Maya: Classic (Other Keyword)
626-650 (857 Records)
Public structures in the Maya region materialize ideologies and define centers of power as they create politically charged sacred landscapes. These locations are nexus points for community and polity making processes, embedding social hierarchies, ideologies, and social memories into the physical landscape. However, archaeologists have historically focused attention on monumental public spaces within large civic-ceremonial centers, and relatively little attention has been given to public spaces...
Pulling it Together: Collecting, Collating, and Analyzing Quantitative Data from Written Reports using R (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Due to the nature of long-term archaeological investigations, data collection and curation methods change over time. This means that data can end up in several physical and digital locations, making the analysis of evidence challenging if it was collected years apart or by several investigators. In Lowland Maya archaeology, annual reports are required to...
Quarrying, Cutting, and Shaping: A Look into the Lives of Ancient Maya Limestone Producers (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The organization of labor in Classic Maya society has long been studied from a top-down approach. The construction of public works is seen as a facet of state economy, while the physical evidence of human effort—monumental constructions—are understood as visible manifestations of labor or service-based taxes. The argument for collective or rotational labor...
The Question of Sacrifice: Examining Maya Mortuary Practices through the Lens of Midnight Terror Cave (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Indigenous Culture and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As bioarchaeological interest in the question of ancient Maya ritual violence developed in the 1960s, it was generally recognized that sacrifice and related violent practices occurred within the social context of ritual. It should be expected, then, that caves would produce sacrificial osteological assemblages since they are...
Rags and Riches: Wealth Inequality at Late Classic Uxul, Campeche (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many recent studies about the distribution of wealth in ancient Mesoamerican cities are revealing new insights into the ways socioeconomic processes were organized. Measures of inequality, like the Gini index, reveal patterns of wealth distribution and socioeconomic stratification, permitting research into the relationships between the rich and the poor. In...
Rain Born of the Mountains: Hydrology, Vistas, and Political Control (2024)
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...
Raised Field Agriculture in the Maya Lowlands: Archaeobotanical Remains from Birds of Paradise (2018)
Up until the late 1990s, researchers believed the Maya were solely reliant on slash and burn agricultural practices. However, discoveries of rectangular canal patterns in the margins of wetlands in the Maya lowlands of Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico shined light on a new agricultural practice: raised wetland fields. One example of wetland fields is found at the site Birds of Paradise (BOP) in the Rio Bravo region of northwestern Belize. The macrobotanicals recovered from the raised fields and...
Re-dissecting an Old Friend: Looking Back at the Evidence of Kiuic’s First Court (2024)
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. From 2007 to 2016, a team of archaeologists under the direction of George J. Bey III excavated Structure N1065E1025, a pyramid temple dated to the Terminal Classic period and located at the Yaxché group in the heart of the archaeological site of Kiuic, Yucatán. The structure had a complex construction...
Re-excavating Xno’ha: Aligning Maya Architecture across Seven Years of Archaeological Research (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part II" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maya architecture at Xno’ha has been recorded digitally every field season since 2012 by the Blue Creek Archaeological Project in conjunction with the Center for Heritage Conservation at Texas A&M University. Through the application of preservation technologies such as laser scanning, it is now possible to juxtapose completely...
Reappraising Mobility during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE among Lowland Maya Populations: A Bioarchaeological and Isotopic Approach (2023)
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,...
Reassessing Classic Maya Identity and the Southern Edge of Mesoamerica (2018)
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...
A Reassessment of Obsidian Procurement Networks on Guatemala's Pacific Slope (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Networks of long-distance exchange in quotidian commodities are essential aspects of prehistoric economies. On the Pacific Slope of Guatemala, there was no more important commodity than obsidian, which accounts for almost all cutting edges found in archaeological contexts. Obsidian sourcing studies on the Pacific Slope have been limited, relied on very...
Recent Archaeological Work in the Kingdom of Sak Tz’i’ and the Santo Domingo-Lacanja Valley (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Dynamic Frontiers in the Archaeology of Chiapas" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Santo Domingo-Lacanja Valley hosted a number of small but important Classic period centers, including Bonampak, Lacanha, Plan de Ayutla, and Lacanja Tzeltal (seat of the Sak Tz’i’ dynasty). It was also an important corridor of travel between the major polities of Yaxchilan, Tonina, and Palenque, among others. Here, we review the...
Recent Building Excavations in the Triple-Courtyard "Palace" Group at the Ancient Maya Site of Pacbitun, Belize (2018)
Adjacent to Plaza B at Pacbitun is a Classic Period "palace" complex consisting of three conjoined courtyards each ringed by elevated range structures, likely serving elite-residential and administrative functions. Previous excavations indicated initial construction in the Early Classic period with numerous modifications made in the Late Classic, and preliminary evidence of occupation or use into the Terminal Classic period. The Pacbitun Regional Archaeological Project has begun to explore this...
