Maya: Classic (Other Keyword)
826-850 (857 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnohistoric accounts from highland Guatemala allude to surveillance systems and their personnel forming part of the integrated defense of Maya political territories during the Late Postclassic period, prior to the Spanish arrival in 1524. Recent lidar-driven archaeological research in the Maya Lowlands suggests that...
Water for the Keep: Hydrological Flow and Accumulation (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. This paper will present the final results and interpretations of data collected from La Cuernavilla’s aguada. Special emphasis is placed on new data collected through several types of soil and geoarchaeological analyses that crucially supplement the data that have already been presented. Previous presentations on this topic...
Weapons of the Sun: Centipedes and Fire Serpents in the Art and Symbolism of Ancient Mesoamerica (2018)
In a myth that provided a charter for Mexica domination of Central Mexico, the deity Huitzilopochtli defeated his foes with a spear-thrower in the form of a fire serpent, or Xiuhcoatl. While Huitzilopochtli was a being unique to the Mexica, the Xiuhcoatl is generally considered to derive from an earlier entity referred to as the Teotihuacan War Serpent. Although the influence of Teotihuacan symbolism on later cultures of Central Mexico is undeniable, the portrayal of solar deities with...
What a Cache! Ritual Activities at the Medicinal Trail Community, a Small Rural Maya Site in Northwestern Belize (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the 2023 field season, excavations uncovered evidence for ritual activities at Group M of the Medicinal Trail Hinterland Community, an ancient Maya farming village in northwestern Belize, near the political center of La Milpa. Initial survey and brief excavations from the 2017 field season indicated the group was atypical of architectural groups...
What Lies Beneath: The Significance of a Midden Burial in Exploring Differential Mortuary Treatment of the Maya at Palenque (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The PREP: Urban Life at Palenque Project 2023 field season brought about unexpected findings regarding household mortuary practices. Two atypical burials were uncovered: (1) an isolated, articulated right arm boxed-in by large stones at the entrance of residential structure J37; and (2) a complete primary burial discovered on the south side of the same...
What Once Was Lost, Now Is Found: Investigating the Relationships of Lower Dover in the Belize River Valley (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located on the Belize River across from Barton Ramie, preliminary investigations of the recently discovered site of Lower Dover began in 2010. The primary foci of excavations were to situate Lower Dover in the sociopolitical landscape of the Belize River Valley. Initially, investigations focused on the monumental architecture of the site’s epicenter, as well...
What's in That Incense Burner? A Study of Residues at Balamku (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Studies in Mesoamerican Subterranean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is so widely accepted that the Maya burned copal incense in their rituals that the assumption has gone unquestioned. During the 2018 season, the Gran Acuífero Maya Project began a multi-year investigation of the cave of Balamku near Chichen Itza. The cave contains a large number of incense burners filled with burned material that...
What’s in a Name: Caches, Offerings, and Problematic Deposits from the Medicinal Trail Hinterland Community, Belize (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations between 2004 and 2019 at the Medicinal Trail Hinterland Community in northwestern Belize have uncovered numerous special deposits from a variety of contexts including caches, termination offerings, exposed offerings, and problematic deposits (PDs). Caches and the offerings have been reported on extensively and are generally understood to have...
When Do We Eat? The Life Cycle of Indigenous Maya Food-Plants and Temporal Implications for Residential Stability (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For Maya agriculture, both ancient and modern, it is known that a wide range of time is needed between planting and harvesting of various plant species. While annual crops require less than a year to reach full productivity, perennial crops, particularly tree-crops, might require many years to begin production, and even longer to reach full productivity....
When Irish Eyes View Maya Classic Period Political Systems (2018)
Several debates have endured for decades within the field of anthropological archaeology as to the character of lowland Classic period Maya political organization. Scholars have been struck by the contrast between Maya regal-ritual centers possessed of impressive monumental architecture with the minimal references from the documentary record to any kind of bureaucratic organization. There is disagreement as to the scale of the larger Maya polities and whether or not some polities had begun to...
When You’re Feeling Blue: Maya Blue Fibers in Dental Calculus of Sacrificial Victims (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. Surveyed in 2008–2010, Midnight Terror Cave contains the comingled remains of at least 118 Maya sacrificial victims from the Classic period (250–925 CE). Although previous studies have shown Maya populations to have high dental caries rates and enamel hypoplasia corresponding with weening, the Midnight Terror collection does...
When, Where, and Wahy: Wielding the Wahy Over Time at El Zotz (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Celebration and Critical Assessment of "The Maya Scribe and His World" on its Fiftieth Anniversary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In “The Maya Scribe and His World,” Michael Coe published some of the first detailed photographs of a series of vases depicting ghoulish, supernatural characters identified by the Maya as “wahy.” With names like “Deer Death,” “Head Louse Spider Monkey,” and “Red Bile Death,” Coe and...
