Maya: Classic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Hruby. Jaime Awe. Christina Halperin. Catharina Santasilia.

This is an abstract from the "Ceremonial Lithics of Mesoamerica: New Understandings of Technology, Distribution, and Symbolism of Eccentrics and Ritual Caches in the Maya World and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Two recently discovered ritual deposits from the eastern Maya Lowlands seem to reveal similarities in the kinds of eccentrics used in Late Classic Maya caches from different political centers. Upon closer examination, however, they...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine C. Dixon. Payson Sheets.

The Loma Caldera eruption of c. AD 660 dramatically buried a sophisticated community built by craftspeople, architects, religious specialists, political leaders, and agriculturalists. As people fled for their lives, they left behind belongings and buildings. Results from decades of archaeological research at Cerén, El Salvador and in the surrounding Zapotitán Valley challenges an ethnocentric, over-simplified reconstruction of ancient socio-political organization. Cerén was not in the middle of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wilhemina Colón Loder. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach. Timothy Beach.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Wetlands played a crucial role in the subsistence methods of early complex polities, including the ancient Maya. The scale of canal development in the Birds of Paradise wetland field complex reflect the status, technological power, and agronomic wealth that wetlands provided to the ancient Maya in this region during the Maya Late Preclassic to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Miller.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster offers an introduction to the Proyecto Sacbe Yaxuna-Coba, which is concerned with understanding how social and material life changed for people living along the longest causeway in the ancient Maya world. Up until now, much of the research on Maya sacbeob has focused on the morphology and spatial layout of these monumental features. This project,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teegan Boyd. Roxanne Mayoral. James Brady. Michele Bleuze.

This is an abstract from the "Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Subterranean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Commingled, fragmentary assemblages of skeletal remains present many complications for analysis; however, there is still much information to be gleaned from the study of them. An example of this is the skeletal assemblage from Cueva de Sangre in Guatemala, an extensive, 3.5km long cave system; its use has been ceramically dated from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Brady. Melanie Saldana.

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. Archaeology has had an ambivalent relationship with the constructed subterranean dating back more than a half century. In the late 1960s, Good and Obermeyer investigated the cave at Oxtotipac, recognized it as man-made, and documented the fact that the material removed in the creation of the cave was used to construct a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Castillo Acal.

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. Archaeological investigations in the Bolonchen district have as one of their goals the understanding of the variation of the natural resource exploitation by the ancient settlers in the region. An approach that has been a relevant for reconstruction of the landscape and prehispanic forest management is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Payson Sheets. Christine C. Dixon.

Volcanic preservation allows for detailed reconstructions of a variety of social relationships and material boundaries at Ceren. Service relationships are inferred from proximity of households associated with special-function structures, such as the religious complex, the sauna and the community governance center. These data show a social function of providing service relationships from each household to the community. Socioeconomic functions are also evident in the form of other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dylan Clark.

This is an abstract from the "Place-Making in Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities Past and Present" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mesoamerican ports were not only settings for exchange but also communities with residential populations and dynamic shared identities that contributed to both coastal and inland cultural landscapes. Ancient ports commonly incorporated a variety of sacred architecture and symbolism to accommodate visitors from distant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miriam Judith Gallegos Gomora. Ricardo Armijo Torres.

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. En territorio tabasqueño se han identificado tres tradiciones de figurillas desarrolladas a lo largo del período prehispánico. A partir de las colecciones de sitios excavados en las llanuras aluviales tales como Jonuta o Comalcalco y sus alrededores, la evidencia sugiere que durante el...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shane Montgomery. Armando Anaya Hernández. Nicholas Dunning. Kathryn Reese-Taylor.

This is an abstract from the "New and Emerging Perspectives on the Bajo el Laberinto Region of the Maya Lowlands, Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ongoing archaeological investigations in the Bajo el Laberinto region, bolstered by advances in aerial laser scanning technology, have begun to offer a clearer indication of how the ancient Maya manipulated their environment to manage food, water, and soil insecurities. Multiple lidar campaigns...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diane Slocum. Jaime Awe.

Xunantunich, an ancient Maya site in the Belize Valley, rose rapidly from a minor political center to a powerful regional polity during the Late Classic period (AD 600-900). Previous researchers suggested that this rapid rise was influenced by Xunantunich’s relationship with the more powerful polity of Naranjo in the nearby Petén Province of Guatemala. Their argument was based in part on a Late Classic period building program at Xunantunich resulting in a site layout that resembles that of sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Jackson. Joshua Wright. Linda A. Brown.