Recent Investigations of War, Economy, and Population at Piedras Negras, Guatemala (2018)
This paper presents a synthesis of current results from the 2016 - 2017 research seasons at Piedras Negras, Guatemala with implications for understanding warfare, economy, politics, and population dynamics throughout the ancient kingdom. First, while project members had identified a series of fortified centers and palisades in the region’s hinterlands, the recent identification of fortifications in the near periphery of Piedras Negras makes it one of the rare polity capitals in the southern...
Recipe for Daub? A Comparative Petrographic Study of a Common Construction Component in the Maya Area (2018)
Daub is characterized as a mixture of a plastic substance, like natural clay or plaster, and an organic, fibrous binder, which is applied and smoothed against a stick or wood structure to construct a wall. This building strategy is used extensively throughout the world, past and present, yet studies have tended to focus exclusively on identification of component ingredients, rather than compositional and provenance characteristics that offer insights related to resource procurement patterns,...
Reconceptualizing Chichen Itza: The Gran Acuífero Maya Project (2018)
During the summer of 2017, the Gran Aquífero Maya (GAM) project initiated an investigation at Chichen Itza designed to define the site around its aquatic resources. The project is based on my previous work at Cenote Holtun, located 1.6 miles west of Chichen Itza, which found that a line drawn between Holtun and Cenote Kanjuyum on the east pasted through the center of El Castillo. It has long been known that El Castillo is bisected by a line drawn between the Sacred Cenote on the north and the...
Reconstructing Ancient Mesoamerican Cuisine through Innovative Imaging Techniques of Amorphous Carbonized Objects (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeogastronomy: Grocery Lists as Seen from a Multidimensional Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeobotanists (paleoethnobotanists) often come across small, amorphous carbonized objects (ACO) in their flotation samples. However, identifying ACO’s is often difficult, and as such, they mostly remain unidentified. New ways are therefore necessary to study these objects, which, we hypothesize are in some...
Reconstructing and Testing Ancient Neighborhoods at Caracol, Belize (2021)
This is an abstract from the "People and Space: Defining Communities and Neighborhoods with Social Network Analysis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Neighborhoods in the past formed in urban contexts from the bottom-up through repeated face-to-face interactions. Through these shared social experiences and relational identity, neighborhood groups would possess a high potential for collective action, facilitating local solutions to issues facing...
Reconstructing Diachronic Changes in Subsistence, Wealth, and Economic and Ritual Practices through Animal Use at the Classic Maya Polity of Lower Dover, Belize (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maya archaeologists have traditionally used faunal analyses to examine questions about subsistence and ritual practices. We chart diachronic changes in patterns of faunal usage pertaining to four sociocultural dimensions: consumption, economic productions, wealth, and ritual at three districts surrounding the Late Classic (AD 600–900) Maya political center of...
Recuperando el rompecabeza: Un análisis de la escalera jeroglífica de El Resbalón (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El asentamiento prehispánico de El Resbalón está ubicado en el sur de Quintana Roo y alberga la segunda escalera jeroglífica más grande conocida en el área Maya. El proyecto “Levantamiento digital de los bienes muebles e inmuebles de los sitios arqueológicos de Dzibanché, Ichkabal y El Resbalón”, en colaboración con el Instituto Nacional de Antropología e...
Rediscovering Ancient Maya Blue Pigments / Redescubriendo los antiguos pigmentos maya (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Current Dynamics of Heritage Values in the Americas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Azul Maya-Maya Ch´oj. Inicié con mi investigación hace aproximadamente dos años atrás tratando de pigmentar mis esculturas y cerámica con el Azul Maya. Tras cuatro meses de buscar la planta Ch´oj (Indigófera suffruticosa mil) al fin dí con ella. Cuando la encontré estaba en su período de floración y fruto, tuve que esperar a que los...
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Small Finds in the Collections of Maya Archaeological Assemblages of the BREA Project in Belize. (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation addresses data from the Maya “small finds” category in the laboratory assemblage of collected and excavated materials of the Belize River East Archaeology (BREA) Project, which beginning in 2011 has been documenting and researching the cultural and environmental history of the Belize River drainage, comprising Preceramic period land- and...
A Reexamination of the Distribution of Jade Artifacts at the Maya Site of Blue Creek in Northwestern Belize (2023)
This is an abstract from the "An Exchange of Ideas: Recent Research on Maya Commodities" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations at Blue Creek from 1992 to 2000 yielded a large collection of jade artifacts with approximately 900 artifacts being found in a single cache in Structure 4 and a total of nearly 1,500 artifacts recovered from throughout the site. In this paper, we revisit our interpretation of the social context of the Structure 4...
Regimes and the Classic Maya Market Economy “Writ Large” (2023)
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...