Maya: Preclassic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Zygadlo.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Research in the Petén Lakes Region, Petén, Guatemala" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. New archaeological survey technologies have transformed the way in which sites are mapped. Nixtun-Ch’ich’ in Petén, Guatemala, has been surveyed in a variety of ways including a theodolite with an electronic distance measurement (EDM), total station, lidar, and photogrammetry. This paper aims to compare various mapping...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angelyn Bass. Heather Hurst.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2001, rarely preserved Maya murals were discovered at the site of San Bartolo, Guatemala. Subsequent archaeological excavations revealed an elaborate artistic program of wall paintings and numerous hieroglyphic texts buried in successive architectural phases dating from ca. 400-100 B.C. The corpus of paintings found within the Las Pinturas pyramid includes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Arroyo. Felipe Trabanino. Eleanora Reber. David Lentz.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Investigations carried out in recent years in various sectors of the Kaminaljuyu site have revealed relevant aspects of the use of local plants, their control, and distribution. Analysis of residues in ceramics allows us to know some data....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Belen Mendez Bauer. Verónica Vázquez López. Takeshi Inomata. Daniela Triadan.

This is an abstract from the "Aguada Fénix and the Middle Usumacinta Region: Interregional Interactions and Social Transformations in the Middle Preclassic Period" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among the many Middle Preclassic sites in the Middle Usumacinta region, Aguada Fénix is, by far, the largest and possibly one of the oldest. A large, rectangular platform was built at its center, measuring 1,400 × 400 m. The construction of this artificial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela Triadan. Takeshi Inomata.

This is an abstract from the "Aguada Fénix and the Middle Usumacinta Region: Interregional Interactions and Social Transformations in the Middle Preclassic Period" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recently discovered site of Aguada Fenix in eastern Tabasco, Mexico is one of the largest monumental constructions in Mesoamerica. It was built in a standardized architectural pattern that we call the Middle Formative Usumacinta Pattern (MFU). Its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Verónica Vázquez López. Daniela Triadan.

This is an abstract from the "Preclassic Maya Social Transformations along the Usumacinta: Views from Ceibal and Aguada Fénix" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Aguada Fénix, located on the San Pedro River in northeastern Tabasco, Mexico, was recently discovered by the Middle Usumacinta Archaeological Project through LiDAR mapping. The site layout corresponds to what the project has defined as the Middle Formative Usumacinta Pattern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edgar Carpio.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years the rescues carried out in Guatemala City, specifically between zones 7 and 11, have uncovered several deposits containing huge amounts of obsidian artifacts. During the excavations of the Lake Miraflores project located on the San Juan causeway, zone 7, a huge deposit containing thousands of obsidian artifacts was uncovered. This deposit...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaitlin Ahern.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the summers of 2018 and 2019, the author collected 19 lime plaster floor samples from the ancient Maya sites of Cival, Holmul, and Witzna. These three sites are located in the Holmul region, which is situated in the Petén along the border with Guatemala and Belize. The majority of the plaster samples were collected during the Holmul Archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katelyn Bishop.

This is an abstract from the "Holtun: Investigations at a Preclassic Maya Center" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Holtun is a civic-ceremonial center located in the Petén region of Guatemala, occupied from the Late Middle Preclassic to the Terminal Classic period (600 BCE–900 CE). Excavations conducted between 2010 and 2017 have resulted in a mid-size vertebrate faunal assemblage and a large archaeomalacological assemblage, including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George J. Micheletti.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ritual and its practice were essential mechanisms for negotiating social identity, status, and political involvement for all members of ancient Maya society. Yet, changes to ritual practices through time are often framed around the legitimization of royal elite, reifying traditional models of dominant ideology. Identifying how ritual of periphery...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa DeLance. Jaime Awe.

Archaeologists working in Mesoamerica frequently encounter construction fill within architecture. Construction fill has been variously used as a tool for determining architectural construction sequences, as a resource for seriation dating, and occasionally as a context for radiocarbon deposits. Although much information can be gleaned from examining construction fill, material culture found within such fill is frequently mentioned in passing as little more than refuse, if it is mentioned at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Whitney Lytle.

This is an abstract from the "The Preclassic Landscape in the Mopan Valley, Belize" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancestor veneration was a cornerstone for Maya social organization and vital to the maintenance of hierarchy. As the Maya became more politically and socially complex, ritual practices involving ancestors also rose in complexity. Critical to the concept of ancestors is the recognition of the bond between ancestors and spaces. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Hutson.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican Population History: Demography, Social Complexity, and Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research in northwest Yucatán, Mexico, has played a large role in the development of demographic archaeology in the Maya area, beginning with Edward Thompson’s nineteenth-century investigations of housemounds at Labna and reaching a mid-twentieth-century pinnacle with maps of Mayapan and Dzibilchaltun. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Molly Corr.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Environmental DNA (eDNA), or the genetic material obtained from sediments, ice, or water, is a relatively new and untapped methodology in archaeology. This technique provides important insight into the biodiversity of different plant, animal, and microbial communities, positioning archaeologists to understand human-landscape interactions of the past...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Thornton. Richard Hansen. Edgar Suyuc-Ley.

