Maya (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucia Henderson.

The site of Kaminaljuyu experienced intensive ideological and material cultural change from the Preclassic through the early Classic period. Certain artistic forms and ideological precepts, however, simultaneously demonstrate remarkable continuity. This talk focuses specifically on public messages communicated through stone sculpture as well as, to a lesser degree, messages communicated by elite and royal funerary contexts in order to access continuity and change in Kaminaljuyu’s archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Orsini. Carolyn Freiwald. Keith Prufer.

Very little is known about Paleoindian and Archaic subsistence strategies of the people of Mesoamerica prior to the development of ceramics as food processing, storage, and serving containers. Rockshelters with good preservation and stratigraphic deposits can provide excellent contexts for a comparative faunal analysis though time. We examine subsistence patterns using the faunal remains from the Maya Hak Cab Pek (MHCP) rock shelter in the Toledo District of southern Belize before and after the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rafael Cobos.

The ancient city of Chichén Itzá reached its apogee as a regional capital in the tenth century. Part of this apogee included the territorial hegemony that Chichén Itzá exerted over a vast area of the maritime coasts of the Yucatán peninsula and Belize. By controlling the coasts, Chichén Itzá maintained strict authority over the different objects and merchandise that were distributed and exchanged throughout the maya lowlands in the Terminal Classic period. In order to control the distribution...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Leight. Christina Halperin.

One of the striking features of contemporary Maya textiles is that their production techniques and aesthetics can be highly regionalized. These textiles manifest strong village, town, and community identities while simultaneously reproducing other identity formations (e.g., gender, ethnicity). Likewise, Classic period Maya (ca. 300-900 CE) political formations were highly regionalized with multiple, shifting centers of gravity. Nonetheless, relatively little is known about the variability of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dante Garcia. Guillermo De Anda.

According to the ceramic evidence that came out of the Chichen Itzá sinkholes or "cenotes" it seems the ancient Maya offered into these wells important quantities of pots and very unique ceramic vessels within a very specific period of time, and under very specific situations. The evidence indicates that most of the ritual activity occurred approximately between AD 900-1100, a time that coincides chronologically with the end of the Terminal Classic Period, the rise and subsequent abandonment of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Meierhoff. Joel W. Palka.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the ancient Maya city of Tikal, Guatemala, was briefly re occupied by Yucatec refugees fleeing the Caste War of Yucatan. The Tikal village was poised on the confluence of the frontiers of Mexico, Guatemala and British Honduras, as well as the belligerent Santa Cruz Maya from Yucatan. Despite the limited presence of settled European diasporas in the northern Petén, colonial institutions were still able to reach indigenous communities seeking refuge...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Miller.

This paper presents new spatial and cultural data on the Maya archaeological site of Coba. As part of the Political Interaction Project of Central Yucatán, we have piloted a new investigation on the political, social, and economic relationship between the two Maya cities Yaxuna and Coba. These two cities are connected by the longest sacbe in the Maya region, Sacbe 1, stretching 100 km across the peninsula. Understanding the relationship between these two cities will require a multi year and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Rowe.

The punk ethos is alive and well in collaborative archaeology, even if it is rarely acknowledged. Like punk, collaborative archaeology is committed to social change, minimally by giving voice to and enabling the participation of previously marginalized people in archaeological investigations. The types of on-the-ground operations involved with collaborative projects take more time and resources, and can be slower to produce the types of insights common in more traditional approaches to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan ONeil. Charlotte Eng. John Hirx. Diana Magaloni. Yosi Pozeilov.

This paper features the Maya Vase Research Project, a collaboration of LACMA’s Conservation Center and the Art and the Ancient Americas Program, which is studying Classic-period Maya ceramics in the LACMA collection. The project’s first phase was to perform digital technical imaging, comprised of photography in different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, starting in the visible and expanding from X-rays to the Infrared, including ultraviolet visible induced fluorescence. Digital rollout...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roberto Lopez Bravo. Elizabeth H. Paris.

Despite the sociopolitical instability and depopulation observed at numerous sites in the Southern Maya Lowlands during the 9th century A.D., often referred to as the "Maya Collapse," numerous politically and geographically peripheral sites do not show evidence of these characteristics. Many of the small cities and towns of the Central Highlands of Chiapas maintained their roles as political centers throughout the Late Classic-Early Postclassic period transition, and also experienced demographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Kaeding.

The frontier location of the Spanish colonial province of Beneficios Altos, Yucatan provides a unique case study for investigation into the lives and strategies of colonial Maya individuals and communities. Given their proximity to a notoriously porous southern border and the documented record of significant numbers of people who escaped colonial authority by crossing that border, those communities and individuals living within the boundaries of Beneficios Altos can largely be considered to have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaylee Spencer. Maline Werness-Rude.

Ancient Maya builders working in the Northern Lowlands often introduced and distributed columns throughout the architectural volumes they created in a way that distinguished them from their southern neighbors. While northern column usage served pragmatic needs by being load-bearing and facilitating entrance and egress, we explore the possibility that selection and placement of structural supports also seems to have functioned in a highly ideological fashion. We will use case studies from sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aviva Cormier.

