Maya: Classic (Other Keyword)

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 Adam King. Sheldon Skaggs. Terry Powis.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Ground Stone Studies in the Eastern Maya Lowlands" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Between 2012 and 2014, a small mound was excavated on the periphery of the Pacbitun site, a medium-sized ancient Maya center located in the Belize River Valley of west-central Belize. That mound revealed a record of the production of 4,000 granite mano and metates dating to the Late Classic period. Since those...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meaghan Peuramaki-Brown. Shawn Morton.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Ground Stone Studies in the Eastern Maya Lowlands" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this presentation, we discuss our research into the use of granite by the ancient inhabitants of Alabama: a Late to Terminal Classic boomtown of the eastern Maya lowlands. One of our initial hypotheses regarding the relatively sudden rise of the town toward the end of the Late Classic period focused on granite as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian Chase.

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. Agricultural production is a fundamental aspect of most societies, and research into agriculture has focused on invention, innovation, involution, intensification, and disintensification in varying forms worldwide. Generations of scholarship have accumulated knowledge and theorized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Ringle. Melissa Galvan. Kenneth Seligson. Gabriel Tun Ayora.

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. It has long been recognized that the two principal physiographic subdivisions of the Puuc are the wedge-shaped Valle de Sta. Elena, just south of the Puuc escarpment, and to its south, the Bolonchen Hill District. One goal of the PARB project was to explore the eastern manifestations of these two regions for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Blitz. Lisa LeCount.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Embedded Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Classic Maya economies, artifact distributions alone do not neatly reflect modes of production and exchange. The simultaneous existence of multiple modes of production (domestic, specialized, ritualized, etc.) and exchange (gift giving, tribute extraction, and markets) in households complicate our understanding of the strength of any given aspect. We...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Blitz. Lisa LeCount.

Understanding the political economy of ancient Maya communities requires reconstructing the forms and scales of exchange, the articulated nature of exchange modes, and the degree to which elites controlled commoner access to goods. These issues are examined at the site of Actuncan, Belize, by documenting the chronology, morphology, raw material, and social context of a large sample of groundstone manos and metates distributed across structures ranging from a palace to large houses to patio...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicaela Cartagena. Sheldon Skaggs. Mike Lawrence. Terry Powis.

The archaeological site of Pacbitun is one of the ancient sites that was inhabited by the Maya for approximately two thousand years. It is located in west central Belize near the modern Maya village of San Antonio. In 2011, investigations in the periphery of the site core revealed a small group of mounds, of which one contained evidence of groundstone production. This group, designated as the Tzib Group, was targeted because one of the mounds, labelled Mano Mound, yielded numerous mano fragments...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fernando Véliz Corado.

This is an abstract from the "La Cuernavilla, Guatemala: A Maya Fortress and Its Environs" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya center La Cuernavilla is well known for its defensive features and its role as a fortress located between the Classic Maya cities of Tikal and El Zotz in the Buenavista Valley of modern-day Guatemala. Excavations of the defensive features as well as the analysis of the artifacts collected during excavations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaylee Spencer. Maline Werness-Rude.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Narratives featuring the Maize God are well represented on Classic Maya ceramics. Appearing with numerous other characters and plants in underworld settings, this deity is abundantly documented in scholarly literature. Despite his ubiquity in ancient imagery, the Maize God remains a slippery creature, with an identity that overlaps with other supernaturals. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Watson. Joshua Schnell. Shanti Morell-Hart. Andrew Scherer.

This is an abstract from the "Medicine and Healing in the Americas: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Botanical residues recovered from the proposed marketplace area of Piedras Negras have revealed rich information about healing and medicinal activities of Classic Period inhabitants. Excavations in this sector yielded a high quantity of identifiable plant remains in the same contexts as human dental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Moles.

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. Human remains are found in a variety of contexts at Aventura: as primary burials below the floors of houses, as secondary burials or caches also below the floors, and even in middens. The preservation of the bone is very poor and therefore the recovery of individuals is often less than 25%. This sometimes makes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynneth Lowe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of correspondence, field notes, catalogs and other archival documents has contributed important information to understand the history of some of the first Maya archaeological collections in the United States and Europe. The field and lab work developed by pioneering explorers and researchers, such as Hermann Berendt (1817-1878) and Charles Rau...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Ringle. Tomás Gallareta Negrón. Ken Seligson. David Vlcek.

