Mesoamerica: Maya Lowlands (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Dennis Baldwin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ancient Maya founded a civilization that endured for thousands of years in the tropical environment of southern Mesoamerica. A century of research in this region has revealed complex water management systems near urban centers designed to capture and store vast quantities of water and possibly provided aquaculture. Over the last decade with growing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Enrique Hernández.

This is an abstract from the "From Origins to Collapses:  New Insights in the Cultural and Natural Processes of the Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin is located in the south of Campeche, Mexico and north of Petén, Guatemala. For the territory of Guatemala, it has been identified that the settlement of many sites was carried out in the Middle Preclassic, but the peak of cities such as El...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brett Meyer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many models have been proposed to explain the disintegration of Classic Maya polities including those based on climate change, inter-site competition, warfare, and environmental degradation. It is now clear, however, that multiple simultaneous factors were involved, and the combination of factors varied from one region to another during the Late to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Tran.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The traditional Maya milpa forest garden is an asynchronous c. 20-year field-to-forest cycle based on the opening of a “milpa” field to cultivate annual plants for around four years for managing the perennial regeneration of useful mature forest. The mosaic of horizontal and vertical habitats offers the constant availability of household products...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rissa Trachman.

This is an abstract from the "Sessions in Honor of Dr. Fred Valdez Jr. and His Contributions to Archaeology, Part 1" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding households and communities and their relationships to nearby cities is a topic of great interest. Investigations in and around the ancient city of Dos Hombres is an example of multi-scale analysis in northwestern Belize. Community level social, political, and economic organization are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sheila Ward.

This is an abstract from the "Sessions in Honor of Dr. Fred Valdez Jr. and His Contributions to Archaeology, Part 1" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The book Heterarchy, Political Economy, and the Ancient Maya, edited by Scarborough, Valdez, and Dunning, argued that local natural resources shaped distinctive local communities of the ancient Maya, which, in combination, could have produced different regional political economies. Thus to understand...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Faizan Khan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study examines the intricate suburban landscape of the Maya civilization, focusing on neighborhood patterns by comparing structures and resource areas. The research takes place around the ancient Maya city of La Milpa in Belize and relies on a lidar survey for identifying features (such as structures and resource areas) and subsequent analysis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard George.

This is an abstract from the "Northern Belize Archaic Period and Sahara Dust" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Trans-Atlantic dust events from the Sahara Desert have wide-reaching impacts on the environment across the Americas, but how the phenomenon exerted influence on the settlement history of people in the Maya region has largely remained understudied. Recent excavations and surveys by the Belize Archaic Project in the Progresso Lagoon Region...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manda Adam.

This is an abstract from the "Sessions in Honor of Dr. Fred Valdez Jr. and His Contributions to Archaeology, Part 1" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the summers of 2023 and 2024, new archaeological efforts were undertaken at the ancient Maya sites of Colha and Tzak Naab in northern Belize. At Colha in 2023, a Postclassic (1000-1500 CE) midden was uncovered and magnetometry surveys were completed in the main plaza and south of the main plaza...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jean Pike.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Both the nature and the extent of Chaco Canyon’s connections to Mesoamerica have long been debated. While the presence of Mesoamerican cacao, macaws, and copper bells at Pueblo Bonito has demonstrated Mesoamerican interaction, source locations for these items have not been fully determined. Aztec West is a large twelfth-century Chaco-style great house...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach.

This is an abstract from the "Sessions in Honor of Dr. Fred Valdez Jr. and His Contributions to Archaeology, Part 1" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Thirty-year normals are statistical units used for hydroclimatological monitoring. They run for 30 Water Years (1 October through 30 September) representing statistically coherent temporal data sets. The most recent 30-year normal period was 1991-2020, and we have just entered a new normal of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Dunning.

This is an abstract from the "Sessions in Honor of Dr. Fred Valdez Jr. and His Contributions to Archaeology, Part 1" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the early 1990s, Fred Valdez, Vernon Scarborough, Nicholas Dunning and others initiated a project examining ancient Maya land use in the Programme for Belize including several small bajos. These karst depressions are common physiographic features within the Elevated Interior Region (EIR) of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Panos Kratimenos.

This is an abstract from the "The Maritime Maya: Current Archaeology of Coastal Yucatan, Mexico, and Belize" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Precolumbian Maya site of Marco Gonzalez, located at the southern tip of Ambergris Caye, is significant in appearing to have weathered the storm of the so-called Terminal Classic ‘Collapse’. While transformations abounded, unlike many other inland sites, Marco Gonzalez persisted into the ‘Postclassic’,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Graham.

