Maya: Classic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Flavio Silva De La Mora.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation centers on the daily life of Maya commoners from the Classic Maya site of Chinikihá in Chiapas, Mexico. The excavations are part of a regional effort to understand rural communities and social complexity. The presentation will offer an intimate view of the materiality of the daily life of non-elite groups from a domestic context, offering a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Patterson.

Analysis of human skeletal remains has made significant contributions to the understanding of the history of La Corona and its interaction with the wider Maya world. The skeletal sample has now grown to include nearly thirty individuals, and includes single and multiples burials, non-burial deposits, and individuals from the site center and outlying sites. The study, one of the most comprehensive in northwest Peten, has focused on establishing demographic information and examining osteological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Hannigan. Shintaro Suzuki. Felipe Trabanino. Boris Beltran.

Micro and macroscopic bioarchaeological analyses enable archaeologists to generate biological profiles of past individuals, including characteristics such as diet, sex, age, occupational stress, pathologies, and social status, among others. In this paper, we discuss the significance of a Maya individual by constructing a biological profile from both micro and macroscopic analyses. The individual of interest was excavated during the 2012 field season at Xultún, Guatemala in a patio situated in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sterling Wright. Nihan Kilic. Karissa Hughes. Nawa Sugiyama. Courtney Hofman.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Classic Period (AD 1-550), thousands of people migrated to the ancient city of Teotihuacan. This population growth forged Teotihuacan into a center for economic, political, and religious activities for the Mesoamerican region. While archaeological evidence has provided a wealth of information about the state, little is known about its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Hyde.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster details the findings of a contextual analysis of portable material culture, commonly referred to as “small finds” artifacts, collected from 2004 to 2019 at the hinterland Maya community of Medicinal Trail, located in northwestern Belize. The collection from Medicinal Trail comes from a variety of contexts, such as middens, burials, caches, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Mink. Anna Novotny. Gabe Wroble.

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. Bioarchaeological studies have taken a central role in developing our current understanding of the sociopolitical and economic organization of the ancient Maya. This is in large part due to advances in methods and theory that allow a deeper contextualization of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Miller.

This is an abstract from the "Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One might think that the 2013 publication of Miller and Brittenham on Bonampak would have closed discussion of these paintings for a few years. But the complexity and richness of the subject continues to yield both details and to add to the big picture of the three-room program of late 8th...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Fox. Jaime Awe.

Previous archaeological investigations of terminus groups in the Maya Lowlands concluded that these architectural complexes served either cosmological, ritual, or economic purposes. In an effort to test these models, we investigated causeway terminus groups at Cahal Pech and Baking Pot. Subsequent comparisons of the Cahal Pech and Baking Pot data with that from other sites in the Belize Valley, Caracol and Tikal, strongly suggest that while there was some regional diversity in the significance...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Mongelluzzo. Jose Garrido. Jean-Baptiste Le Moine.

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. An exploration of how modern borders of different kinds have influenced, and sometimes impeded, our understanding of ancient borders and territories. The Guatemala-Belize border has ramifications in terms of the ways in which scholars interact and how the archaeology is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Gregory Smith. Alejandra Alonso Olvera. Soledad Ortiz. Atasta Flores.

Social boundaries of the past and present are usually nebulous, contested, and fluid. In this paper we examine the ancient towns and villages between the two Maya kingdoms of Chichen Itza and Ek Balam in northern Yucatam. We hypothesize that the boundary area between these two cities in the 9th century AD was based on Classic Maya concepts of ruler-centered polities but changed dramatically in the 10th century as Chichen Itza became a fundamentally different kind of Maya city the likes of which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allan Cobb.

This is an abstract from the "Studies in Mesoamerican Subterranean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maya explored caves with torches and burned copal with wood fires during ceremonies. These activities, in a confined space such as a cave, used up oxygen and produced carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. The effects of high carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide on the human body are well studied by OSHA and documented in environmental and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Popovici.

Comalcalco displays a radical departure from traditional Maya building materials in its brick and seashell mortar construction instead of the paradigmatic Maya limestone. Incised animal, architecture, hieroglyph, and human forms adorn the brick slabs of principal buildings of Comalcalco’s ceremonial core. However, their inward-facing, or concealed, orientation rendered these markings invisible. Because monumental architecture benefited from the labor of non-elites, the purposeful placement of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Omar Alcover. Thomas Garrison. Stephen Houston.

In the last decade, archaeologist have successfully employed active remote sensing technologies, such as LiDAR, to identify ancient settlement in the Maya lowlands. Near the site of El Zotz in northern Guatemala, this technology has aided in the identification of fortresses, terraces, and a network of raised roads. Archaeologist who employ LiDAR focus principally on the structural data acquired from the LiDAR point clouds. Building on these methodologies, we assess the benefits of incorporating...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Norbert Stanchly. Jon Spenard. Terry Powis. Christophe Helmke.

