Mesoamerica: Maya Lowlands (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Farquharson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we provide a re-evaluation of the relationships between Calakmul and surrounding subsidiary centers, offering a novel approach in understanding Calakmul’s role within the region during the Late Classic period (AD 650-850). This study is based on new lidar and survey data from southern Campeche, Mexico, which enhances our understanding of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Citlali Tierney.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Biocultural investigations of sex-based differences in social roles of ancient societies of the Maya Lowlands from the early Holocene foragers to late Holocene farmers have been constrained by major gaps in the archaeological record, primarily due to the absence of preserved human remains from the earliest periods in this region. The exceptional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cynthia Bello-Hernandez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The discovery of two cremation burials at the Maya site of Ucanal, Guatemala in 2019 and 2022 is significant as this practice remains extremely rare during the Classic period (250–950 CE) in the Southern Maya Lowlands. One of the burials, Burial 20-1, was unusual in that it contained four individuals, exhibiting varying degrees of thermal exposure that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Scholnick.

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. Previous investigations at Altar de Sacrificios by Harvard University in the 1960s uncovered 140 individuals from diverse residential and ceremonial contexts concentrated around the site epicenter. Recent excavations by PAALS have increased this sample to over 200 individuals from more dispersed spatial contexts in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ignacio Lerma.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sihó, is a Maya city in the northwest of the Yucatán Peninsula, which had its apogee during Late and Terminal Classic Periods (ca. 600-900 A.D). Research developed in the last twenty years suggests that the settlement was the center of a royal dynasty and was inhabited by a complex and multistratified society. The horizontal excavations of eight...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Chávez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maya archaeology has historically been an exclusive discipline, often closed off to Indigenous people, nonacademics, and the general public. Originating in the colonial period, it initially focused more on the extraction and collection of “treasures” rather than sharing knowledge. In recent decades, archaeologists have made significant progress in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Thomson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Based on a previous Microsoft Access database created to organize data from the Michigan State University Bioarchaeology Laboratory, this project expands on the foundational elements of data management to enhance the accessibility, identifiability, and searchability of burial records, while incorporating visual data comparison. Utilizing an ArcGIS system...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaxson Brewer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We examine the architectural and artifactual patterns distributed across the Postclassic city of Mayapan (A.D. 1150-1450), located in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, by analyzing artifacts recovered from middens throughout the city. We synthesize data collected by the Carnegie Institute, which conducted extensive mapping and excavation at Mayapan during...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Mixter.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Maya Lowlands, water is a precious but fickle natural resource. Too little water shrivels crops and leads to hunger, while too much water washes away fields and houses, transforming the land to mud and misery. To help manage these challenges, some ancestral Maya captured water into reservoirs, holding excess for times of need. Unlike at some Maya...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Beach.

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. The view of archaeology from Fred Valdez in the lineage of his advisor Gordon Willey at Harvard allowed for a big tent archaeology that included ecology and technology of past societies. Our work in the Three Rivers transboundary region has fit into that part of the science and humanity of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Levi.

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. Hinterland is one of the most under-interrogated constructs in lowland Maya archaeology. At best, it is used to designate areas between large precincts of monumental architecture, and therefore implies notions of architectural scale as well as physical and social distance. At worst, it is conflated...