This is an abstract from the "The Maritime Maya: Current Archaeology of Coastal Yucatan, Mexico, and Belize" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. "No sólo comercio sino también poder” was the title of a paper Graham presented at the Congreso de Mayistas in Izamal in 2016 and expanded on in Kyoto in 2017. The core problem, however, remains unsolved and worth investigating: What was the role of the commercial classes in the Maya dynastic collapse and in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Dudgeon.

This is an abstract from the "From Origins to Collapses:  New Insights in the Cultural and Natural Processes of the Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. pXRF elemental source analysis was conducted on a sample of 990 obsidian artifacts curated in the Foundation for Anthropological Research and Environmental Studies collections in Guatemala. The majority of the artifacts analyzed were from El Mirador, with additional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robyn Dodge.

This is an abstract from the "Sessions in Honor of Dr. Fred Valdez Jr. and His Contributions to Archaeology, Part 2" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper reflects on research, pedagogy, and life lessons from Dr. Fred Valdez, Jr. His lifelong commitment to archaeology, teaching, mentorship, and scholarship will be emphasized, but are too numerous to name in this context. His many contributions to ancient Maya commoner theory and social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Angell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2001, members of the Actuncan Archaeological Project have driven down the Callar Creek road and glanced with only partial attention at mounds in the surrounding cow pastures of Clarissa Falls ranch. The project had long had its eyes and trowels across the river, at the major Preclassic Maya ceremonial center of Actuncan, Belize. Informal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mario Borrero.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Terminal Classic (approximately AD 790-900) marked a time of significant social and political upheaval for Maya society. The site of Nim li Punit, located in southern Belize, experienced significant changes during the Terminal Classic period, ultimately leading to its abandonment by around AD 830. While we can note the overall effects of these major...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Irene Holst.

This is an abstract from the "Repositioning Altar de Sacrificios on the Ancient Maya Landscape" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maya site of Altar de Sacrificios is uniquely situated where the Chixoy/Salinas and Pasión rivers meet to form the Usumacinta. A focus of the Altar de Sacrificios Archaeological Project is the way ancient peoples adapted to this unique setting, including how the site settlement changed as the river systems shifted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Nowakowski.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ongoing excavations at Xunantunich aim to deepen our understanding of Group C as a center for specialized knowledge and training. Previous research revealed large, vaulted range structures, C-2 and C-3, featuring high benches, incised Patolli boards, and outward-facing doorways. Proximity and architectural connections suggest these atypical residential...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Mauricio.

This is an abstract from the "From Origins to Collapses:  New Insights in the Cultural and Natural Processes of the Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Como resultado del hallazgo de varias cabezas de estuco modelado en una de las trincheras de saqueo en la estructura principal del Grupo Casa del Coral, El Mirador, Petén. Se han llevado a cabo investigaciones intensivas y extensivas en la estructura principal del grupo...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allan Ortega-Muñoz.

This is an abstract from the "The Maritime Maya: Current Archaeology of Coastal Yucatan, Mexico, and Belize" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Palaeodemograhic analysis has been a useful tool to understand the evolution and adaptability of ancient populations. Because, historically, the small number of individuals exhumed in archaeological surveys along the coastal sites in the peninsula of Yucatan, the application of this methodology have been hard...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vera Tiesler.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Investigations in Maya Archaeology, Epigraphy, Bioarchaeology, and Zooarchaeology by the Holmul Archaeological Project in Northeastern Peten, Guatemala" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Permanent Maya dental crafting reached an all-time high in visible results and technical sophistication by the Early Classic period, where thousands such permanently inscribed modifications have come to light in burial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Glover.

This is an abstract from the "The Maritime Maya: Current Archaeology of Coastal Yucatan, Mexico, and Belize" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Proyecto Costa Escondida (PCE) has been conducting interdisciplinary research along the north coast of Quintana Roo, Mexico since 2011. Project members have focused on the two ancient Maya port sites of Vista Alegre and Conil. Both have occupations stretching from the Middle Preclassic to the Historic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Munson.

This is an abstract from the "Repositioning Altar de Sacrificios on the Ancient Maya Landscape" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> Although the site of Altar de Sacrificios was originally investigated during the first half of the 20^th century, it has largely been excluded from contemporary narratives about ancient Maya society. Recent research conducted by the Proyecto Arqueológico Altar de Sacrificios (PAALS) aims to reevaluate its...