The site of El Mirador (Petén, Guatemala) is among the largest Preclassic settlements in the Maya lowlands. The site has attracted attention due to its size and antiquity, but also for its location within a region containing few permanent or perennial water sources. This study summarizes current zooarchaeological evidence from the site to assess past diet, habitat use, environment, and exchange. Comparative analysis demonstrates that the inhabitants of El Mirador conformed to certain widespread...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Carr. Jeffrey Brewer. Nicholas Dunning. Kathryn Reese-Taylor. Armando Anaya Hernández.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lidar has dramatically expanded our view of the ancient Maya landscape. We have used lidar to study the key natural resources of limestone and chert- their location, extent, and relationship to other ancient Maya features. Limestone was a key building material and chert was the source for most chipped stone tools. Lidar-derived imagery and hydrological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynneth Lowe. Emiliano Gallaga. Emiliano Melgar Tísoc.

This is an abstract from the "And They Look into the Mirror for Answers: Mirror Analysis to Understand Its Holder" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Smith and Kidder were among the first to highlight pyrite prehispanic mirrors as “marvels of painstaking craftsmanship” (1951: 44). These mirrors presented a reflective surface consisting of 20–50 pyrite tesserae with beveled edges, perfectly cut, and average 2 mm in thickness. The first known examples...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Vadala.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study uses a modified actor-network approach to examine and characterize the human and nonhuman relationships that produced and shaped ancient Maya caches and the corresponding ritual events wherein they were buried. This contrasts with archaeological approaches that have generally focused on defining essential properties of artifacts to define or clarify...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Saldana. James Brady. Christian Mora.

This is an abstract from the "Defining Perishables: The How, What, and Why of Perishables and Their Importance in Understanding the Past" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Variations in the deposition of maize remains have been noted in different Maya caves. These vary from the discovery of small immature cobbs, 3 to 5 cm in length, which appear to represent first fruit rituals to large deposits of mature cobbs in ritual contexts that appear to have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Pugh. Evelyn Chan Nieto. Jemima Georges. Gabriela Zygadlo.

This is an abstract from the "The Past, Present, and Future of Water Supplies" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent work at Nixtun-Ch’ich’, Petén, Guatemala has revealed several artificial ponds. Many of the pools occurred naturally but were enhanced through the construction of floors and walls and the manipulation of groundwater flow. Some of the pools contained large ritual deposits, including ceramic sherds, animal bones, greenstone objects,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edgar Ortega. Gustavo Martinez.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Multidisciplinary Investigations in the Mirador Basin, Guatemala" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En la última década, el Proyecto Cuenca Mirador ha trabajado en el Grupo Cascabel ubicado al norte de la gran plaza principal del sitio El Mirador. Su meta ha sido la investigación arqueológica y consolidación arquitectónica de varios edificios de este grupo para conocer los aspectos constructivos de épocas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Dalton.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Multidisciplinary Investigations in the Mirador Basin, Guatemala" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Subterranean chambers known as chultuns or chultunob exist in great numbers in sites throughout the Maya world, with over 300 being found in the city site of El Mirador alone. Although seemingly ubiquitous, the function of these structures has yet to be fully understood, with a variety of uses having been proposed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mallory Melton.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rulership in Mesoamerican societies was inextricably tied to generative aspects of agriculture. Becoming a focal point for the maintenance of cosmological order provided a pathway for asserting control of aspects of the natural world, like...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Dunning. Armando Anaya Hernández. Jeffrey Brewer. Christopher Carr. Nicolaus Seefeld.

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. The Elevated Interior Region of the Maya Lowlands, including the area surrounding the sprawling Bajo el Laberinto, faced acute water availability issues that necessitated the annual capture and storage of rain water to support urbanization. Two large urban areas dominate ancient Maya settlement...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Brewer. Nicholas Dunning. Shane Montgomery. Nicolaus Seefeld. Christopher Carr.

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. Calakmul is known to be one of the largest ancient Maya urban centers in the Elevated Interior Region of the Maya Lowlands. Thus, it is not surprising that in this water-challenged environment, the population of Calakmul invested in some of the region’s grandest reservoirs. While limited...