The northeastern Petén of Guatemala is an ideal area for applying stable isotope analysis to reconstruct past population histories and to explore the interplay of migration and social complexity throughout the rise of the Maya. The strontium and oxygen isotope analysis of dental enamel is a productive alternative when bone collagen is not available or is severely altered by taphonomic processes or conditions of preservation. These isotopic analyses of dental enamel can be combined with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only M. Kathryn Brown. Jason Yaeger.

Twenty five years have passed since Linda Schele and David Friedel presented their thoughts on the origins and establishment of the institution of kingship in their book "A Forest of Kings." Their historical reconstruction of Cerros illustrates the steps taken by early rulers to establish and institutionalize a hierarchical social system. Through the empirical data from Cerros, they artfully illuminate how the construction and display of symbols of royal power on monumental buildings coupled...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Collins.

Through hieroglyphic, historical, and ethnographic documentation, the act of ensouling and cleansing an architectural space is a well documented ritual activity practiced among Mesoamerican cultures. Acts that commemorate space, whether marking renewal or termination, often leave traces. As can be attested archaeologically, the trace evidence commemorative acts are often visible on several surfaces in an architectural sequence, speaking both to the continuity and disjuncture in such practice....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Eppich.

The ceramic database from El Perú-Waka’ contains the record of the production, distribution, consumption, and disposal of some 50,000 sherds and 200 whole vessels. Patterns and fine details of the Classic Maya economy emerge from this expansive dataset. These include, but are not limited to, the marketing distribution of monochrome ceramics and the redistributive gifting of high-quality polychrome vessels. Unexpected patterns appeared as well, such as the apparent autarky of monochrome blacks in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Lentz. Venicia Slotten.

Archaeological investigations at Cerén, a Classic period Maya site in western El Salvador, have unearthed an abundance of carbonized bean remains, both Phaseolus vulgaris and P. lunatus. Surprisingly, the Cerén P. vulgaris bean remains were derived from both wild and domesticated populations. This find reveals that the Late Classic inhabitants continued to draw upon wild food sources even though they had clear access, as seen in the Cerén paleoethnobotanical record, to a full array of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanley Walling. Travis Cornish. Chance Coughenour. Jonathan Hanna. Christine Taylor.

A number of seasons of research at the site of Chawak But’o’ob in the southwestern outskirts of the city of Dos Hombres have revealed an architecturally humble community characterized by dense habitation and extensive landscape modification as well as domestic and public ritual. The evidence suggests that the inhabitants of this farming community had an eye toward symbolism in decisions they made about the disposition of domestic and public structures as well as the manipulation of water and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Brown.

A unique building (Structure 12) excavated during the early 1990’s was interpreted as a divination house serving individuals living in the agricultural community of Cerén, based on its unusual architectural features and enigmatic artifact assemblage. The latter was composed of bits-and-pieces of mostly broken, worn, or repurposed items, some of which showed physical evidence suggesting they were collected from a discard context or dated to an earlier time period. The similarity between this...

PROJECT Kara Fulton.

This research examines the relationship between the ways in which urban families engaged local landscapes and the development of shared identities at the prehispanic Maya city of Actuncan, Belize. Such shared identities would have created deep historical ties to specific urbanized spaces, which enabled and constrained political expansion during the Terminal Classic period (ca. A.D. 800–900), a time when the city experienced rapid population growth as surrounding centers declined. This research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edy Barrios. Cameron L. McNeil. Mauricio Díaz. Antolín Velásquez. Walter Burgos.

Recent and ongoing research at residential groups at the sites of Río Amarillo and Quebrada Piedras Negras are providing a better understanding of the lives of commoners and of the population dynamics during the Late Classic through the Postclassic period in this area. These sites share the second-widest pocket of the Copan River Valley, and lie in the middle of one of the main trade routes between Copan and Quirigua. The excavations and mapping of the household groups distributed in this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Thompson.

This paper compares two ancient Maya centers in the Toledo District of Belize, Central America. The two Classic Period (AD 250 – 800) Maya polities of Uxbenká and Ix Kuku'il are located ~ 7 km apart in the southern foothills of the Maya Mountains. Ongoing work at Uxbenká suggests that it is both the earliest established, and longest occupied site in the southern Belize region. Thorough radiocarbon dating and ceramic sequencing by the Uxbenká Archaeological Project has resulted in a detailed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Macrae.

Tropical environments are defined by a shared suite of climatic and environmental variables. These unifying characteristics led past archaeologists to delineate these regions as incapable of fostering state level civilizations. These interpretations presumed a lack of resources required to support agricultural production at the level obligatory for the urban centers that define states. Modern studies in tropical ecology question this perspective by identifying a high degree of localized resource...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Gust.

In this paper I compare the working conditions and cultural material found at a cluster of three sites in the northeast corner of the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula, to those at San Pedro Siris in the Cayo District of then British Honduras. The people in both areas contended with more militant Maya groups that were unhappy with improved relations with Mexican and British Honduran authorities respectively. Similar workplace dangers confronted both the lumber workers at San Pedro Siris and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valorie Aquino. Douglas J. Kennett. Yemane Asmerom. Keith Prufer.

In studies of human-environment interactions, the conceptual framework of panarchy and its associated resilience theory posit that periods of stability and transformation are inevitable in what has been termed an "adaptive cycle". This presentation discusses the reconstruction of a community-level political adaptive cycle for Uxbenká, an ancient agrarian polity in the Maya hinterlands, and explores its linkages with the broader political ideology of divine kingship and climate stress. Employing...