Making and Breaking Boundaries in the Maya Lowlands: Alliance and Conflict across the Guatemala–Belize Border

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Making and Breaking Boundaries in the Maya Lowlands: Alliance and Conflict across the Guatemala–Belize Border," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Pre-Columbian social ties, political alliances, trade networks, and migrations were oblivious to contemporary geopolitical divisions, such as those between Guatemala and Belize. While a good deal is known about the major political players during the Classic period, it is a continual effort to flesh out the many shifting political, social, and economic formations and fissures in the Peten–Belize area of the Southern Maya Lowlands. This session seeks to bring together collaborations across the Belize–Peten divide to better understand the dynamic ways ancient and historic period Maya boundaries of belonging were formed and broken. We emphasize, in particular, the ways in which such affiliations, conflicts, co-existence, and movements were constantly changing, and as such, symposium papers cover multiple periods of Maya history.