient cultural landscapes. Lidar, in particular, is one technology that has rapidly transformed our analytical capabilities by simultaneously providing wide regional and finely localized views of archaeological sites. In this paper, we present new lidar data that is reshaping our understanding of the Northern Maya Lowland metropolis of Coba. In particular we discuss features on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan E. O'Neil.

This paper explores the collecting, repositioning, and separating of ancient Maya objects, both in the ancient past and the twentieth century. Archaeological context provides evidence of ancient Maya aggregation of disparate objects in tombs, caches, or sculptural tableaux as well as evidence of repositioning or separating things. These changes are fundamental aspects of objects’ life histories. Yet in the twentieth century, ancient monuments and object sets also have been divided -- and new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arturo Pascual Soto.

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. La historia de los primeros años del Epiclásico (ca. 750-850 dC) en El Tajín, Veracruz, no es sólo la historia de esta antigua ciudad. Hay toda una serie de factores que participan de ella en distintos momentos de su desarrollo cultural. Varios de ellos se...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanley Walling. Christine Taylor. Shawna Veach.

This is an abstract from the "Prehispanic Maya Marketplace Investigations in the Three Rivers Region of Belize: First Results" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers preliminary evidence for a Late Classic period marketplace at the site of Chawak But’o’ob, Belize. Group E, one of the largest settlement groups at this eighth-century agrarian site, is characterized by a well-bounded, spacious plaza that is larger and otherwise unlike...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Friedel. M. Kathryn Brown.

The importance of fire in Maya rituals is well-known, both archaeologically and ethnographically. Fire, which is symbolic of the life cycle in Maya ideology, has been used as a means of communicating with the supernatural world in order to manage specific aspects of everyday life, such as the success of the agricultural season. In the archaeological record, we find evidence for ancient fires as features consisting mostly of burnt plant remains, some of which resemble modern Maya fire altars both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sylvia Batty. Josue Ramos. Antonio Beardall. Debra Wilkes Gray. 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. With a five millennia history spanning forager-horticulturalist, precolumbian Maya, historic, and contemporary periods, Aventura is a community with a long history. The Aventura Archaeology Project addresses community at many levels, in its study of the past and in its collaboration with local cultural heritage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Nissen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper investigates the "who/what" that constitutes "the local community" in engaged community archaeologies. It will do so by discussing community events organized by the Aventura Archaeology Project, as well as preliminary ethnographic and oral historical work I have conducted in the San Joaquin Village and Corozal Town areas of northernmost Belize. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cynthia Robin. Antonio Beardall. Cynthia Ellis-Topsey. Anabel Ford.

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. This paper examines community archaeology in Belize: its recent history and contemporary practice. Community archaeology, following the work of Sonya Atalay, is archaeology done “with, by, and for” Indigenous and local communities. It produces an archaeology that is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Ebert. Antonio Beardall. Tia Watkins. Julie Hoggarth. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Community building through education and public outreach has been a central component of the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance (BVAR) Project since its inception over 30 years ago. One of our primary goals is to actively engage with local communities and students in archaeological heritage management in western Belize since they are the most impacted...

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 Hannah Julia Paredes. Olivia Navarro-Farr. Mary Kate Kelly.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Photogrammetry is a rapidly-evolving technology that is applicable to a wide array of archaeological contexts and reconstructions. Researchers affiliated with the Proyecto Arqueológico Waka’ (PAW) at the site of El Perú-Waka’, Petén, Guatemala, initiated a program of photogrammetric recording of stelae during the 2018 season. In this process, a series of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Ingalls.

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. Movement is often implicitly assumed when exploring the ancient makeup of communities. We conceptualize movement at different scales of interaction – at the hyperlocal through households, as well as between and across communities, polities, and landscapes. Here, I will explore how movement to/from focal nodes on a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Richards-Rissetto. Ellis Codd.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades, many archaeologists did not consider ancient Maya centers such as Tikal, Palenque, and Copan to be cities. While today most archaeologists would agree that large Maya centers were cities, the nature of Maya urbanism is still little understood. Maya cities seem different, and in attempt to explain these differences, they have been termed "Garden...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allan Ortega. 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. he so-called Maya collapse has been seen as an entelechy of the depopulation and emigration of the great Maya cities of the lowlands during the ninth and tenth centuries AD. However, proper paleodemographic and archaeodemographic works that support this...