Archaeologists routinely engage with concepts of space and materiality as we inscribe meanings onto the architecture and objects left behind by past peoples. However, in doing so, we bring explicitly modern sensibilities to our interpretations. In this paper, we consider alternative interpretations of space and materiality as described by Classic Maya people (250-900 CE). We ask: In what ways do categorizations and interpretations of space at Maya archaeological sites change when traditional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia McAnany.

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. Theory—the workhorse of evidence—is a powerful engine that can revolutionize understanding or create a huge misstep. To theorize the past is to generalize principles and processes of human practice that surpass cultural boundaries. By participating in these larger networks of meaning,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Yaeger. Bernadette Cap. M. Kathryn Brown. Rachel Horowitz.

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. Archaeologists working in Belize have made signal contributions to our knowledge of Maya economies and their relationships to political processes and dynamics. In this paper, we examine the ways that archaeological research at Maya sites in Belize has advanced our understanding of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Holley Moyes. Jaime Awe. Christophe Helmke. Jon Spenard.

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. Throughout the Maya area, caves are recognized as unambiguous ritual contexts that provide scholars with a glimpse into the ritual life of ancient people. Religious ritual was not epiphenomenal as some theoretical stances would argue, but was intertwined with the social and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Zender.

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. Paleography (from Greek παλαιό- ‘old’ and γράφε ‘writing’) was long understood as the study of the origins and development of signs (e.g., De Montfaucon, Paleaeografica Graeca, 1708), but since the welcome focus on ductus (i.e., shape, stance, and stroke-order in sign-formation)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Halperin. Jose Luis Garrido Lopez. Miriam Salas. Jean Baptiste LeMoine.

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. The Maya archaeological site of Ucanal is located in Peten, Guatemala, close to the contemporary border with Belize. In Pre-Columbian times, the site also sat at the borders of some of the largest political centers, such as Caracol (Belize) and Naranjo (Peten, Guatemala)....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Novotny.

This is an abstract from the "Cooperative Bodies: Bioarchaeology and Non-ranked Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In ancient complex societies, unique social strata had differential access to food resources and likely relied on different food procurement strategies to meet their needs. This paper explores the extent to which cooperation was part of that strategy for the ancient Maya farmers of the Chan site, located in the Belize River...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Brady. Ann Scott.

This is an abstract from the "Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Subterranean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Petexbatun Regional Cave Survey, working for three seasons from 1990 – 1993, was the largest cave project ever conducted in the Maya area. While investigating 22 caves and 11 km of passage, the survey collected a large assemblage of human skeletal material that had the potential for clarifying the nature of human remains in caves....

DOCUMENT Citation Only David McCormick.

Procurement, production, and distribution of raw materials loom large in discussions of prehistoric economies. Over the past three decades surface survey and excavations in and around the Late Classic polity of Cotzumalguapa revealed the presence of several obsidian dumps, the result of a large-scale lithic industry. These deposits contain production debitage from most phases of blade-core reduction but no nodules and relatively very little cortex, suggesting that obsidian came into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edy Barrios. Cameron L. McNeil. Mauricio Díaz. Walter Burgos. Antolín Velásquez.

Cities and the communities in their hinterlands are inextricably linked, and yet the objectives of their inhabitants can be starkly different. The archaeological sites of Río Amarillo and Quebrada Piedras Negras shared a fertile plain along the Río Amarillo and Río Blanco Rivers. Several scholars have suggested that the arable fields here may have acted as a bread basket for the urban center to their west. Research at Rio Amarillo has yielded evidence of strong ties to Copan including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cady Rutherford. Marisol Cortes-Rincon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Economic integration in hinterland communities has often been under theorized in Maya studies. Here I explore the evidence of craft production in several hinterland households as well as the implications for connections with social, political, and economic institutions. Households make decisions about crafting activities and respond to risks and stressors both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Sullivan. Kenichiro Tsukamoto. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dispersed urban landscapes are mosaics of individual interactions generated through a range of social and economic processes. Large-scale lithic production provides a lens for understanding the interconnected nature of economies between hinterland communities and central polities, yet it remains relatively underexplored in Classic period Maya society (AD...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Gregory Smith. Alejandra Alonso Olvera.

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. This paper discusses chert crafting at the site of Santa Cruz in northern Yucatan. Santa Cruz was a small town located only about 25 km from both Chichen Itza and Ek Balam and occupied almost exclusively during the Late/Terminal Classic period when both these cities were at their height. Surface collections in 2017 and...