Where the Temple Meets the Road: Salvage Burial Excavation in San Ignacio, Cayo District, Belize (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. No country is immune to crumbling infrastructure and (un)predicable weather that exposes archaeology. How we deal with these sudden assemblages and how we use the information gained from these quick and limited excavations can be a place of growth in our field. This can be most crucial in salvage burial excavations. The biological, especially the human,...
Whose Land? Governance of Land Tenure, Property, and Inequality in the Maya Lowlands (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The role that governance and property regimes play in the everyday life of citizens is something we grapple with, actively or passively, every day. In the archaeological record, these topics often prove challenging to evaluate without written records. However, using robust survey data from settlements and civic-ceremonial/administrative architecture...
Whose Lime Is It Anyway? Burnt Lime as Commodity in the Classic Period Northern Lowlands (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. Burnt lime (calcium hydroxide) has been crucial for architectural, dietary, and other purposes in Maya society since as far back as the Formative period. The recent identification of hundreds of pit-kilns used for lime production in the Puuc region of the Yucatán Peninsula allows for an investigation of the socioeconomic...
Why Do Pictures Speak? Orality in Maya Hieroglyphic Writing (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. This paper investigates the relationship between Classic Maya text, imagery, and genre when quoted speech is introduced. Quotes can be attributed to speakers through “speech scrolls,” the quotative evidential particle, or the verb meaning “say.” When the latter two are used, they...
Witz Naab and Killer Bee Revisited: New Interpretations of Two Salt Mounds in Paynes Creek National Park, Belize (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Underwater Maya: Analytical Approaches for Interpreting Ancient Maya Activities at the Paynes Creek Salt Works, Belize" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Witz Naab and Killer Bee mounds are some of the few remaining onshore remnants of the Paynes Creek salt works. In this presentation, we will reexamine the interpretations of two salt mounds at the Paynes Creek Salt works. These excavations are part of a larger NSF...
Women Elites in the Royal Court of Tonina, Chiapas (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Archaeological Investigations in Chiapas, Mexico" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. New hieroglyphic and iconographic evidence allows us to preliminary reconstruct women’s political hierarchy inside Tonina’s royal court during the Late Classic period. As it is well known, parentage statements are very scarce in the inscriptions of Tonina and limited to maternal ancestry. Aside from the importance of local female...
Women’s Dress in Ritual and Non-ritual Contexts (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Role of Women in Mesoamerican Ritual" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dress is an important way people interact with others. Modern concepts of dress include the entire body and how people adorn or change it. Maya rituals use specific sets of dress elements to convey not only what is happening but also to ensure the ritual was done correctly. After a brief review of women’s dress, I identify dress in ritual and...
Woot There It Is: Ground-Truthing LiDAR Survey Results at El Peru-Waka’, 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. In 2016, a 91 square kilometer lidar survey was completed of the region surrounding the Classic Maya center of El Peru-Waka’, as part of the PACUNAM LiDAR Initiative. Visual analysis was then conducted from 2017-2018 by members of the Waka’ Archaeological Project (PAW) to identify new and previously recorded structures and other settlement features visible in...
"The World is a Garden": Human-Animal Relations and Sustainability Comparative Studies of Classic Maya and Early China (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The interactions among organisms along with environmental factors in non-Western cultures, require to be re-examined since Western humanity-nature binary explanations fail to take into account indigenous ontologies. In the title, I prioritize environment among these three objects because I want to demonstrate that it is a prerequisite, helping shape the...
Xibalba in Technicolor: The Popol Wuj and the Interpretation of Ancient Maya Art (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Celebration and Critical Assessment of "The Maya Scribe and His World" on its Fiftieth Anniversary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An enduring contribution of “The Maya Scribe and His World” was Michael Coe’s call for attention to the Popol Wuj as a source for the interpretation of ancient Maya deities. Developed in subsequent works, this approach has yielded important insights on ancient Maya art and religion, and...
The Yaxhom Valley Survey II (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The second season of the Yaxhom Valley survey, conducted during the summer of 2018, continued its assessment of LiDAR imagery collected by an NSF-sponsored mission flown over the eastern Puuc region of Yucatan, Mexico. Our focus shifted to Muluchtzekel, which LiDAR revealed to be the dominant site of the entire valley. We covered approximately one square...
You Better Be-Leaf It: Microbotanical Remains Found in Dental Calculus of Individuals from Actun Kabul, Belize (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dental calculus (DC), the mineralized plaque or tartar on a tooth’s surface, is formed and fossilized during life. Foodstuffs and medicinal plants that people interact with in life can be caught in the DC matrix. Because DC fossilizes during life, researchers can decalcify DC and analyze the microbotanicals, proteins, and aDNA trapped inside....
Yucatec and Gulf Coast Influences in Terminal Classic Western Belize: Examining the Evidence and Processes for Change (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 I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations in western Belize have recorded a growing body of evidence that is indicative of non-central lowland Maya influences in this Maya subregion during the Terminal Classic period. Evidence for Yucatec and non-Maya influence in the...