LiDAR imagery is revolutionizing interpretations of ancient Maya demography, land use, and community organization, among other concerns. This paper provides preliminary observations on LiDAR coverage of 200 km2 of the Puuc region of northern Yucatan, Mexico, collected in 2017 by NCALM. The Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project has been working in this area since 2000,and although we have intensively studied settlement at both the urban and intersite level, LiDAR provides the opportunity to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mallory Matsumoto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The area stretching from the Usumacinta River basin in western Guatemala into the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, hosted key centers of Classic Maya political and cultural life (ca. 250–850 CE). Scribes and sculptors active across the region produced hundreds of stone monuments inscribed with texts in a common hieroglyphic script. Yet little is known about how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Spenard. Terry Powis.

On an isolated, steep-sided hill in the otherwise undifferentiated foothills of the northern Maya Mountains is the site of Sak Pol Pak, a secondary center of the pre-Hispanic (900 BC – AD 900/1000) Maya site, Pacbitun. Sak Pol Pak is a small site encompassing the entire hilltop, with no room for agriculture and is difficult to access, yet it contains the largest pyramid-temple outside of Pacbitun’s epicenter. At the foot of the hill is the deepest, and most complex cave system in the Pacbitun...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Whitaker.

This paper summarizes recent archaeological investigations at the San Lorenzo settlement cluster in the Mopan River Valley of Western Belize. Current research at this ancient hinterland settlement is concerned with better understanding household economic organization and integration during the Late and Terminal Classic (A.D. 670-890) occupations of this site. Households are fundamental units of economic organization in both past and present societies. The examination of ancient household...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Esteban Miron Marvan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Modern Maya peoples have been denied of their right to appropriate their own history and archaeological heritage. After almost three decades of multiculturalism in Mexican laws and state rhetoric there is still a lot of colonial ideas, practices, and laws that prevent the participation of indigenous communities in the heritage discourses and their involvement...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frauke Sachse. Daniel Boomhower.

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 Archive constitutes the largest photographic collection of Maya ceramics, including rollouts and stills of more than 5,000 unique artifacts from museums, private collections, and archaeological excavations. Devising their own numbering system, Justin and Barbara Kerr...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Simon Martin.

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 cylinder vessel paintings assembled in the Kerr Archive cover a remarkable range of themes, with many of the best-known depicting fantastical beasts and other supernatural actors. But a not insignificant portion of the corpus features scenes of courtly performance and, as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fred Valdez.

The "hinterland" communities of northwest Belize are among the most diverse and complex across the Maya lowlands. The Rio Bravo Management and Conservation area of NW Belize serves as the region of interest with more than 25 seasons of Maya archaeological research. Utilizing survey and mapping strategies, material culture analyses, and theoretical concerns, the Programme for Belize Archaeological Project (PfBAP) defines new ways of looking at and interpreting ancient Maya interactions for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Lucero. Adrian Chase.

This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The rainfall-dependency of the ancestral Maya shaped their daily and seasonal existence in homes, communities, and cities. They adapted quite well to the annual wet and dry seasonal cycles—as well as extreme weather events like hurricanes, tropical storms and severe droughts,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Gonlin. David Webster. David Reed.

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. A Classic Maya rural household, Site 34C-4-2, yielded two artifacts considered unusual for this nonurban context: a manopla (a 15-pound tuff ball with a handle used in a sport similar to boxing) and a miniature sculpture of a house or altar that resembles those found in Copan’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucas Johnson. Lisa Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Classic period (250–900 CE) Maya economic systems were diverse with most lowland cities revealing a combination of intensive surplus crafting workshops and more domestic household crafting. Some craft production may have been centralized and occurring under the supervision of the state and others appear to be operating independently at the household level...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Thompson. Jillian Jordan. Keith M. Prufer.

This paper examines processes of low-density urban development through geospatial analyses of households at two Classic Period (AD 250-800) Maya communities, Uxbenká and Ix Kuku’il. Located in the southern foothills of the Maya Mountains, Toledo District, Belize, these centers were situated are similar landscapes yet exhibited distinctly different household distributions. Wherein Uxbenká had geospatially discrete districts and neighborhoods while Ix Kuku’il’s houses were more evenly distributed...