Maya: Preclassic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robin Robertson.

Joseph Ball has devoted his professional career to masterfully determining how the ceramic complexes at one site related to those at another, generating models for Maya movements and prehistory from the identified similarities or differences between them. Following his example, this paper proposes to take the data from Cerro Maya in Northern Belize and correlate it with other sequences in the region to produce a carefully researched sequence for the region with specific attention to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maia Dedrick. Luke Auld-Thomas.

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers the development of agriculture and society in northeastern Yucatán, Mexico, drawing on evidence from lidar imaging, paleoethnobotany, and isotopic studies. We focus on geological features known as dolines, sinkholes, or rejolladas—round, low areas that dot the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Fisher.

Tzacauil is a small archaeological site in the hinterlands of Yaxuná, a major center in the central Yucatán region of the northern Maya lowlands. Excavations of Tzacauil’s nine house groups suggest that a community formed here twice: first during the Late Formative period (250 BCE – 250 CE) and again in the Terminal Classic period (700 – 1100 CE). Both of these occupations coincide with population peaks at nearby Yaxuná. Judging by the ample open spaces surrounding the site’s house groups,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mallory Melton.

This paper uses macrobotanical and microbotanical remains to investigate the impacts of developing sociopolitical complexity on the foodways of Middle Preclassic inhabitants of the Pacific coast of Guatemala. I use these datasets to explore how urbanization affected food-related practices of residents of La Blanca (900-600 BCE). Macrobotanical remains from house floors facilitate comparisons between elite and commoner foodways, while starch grains and phytoliths extracted from grinding...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Borislava Simova.

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. One of the earliest known examples of permanent architecture in the Maya Lowlands, a distinctive plaza-structure complex known as an E Group, is also one of the most commonly encountered architectural groups present within Preclassic sites throughout the region. The rapid adoption of permanent architecture and widespread...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nadia Neff. Keith M Prufer. Geraldine Busquest-Vass. Erin Ray. Seth Newsome.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The middle-late Holocene in southern Belize saw shifts in subsistence strategies, including the introduction of managed plants and animals. Botanical and stable isotope data have been used to track the introduction of agricultural products into human diets, with maize first consumed before 7,000 cal. BP. However, the timing of the introduction of managed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam King. Terry Powis. Jaime Awe. Gyles Iannone. Nilesh Gaikwad.

While absorbed residues are widely used to explore subsistence-related questions, more recent work has used them to examine the use of elite and ritual beverages. In this paper, we explore absorbed residues found in ceramic containers and bone tubes recovered from caves, burials, and caches in the Belize Valley. The ceramic vessels presumably held liquids consumed or otherwise used in rituals in these settings, while the bone tubes delivered substances to participants in those rituals as enemas....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Guernsey. Kathryn Reese-Taylor.

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. Acts of deliberate fragmentation characterize tuber cultivation. Root plants rarely produce seeds, so new tubers develop by fragmenting the stem and inserting the severed portion into the ground, from which new tubers develop. Evidence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evan Parker. George J. Bey III. Tomás Gallareta Negrón.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Jade tadpole spoons and clamshell pendants represent some of the most symbolically charged items of wealth and power in formative Mesoamerica. The Tzimin jades are a newly discovered cache of these items from the Middle Preclassic (900 BC—350 BC) Maya village of Paso del Macho that offer additional context for assessing the function and significance of jade...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Milan Kovac.

In the beginning of the 20th Century Uaxactun was considered to be the cradle of the Maya civilization. Later, other monumental Maya centers were found and scholars lost interest for Uaxactun. The former popularity of Uaxactun was interpreted as just a coincidence because the first large excavations were carried out there. Newly identified important Maya sites were considered to be older and more interesting. The new archaeological project in Uaxactun has dealt with the Preclassic horizon of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon Plank. Rafael Burgos. Scott Hutson. Yoly Palomo. Miguel Covarrubias.

In the Late Preclassic and Classic periods, several sites in the center of the northern Maya lowlands constructed buildings with distinctive megaliths. Izamal was the largest of these sites by far, and connected itself to other important sites with stone causeways that stretched up to 30 km long. Ucí, located approximately 35km to the northwest of Izamal, had its own long distance causeway which linked it to three smaller sites with monumental architecture. This paper combines data from two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nobuyuki Ito.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En la Costa Sur de Mesoamérica, se han descubierto numerosas estelas esculpidas. Sin embargo, solamente una docena de estas se registró dentro de un contexto arqueológico del período Preclásico. No obstante, en esta región se localizan dos sitios que poseen estelas con las fechas calendáricas más tempranas del Bak’tun 7, como Chiapa de Corzo y El Baúl,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Zygadlo Vera.

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. Nixtun-Ch'ich', a Middle Preclasssic settlement along Lake Peten Itza is known for its city organization. Nixtun-Ch'ich' has been surveyed in a variety of ways including a theodolite with an electronic distance measurement (EDM), total station, lidar, and photogrammetry. These various maps of Nixtun-Ch'ich' show how the central...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Burham.

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. Excavations and geospatial analyses of outlying residential settlement at Ceibal, Guatemala, shed light on the relationships between ritual and urbanization during the Preclassic period. The site epicenter, which consists of an E-Group assemblage carved out of bedrock, was established around...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barry Kidder. Jacob Welch. Scott Hutson. Shannon Plank.

Often overshadowed by the splendor of massive monumentality to the south, Late Preclassic life in the Northern Maya Lowlands is a period of material and social experimentation, a balancing act between emerging social differentiation and an ideology of communal integration. During the latter half of this period, the secondary site of Ucanha in Yucatán was physically integrated into a micropolity via an 18-km long sacbe and experienced the creation of integrative civic spaces, a population apogee,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicaela Cartagena. Sheldon Skaggs. Terry Powis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological site of Pacbitun is located in west central Belize between the ecozones of the Belize River Valley and the Mountain Pine Ridge. The ancient Maya occupied the site from the beginning of the Middle Preclassic (900 – 300 BC) and continuing through the Terminal Classic (AD 800-900). The use of geographic information systems (GIS) is becoming...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrien Martinet.

This is an abstract from the "Materials in Movement in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Usulután wares are ubiquitous throughout Central America during the Late Preclassic period. These ceramics likely originated in eastern El Salvador and quickly spread to neighboring regions of western Honduras, forming the so-called Uapala Ceramic Sphere. Recent Investigations suggest that this Sphere covered a larger area than...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Davis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Usulután is a type of resist-decorated pottery which was a prominent component of the ceramic assemblage for many Late Formative archaeological sites in the Southern Maya Region. Originating in Western El Salvador, this resist decoration is found on serving wares across Mesoamerica. This paper presents the results of compositional analyses of Usulután...

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

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent research has demonstrated that Handheld (portable) X-ray fluorescence spectrometers (pXRF) have difficulty in consistently and accurately determining chemical composition of non-homogenous cultural materials such as ceramics. This is unfortunate as pXRF instruments have proven to produce accurate and consistent compositional data for other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Dalton. F. Kent Reilly III.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The iconographic corpus of the Taino cultures has been the focus of recent scholarship, yet as a whole remains understudied within Caribbean archaeology. Scholars in the past attempted to demonstrably link the Taino to the Late Postclassic Maya with limited success. However, Yucatecan influences are evident within the spatial layout of Taino ceremonial...