Maya: Classic (Other Keyword)
401-425 (857 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Mesoamerican Figurines in Context. New Insights on Tridimensional Representations from Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation explores how miniature ceramic figurines were incorporated into the daily lives, rituals and intentions of the Late Classic period Maya of the Alta Verapaz region. Ceramic figurines are also the remnants of Maya musical instrumentation and have been recovered from...
Interwoven Networks: Obsidian Exchange and Overlapping Economies among the Ancient Maya of Western Belize (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies of ancient Maya commodities have focused on elite control of economic institutions, yet goods were mobilized at different levels of the social hierarchy to support the growth of broader economic institutions. Here we present the results of portable x-ray fluorescence (pXRF) analyses of over 4000 obsidian artifacts from Preclassic to Terminal...
Into the Darkness: Analyzing the Midnight Terror Cave Artifact Assemblage and its Spatial Implications (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Subterranean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 2008-2010, California State University, Los Angeles, working under the Western Belize Regional Cave Project directed by Jaime Awe, investigated Midnight Terror Cave (MTC) in the Cayo District of Belize. At present, MTC is best known for its large human osteological assemblage of over 10,000 bones, which is well documented in the...
Intraregional Interaction in the Zapotitan Valley, El Salvador: The San Andres Regional Center and Joya de Ceren Village (2018)
This paper provides new insights to better understand the intraregional interaction, especially San Andres and Joya de Ceren in the Zapotitan Valley of El Salvador. Joya de Ceren is a village of commoners that was buried by the Loma Caldera eruption, which occurred around AD 650; it is one of the most studied ancient villages in Mesoamerica. Moreover, the previous study indicate that this village might have been closely connected to San Andres, which is the religious, political, and economic...
Investigating Ancient Maya Foodways in the Copan Valley, Honduras: Macrobotanical Analysis from Late Classic to Postclassic Middens in the Rio Amarillo East Pocket (2018)
Within the Copan Valley a dearth of macrobotanical assemblages have been analyzed, and most that were focused on the area within or close to the Acropolis. As part of a larger project investigating ancient practices of sustainability within the Copan Valley, macrobotanical remains recovered through flotation from two commoner communities, Site 29 and Quebrada Piedras Negras, Group C, in the Rio Amarillo East Pocket have been analyzed. Due to acidic soil in the area both bone and other types of...
Investigating Ancient Maya Resiliency at Xunantunich, Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite more than a century of intensive archaeological research, factors leading to the Classic Maya Collapse continue to be debated by Maya archaeologists. This presentation discusses the Classic Maya Collapse and its effects on the people of Xunantunich, Belize. Investigations from the 2018 field season, carried out by the Belize Valley Archaeological...
Investigating Market Activity at the Ancient Maya Site of Dos Hombres, Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Finding evidence of an ancient Maya marketplace is difficult due to the perishability of telltale materials such as food, textiles, and wooden stalls in the tropical environment of northwestern Belize. Therefore, multiple lines of evidence including material culture, stratigraphy, soil chemistry, and spatial analysis are essential in identifying possible...
Investigating the Contexts of An Early Classic Carved Monument at the Maya site of Pacbitun, Belize (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the discovery of Stela 6 in the mid-1980s, the weathered remains of this Early Classic period carved stone monument continue to lie in the main plaza at Pacbitun, displaced in antiquity. Re-exposed in 2003, epigraphic analysis verified the monument’s AD 485 Long Count date—confirming it as one of the earliest carved stelae in the Maya lowlands—and...
Investigating the Spatial Analysis of Chultuneob at Mul Ch’en Witz, Belize (2018)
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...
The Investigation of a Sascabera near the Las Monjas Complex in Chichen Itza (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Studies in Mesoamerican Subterranean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Some 75 m southwest of the Las Monjas complex at Chichen Itza and just west of Sacbe No. 7, lie a series of eleven sascaberas that are shown schematically on the Carnegie map. While ceiling collapse has undoubtedly occurred in the millennium since their creation, some, such as Sascabera #2, have an extensive enclosed dark zone space. In...
Investigations of Plastered Constructions at Las Cuevas, Belize (2018)
The ancient Maya site of Las Cuevas, in Western Belize features a cave system that runs beneath the main plaza. Investigations by the Las Cuevas Archaeological Reconnaissance project suggest that the site functioned as a Late Classic ritual pilgrimage venue and that the cave was used for large public centrally-organized performances. The cathedral-like cave entrance contains monumental architecture consisting of at least 76 plastered platforms. I hypothesize that the level of managerial...
Isotopic Analysis and Social Identities from Classic Period (ca. 300-900 CE) Burials at the Maya Site of Ucanal, Petén, Guatemala (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ucanal, is an archeological site situated in the Petén area of the southern Maya Lowlands. Close to the modern-day border between Guatemala and Belize, it is situated on the Mopan River which seems to have facilitated the trade of objects between different neighboring sites. While we know that this site was a nexus for the movement of goods from afar, less is...