The Terminal Classic period in the southern Maya Lowlands was one of great social transition, witnessing the disruption of long-standing economic systems, and the downfall of divine kingship. The manifestation of this "collapse" in the artifactual record has been well documented at many sites throughout the Belize Valley, yet how it does so at the site of Pacbitun, on the southern rim of the Belize Valley, remains poorly understood, in spite of nearly three decades of archaeological research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Spenard. Mike Mirro. Javier Mai.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Rio Frio Regional Archaeological Project (RiFRAP) 2022 Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve regional survey resulted in documentation of the Buffalo Hill Quarries (BHQ), the first recorded ancestral Maya granitic rock quarry with a ground stone implement workshop site. Preliminary investigations indicate a complex multicomponent quarryscape with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenichiro Tsukamoto. Fuyuki Tokanai. Toru Moriya.

This paper aims to refine the Maya chronology during the Classic period (A.D. 250-950) through the development of Bayesian models. In so doing, we combined radiocarbon dates with stratigraphic information, ceramic data, burials, and calendric dates from stone monuments. At the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry of Yamagata University, we ran 78 radiocarbon samples recovered from the Guzmán Group, an outlying group located 1.3km north of El Palmar in southeastern Campeche, Mexico. To...

DOCUMENT Citation Only L. Renee Hendricks.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper addresses the inclusion of women within Classic Maya works of art, consisting of, for this purpose, private-consumption ceramic vessels and large scale public monuments. Through the use of Feminist and Gender Theory, Performance Theory, and Iconographic Theory, the roles of women in iconographically depicted ceremonial performance is assessed. A...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ken Seligson. Tomás Gallareta Negrón. Rossana May. George Bey III.

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. This talk will present an overview of the Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project’s contributions to the study of Maya burnt lime production, drawing on a mix of excavation, archaeometric, and spatial data. As part of their extensive Kiuic-Labná intersect pedestrian survey, Tomás Gallareta Negrón and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sheldon Skaggs. Peter Cherico.

Recent investigations in a large, enclosed courtyard on the southwest corner of the ancient Maya site of Pacbitun, Belize, revealed evidence of successive emplacements of ritually important deposits. Initial analysis of the ceramic material suggests that the entire courtyard plaza has only one or two floors, with construction and use only during the Late to Terminal Classic period (600 – 900 CE). Five caches and two cyst graves were related directly to the plaza floor. The caches consisted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eugenia Robinson. Marlen Garnica.

Archaeological survey of Cakhay, the largest Classic site (200-800 A.D.) in the Maya Kaq’chik’el area, was carried out in 2017 by the Proyecto Arqueológico del Área Kaq’chik’el (PAAK). The goal of the survey was to determine the limits of the site and survey its periphery. Reconnaissance of 20 sq km found that populations were nucleated on the hillside surrounding the defensive and religious center with some look out sites in the periphery. Within the center and the nucleus of the site,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Krause. Timothy Beach. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach. Thomas Harold Guderjan. Fred Valdez.

In 2016 the Northwestern Belize Lidar Consortium acquired nearly 300 square km of LiDAR imagery that covers large areas of ancient Maya agricultural systems, including ditched and raised fields, reservoirs, terraces, and sacbeob. This new imagery allows us to map beneath the canopy and shows that over nearly 20 years without LiDAR we studied only a small spatial sample of these complex systems. We have tested these systems with multiple excavations, and used multiple proxies such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Audrey Smith. Claire Ebert. Brett Meyer. Julie Hoggarth. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For millennia dogs (Canis familiaris) have fulfilled various biological, functional, and companionship roles, yet their use and significance in Mesoamerica varied substantially through time. Previous studies of dogs in the Maya lowlands argued that human-canid relationships involved high levels of dog consumption, though zooarchaeology and epigraphic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron L. McNeil.

Pollen analysis of Classic-period temple and tomb spaces in Copan’s Acropolis revealed a range of plants important to ancient Maya ritual practice. Some of these species were not represented in macroremains in ritual or household contexts. Scholars have described temple spaces as thick with the odor of burned offerings and copal, but added to this would also have been the fresh and heady fragrance of blooming buds and greenery, adding a fecund perfume to the areas of ritual supplication. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Varela.

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mesoamerica is a region with highly biodiverse ecosystems, from temperate forests to tropical jungles, and where civilizations impacted the landscape in different ways. In several Mesoamerican cities, zooarchaeologists have found evidence for animal management and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Mirro. Jon Spenard.

Since 2010, a major focus of the Pacbitun Regional Archaeological project has been a regional ritual landscape survey surrounding. In 2016, Phase II of that subproject commenced, with significant efforts geared towards experimenting with digital mapping and documentation of surface archaeological features in four poorly understood caves, Crystal Palace, Slate Cave, Tzul’s Cave, and Actun Tokbe. In this paper, we discuss our work and offer some results from our Phase II investigations. In 2016,...