Maya: Preclassic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miguel García Mollinedo.

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. In the Middle Usumacinta region, located in southeastern Mexico, multiple standardized architectural complexes dated from the Middle Preclassic (1000–00 BC) have been detected with the use of lidar technology. Of these complexes, three belong to the Middle...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ulysses Salcido. James Brady. Guillermo de Anda.

This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Cultural Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Gran Acuífero Maya conducted preliminary excavations in the entrance chamber of Balamkú yielding a small but interesting ceramic assemblage containing sherds of large incensarios and large numbers of miniature vessels that generally parallel the material documented at Balankanche cave. The high incidence of both incensarios and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomas Barrientos. Ernesto Arredondo Leiva. Julia Guernsey. Diego López García.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The sculptural style known as potbelly (“barrigón”) has been widely documented in archaeological sites in the southern Maya region, from Chiapas to El Salvador, with a few examples in the Lowlands and other areas of Mesoamerica. However, most of these monuments are concentrated in sites occupied during the Late Preclassic period on the Guatemalan Pacific...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Schreiner.

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. Excavations over several decades in the Mirador Basin of northern Guatemala, combined with detailed experimental data, have revealed extraordinary use of lime products in the construction and maintenance of Maya causeways, architecture, and associated art. This paper will consider both the quantitative utilization...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Stuart.

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. The 1980s saw dramatic new insights into the decipherment of ancient Maya writing, much of it spurred by collaborations with my friend and colleague Steve Houston. One of these was the recognition of inscribed "name-tags" on various types of portable objects and monuments, serving to specify...

DOCUMENT Citation Only José De Calasanz Ligorred Perramon.

This is an abstract from the "2024 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Luis Barba" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En nuestra ponencia presentaremos el fruto de años de relación entre el Laboratorio fundado por el doctor Luis Barba, que fue nuestro profesor en los años ochenta cursando la licenciatura en Arqueología en la ENAH de la Ciudad de México. Desde entonces, nos asomamos como arqueólogos al patrimonio invisible y/o abandonado...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Jamison. David Mixter.

Monumental architecture and public spaces provide primary contexts for community ritual and social action. The process of construction of public architecture involves community cooperation and collective action, with the latter contributing to significant changes in the form and use of structures through time. The public architecture of Actuncan developed from the Preclassic period to constitute a nearly complete set of architectural forms devoted to ritual, administrative and community...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Munson. Jonathan Scholnick. Lorena Paiz Aragon.

Inequality is a prominent and persistent feature of all large-scale human societies that has significant impacts on everyday life. Variation in material wealth and social capital as well as differential access to specialized knowledge and other resources directly impacts household quality of life (QOL) within ancient and contemporary communities. For the ancient Maya, the establishment of political institutions centered on divine rulership significantly contributed to QOL changes during the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Burham.

This is an abstract from the "Theorizing Prehistoric Large Low-Density Settlements beyond Urbanism and Other Conventional Classificatory Conventions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maya site of Ceibal, Guatemala, became a preeminent center in the Pasión Region of the southern lowlands over the Preclassic period (ca. 950 BCE-350 CE). During the latter centuries of this period, minor temple complexes were built at regular intervals within the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Betsy Kohut. George J. Bey III. Tomás Gallareta Negrón.

In 1958, Brainerd first described "the earliest deposits yet to come from Yucatan"—composed primarily of narrow-mouthed jar fragments recovered from the lowest strata of excavations at the Mani cenote. This type, classified as Yotholin Pattern-Burnished, has a medium-fine paste and unslipped surfaces that had been smoothed or burnished in decorative patterns. Since then, similar wares have been recovered from Preclassic contexts at a number of other sites. Although Brainerd originally described...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Rafael McCormick Alcorta.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mikael Voltaire. Timothy Pugh.

This is an abstract from the "Hydro-Ecological System of the Maya in Petén, Guatemala" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. E-Groups in the Maya world are believed to have had ritual purposes, serving as meeting centers where political meetings or markets may have taken place. They are also believed to have celebrated solar cycles. At Nixtun-Ch’ich’ three or four E-Groups are aligned on the site’s east-west axis. Our excavation in one of the E-Groups...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Galvan. William M. Ringle. Betsy Kohut.

Previous investigations by the Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project demonstrated that the Valle de Yaxhom, in the Puuc region of Yucatan, was a significant locus of monumental construction during the latter Middle Formative and early Late Formative. Two large acropoli, the Acropolis Yaxhom and the Acropolis Lakin, were previously mapped and tested, but the nature of accompanying residential construction remained unknown. Two other sites with megalithic architecture, Nucuchtunich and Nohoch...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colin Doyle. Timothy Beach. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach.