Ixtepeque Obsidian and the Polity: a Network and Boundary Approach in Southeastern Mesoamerica (2019)
This is an abstract from the "I Love Sherds and Parasites: A Festschrift in Honor of Pat Urban and Ed Schortman" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Edward Schortman and Patricia Urban (2012) borrow theoretical approaches from Bruno Latour (1996), Giddens (1984), and Bourdieu (1977) to highlight networks of shared inter-elite interaction in southeastern Mesoamerica that interpenetrate ethnic and political boundaries. The following paper builds upon...
Just for the Celt of It: Investigations and Discoveries Beneath the Petroglyph Panels of Aktun Kuruxtun, Yucatan (2018)
During 2011 excavations deep beneath the petroglyph panels in Aktun Kuruxtun, Mexico, members of the Central Yucatan Archaeological Cave Project (CYAC) uncovered a small tunnel leading into a previously unknown chamber of the cavern. The discovery came in the final days of the field season, however, and the chamber was too choked with flood sediments to be methodologically investigated. As a result, the passage was reburied. Last summer, CYAC returned to the cave and successfully explored the...
The Justin Kerr Maya Vase Database and Its Contribution to the Study of Maya Iconography (2024)
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...
Kaanu'l Lords in Quintana Roo: New Data from Dzibanche and Resbalón Monuments (2024)
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. Re-documentation and analysis of inscribed monuments from the archaeological site of Dzibanche and its vicinity have revealed new details of the history of the Kaanu’l polity during the Classic period. The presentation centers in particular on the narratives recovered from the hieroglyphic stairways of El...
The Kaanul Dynasty and the Early History of the Northwest Petén (2021)
This is an abstract from the "New Light on Dzibanché and on the Rise of the Snake Kingdom’s Hegemony in the Maya Lowlands" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past two decades it has become increasingly clear that the ancient Maya political landscape was permeated by regional systems of political asymmetry. These hegemonic networks fluctuated through time, but the steady presence of a few especially dominant polities shows that they were a...
The Kenyon-Honduras Program 1988-2019: Learning from the Past About Ourselves (2019)
This is an abstract from the "I Love Sherds and Parasites: A Festschrift in Honor of Pat Urban and Ed Schortman" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the 1980s, the Kenyon-Honduras Program, under the leadership of Drs. Patricia Urban and Edward Schortman (P&E to us), has engaged students in the study of archaeology, anthropology, and life. Hundreds of students have been a part of the program over the past several decades. Being in the program...
The Kingdom of Piedras Negras: A View from Mexico (2018)
Though today the Usumacinta River marks part of the boundary of Mexico and Guatemala, during the Classic period the Usumacinta would have passed through numerous kingdoms, including Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan. Alternate travel routes through the valleys to the west in Mexico crossed an even more complicated political landscape approaching the kingdoms of Palenque, Tonina, and Sak Tz’i’, as well as the plentiful minor centers and rural settlements throughout the region. While surveys between...
Knowledge Networks and Entanglements in the Crafting of Pre-Columbian Maya Ceramics and Architecture (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the underlying precepts of materiality is that, whereas people make objects, objects simultaneously and recursively make people. Objects also make objects, however, in so far as seemingly separate crafting traditions were intimately entangled with each other, stimulating and reinforcing similar procedures, practices, and...
Komkom What May: The Ancient Maya Kingdom of Komkom in Time and Place (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Making and Breaking Boundaries in the Maya Lowlands: Alliance and Conflict across the Guatemala–Belize Border" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Painted and carved pictorial pottery of the Classic Maya (250-850 CE) served primarily as ostentatious serving vessels at feasts and other principal celebrations. The vessels were masterful creations by accomplished artisans and are, for the most part, individualistic...
K’anwitznal: Six Years of Cartography at the Site of Ucanal, Guatemala (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Building on the pioneer work of the Proyecto Atlas de Guatemala, the Proyecto Arqueológico Ucanal has considerably expanded the survey and excavations of the site leading to a better comprehension of the transition of the Late to Terminal Classic periods. The site has been surveyed with a combination of approaches including a traditional total station,...
La Cuernavilla, Guatemala: A Fortress and Its Environs (2023)
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. La Cuernavilla is a recently discovered Classic Maya fortress in the central Petén of Guatemala. Situated between the major ancient kingdom of Tikal and the minor city-state capital of El Zotz, the site has a complex history tied into the broader geopolitics of the Buenavista Valley, which it overlooks. This talk introduces the...
La excavación monumental en Yaxchilán e Iglesia Vieja, Chiapas, México (2019)
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. La liberación por el medio de excavación y consolidación de los monumentos prehispánicos tiene una larga historia en la arqueología mexicana. Los métodos de las excavaciones de los conjuntos arquitectónicos de los sitios arqueológicos a cual definimos como la excavación monumental....
La Producción Prehispánica de Cal en la Región de Ichkaantijoo, Yucatán, México: Caracterización de Morteros por Medio de Ciencias de Materiales Aplicadas (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En este estudio se caracterizaron pisos de cal arqueológicos de ocho sitios de la región de Ichkaantijoo, Yucatán, de distintas temporalidades (1000 a.C. - 1300 d.C.) por medio de técnicas de ciencias de materiales, a fin de identificar los procesos de la producción artesanal prehispánica y reconocer las diferencias y similitudes en tiempo y espacio. El...