This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lidar acquired in 2016 in northwest Belize revealed an expanse of ~7 km2 of ancient Maya raised fields and canals along the Rio Bravo floodplain near the ancient Maya site of Wari Camp. This is half of all the wetland field area found from lidar in this region. Excavations and multiproxy data provide the first...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Gill. Brigitte Kovacevich. Michael Callaghan.

In the late 19th century, explorers identified graffiti etched in stucco walls of residences, palaces, and temples in the Maya Lowlands. By the mid-20th century, scholars acknowledged that the ancient Maya produced these incised images. Today, archaeologists struggle with documenting these instances of graffiti with precision and accuracy, often relying solely on to-scale line drawings to best represent the graffitied image they see before them. These images can be complex, multilayered, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ricardo Rodas. Omar Alcover. Mónica Urquizú.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Entre los grupos mayas; fortalezas, armas, y sistemas de murallas defensivas nos indican lo común que era el conflicto en las relaciones sociopolíticas de estas comunidades. En las Tierras Bajas occidentales, fueron pocos los sitios que alcanzaron un alto grado de desarrollo convirtiéndose en grandes centros urbanos para el Clásico. Dentro de la región, una...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica MacLellan.

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. Recent investigations at the Karinel Group, an early residential area at Ceibal, Guatemala, show that the roles household rituals played in the development of complex societies varied across the Maya lowlands during the Middle Preclassic period (c. 1000-350 BC). In northern Belize, rituals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Griffin. Kelsey Herndon. Heather Hurst. Franco Rossi. Boris Beltran.

This is an abstract from the "Innovations and Transformations in Mesoamerican Research: Recent and Revised Insights of Ancestral Lifeways" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maya sites of San Bartolo and Xultun, Guatemala, provide compelling evidence for ancient Maya agricultural interventions and shifting perspectives about the regional ecological landscape. The first line of evidence is visual: murals there catalog political and religious...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Javier López Camacho. Luz Evelia Campaña Valenzuela. Kenichiro Tsukamoto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Proyecto arqueológico Entre bajos: Ichkabal y su entorno ha realizado intervenciones arquitectónicas en siete estructuras del Grupo Principal y excavaciones extensivas en la Plaza Poniente. En el entorno se verificó la imagen LiDAR en campo. Ichkabal se encuentra en el sur de Quintana Roo, México, a 11 km al oriente de Dzibanché. Destaca la Plaza...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clayton Meredith. Keith M. Prufer.

Derived from lipid-rich plant tissues (primarily leaf waxes), long chain n-alkanes are a durable organic biomarker whose relative abundance is used in paeloecological studies as a proxy marker of plant species composition, and as an indicator of biomass burning. Isotopic composition of individual n-alkane components preserves signals that reflect both hydroclimate and canopy height. These properties can be employed to examine spatially integrated signals of anthropogenic land clearance in lake...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dominique Rissolo. Jeffrey B. Glover. Travis W. Stanton.

Seminal and persistently relevant work by Ball has shaped and reshaped our understanding of Middle to Late Preclassic population movements on the Yucatan Peninsula and the establishment of local potting communities and traditions. Evidence of Middle Preclassic ceramic production in the northeastern-most Maya Lowlands had remained elusive until the mid 1990s. Early Nabanche affinities observed in the locally produced pottery of northern Quintana Roo suggested an expansion of peoples across the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Ebert. M. Kathryn Brown. Lauren Sullivan. Jaime Awe.

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. The Preclassic period (1200/1100 BC–AD 300) represents one of the most significant cultural transitions for lowland Maya societies. Over the course of ~1,500 years, communities settled permanently on the landscape, committed to agriculture, and began building monumental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Callaghan. Brigitte Kovacevich.

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. In this paper we present data from investigations of Group F, or the E-group complex at Holtun, Guatemala. Named for the group at Uaxactun where this specific architectural compound was first identified, the Holtun E-group contains a large pyramidal structure to the west and a range structure to the east. First believed to be celestial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Ingalls.

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. Evidence from the Mopan River valley continues to clarify the nature and extent of Preclassic occupation of the region. The hinterland community of San Lorenzo sits directly across the river from both Xunantunich and Actuncan, sites with substantial Preclassic construction and ritual use. Using data gathered from this ancient...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco Estrada-Belli.

The link between Lowland Maya ritual and power relations during the Preclassic period has been so far approached primarily through iconographic, burial and artifact data at the local scale. Very little evidence exists linking notions of political authority, ritual practices and landscapes at the regional level. Recent survey and excavation data from the Cival region of Northeastern Peten, reveals a vast and complex settlement pattern. The Preclassic Maya city of Cival was surrounded by a network...