Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

How can people create communities that are long-lived? This is the overarching research question that drives the Aventura Archaeology Project’s investigations at Aventura, Belize, which has been a place of human activity for over 5,000 years, from the Late Archaic to historic and contemporary periods. In this session, we focus on a part of Aventura’s long history, the households of the ancient Maya city of Aventura. We present new excavation, survey, lidar, and analytical research designed to address sociopolitical, economic, and environmental issues related to Aventura’s long-term history. From 2014 to 2023, project members investigated 12 households across a 1 km2 area around the city, revealing new information about the diversity and daily lives of residents and the role they played in maintaining and shaping their community over the long term. We highlight Aventura’s households during the Middle to Late Classic population maximum as well as those in the smaller Terminal Classic and Postclassic communities. We conclude by considering how questions of households and community longevity are as central for building collaborative archaeologies with local communities and addressing questions relevant to the contemporary world as they are for understanding the past.

Other Keywords
Maya: Classic • Household Archaeology • Paleoethnobotany • Landscape Archaeology • Ceramic Analysis • Maya: Postclassic • Lithic Analysis • water • Environment • Chronology

Geographic Keywords
Belize (Country) • United Mexican States (Country) • North America (Continent) • Peten (State / Territory) • Yucatan (State / Territory) • Orange Walk (State / Territory) • Cayo (State / Territory) • Corozal (State / Territory) • Belize (State / Territory) • Stann Creek (State / Territory)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-13 of 13)

  • Documents (13)
Documents
  • Analysis of Plant Remains from Aventura, an Ancient Maya Site in Northern Belize (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Detwiler. David Lentz.

    This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents an analysis of botanical remains recovered from archaeological contexts at the Aventura site, located in what is now northern Belize. A total of 478 large carbonized plant fragments, 167 flotation samples, and 10 eDNA samples were included in this analysis. Samples were recovered from a...

  • Aventura: An Introduction (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Cynthia Robin.

    This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Urban households anchor the first decade of research at the Maya site of Aventura, Belize, situating the daily lives of the city’s heterogenous residents. They also illuminate social, political, economic, and environmental factors that enhanced life in the community. Summarizing research results of the Aventura...

  • Aventura’s Households from Commoners to Elites (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Hoover. Maria Cunningham. Erin Niles. Cynthia Robin.

    This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Household archaeology provides a powerful lens to understand people, their daily lives, and the myriad social, political, economic, and environmental relations that link people, households, and communities to broader societies. For its first decade of research, the Aventura Archaeology Project conducted a study...

  • Aventura’s Watery Landscape: Communities of People, Water, Houses, and Ancestors (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kacey Grauer.

    This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Water was essential for the longevity of ancient Maya cities, and Aventura was no exception. The site’s watery landscape consists of pocket bajos, defined as karstic depressions less than 2 km2 in area. While they are seasonally inundated today, this paper presents data from excavation, oral histories, and...

  • Community and Collaboration at Aventura (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sylvia Batty. Josue Ramos. Antonio Beardall. Debra Wilkes Gray. Cynthia Robin.

    This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With a five millennia history spanning forager-horticulturalist, precolumbian Maya, historic, and contemporary periods, Aventura is a community with a long history. The Aventura Archaeology Project addresses community at many levels, in its study of the past and in its collaboration with local cultural heritage...

  • An Elite Household in the Late to Terminal Classic Periods at Aventura (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Dziki. Martin Menz.

    This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines an elite household, Group 48, at the site of Aventura, Belize. Group 48 is located east and adjacent to Group C, one of the six adjoining plaza groups that form Aventura’s city center. It is also situated at the north end of an intersite causeway and adjacent and south of the proposed salt...

  • Health, Mobility, and Burial Practices: Lifeways and Deathways at Aventura, Belize (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Moles.

    This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human remains are found in a variety of contexts at Aventura: as primary burials below the floors of houses, as secondary burials or caches also below the floors, and even in middens. The preservation of the bone is very poor and therefore the recovery of individuals is often less than 25%. This sometimes makes...

  • Household Pottery from Aventura, Belize (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Debra Walker.

    This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Household pottery from recent excavations at Aventura informs our current understanding of life near Chetumal Bay, its resilient villagers situated within a larger boom-and-bust economy. Although Preclassic pottery has been found near bedrock in some household excavations, construction began in earnest about...

  • A Human Geography of Aventura: Lidar and Settlement Survey (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kat Fitzgerald. Kacey Grauer. Zachary Nissen. Cynthia Robin.

    This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A human geography perspective provides our broadest lens to envision the entwined relationships of people, communities, and environments at Aventura. Drawing from an 18 km2 lidar survey and 1 km2 pedestrian survey, this paper presents a human geography of Aventura that links people, settlement, agriculture,...

  • Preliminary Analysis of Flaked and Ground Stone from Aventura, Belize (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucas Martindale Johnson.

    This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Household investigations at Aventura recovered several primary stone materials common in northern Belize and elsewhere in the Maya Lowlands. Chert and chalcedony is common as well as a high relative proportion of obsidian indicating households had reliable access to tool stone. Ready and reliable access...

  • Reconfiguring Communities in the Postclassic at Aventura (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Eponine Wong. Kacey Grauer. Zach Nissen. Debra Walker.

    This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent excavations have revealed that Postclassic Aventura was a very different place: both reverentially remembered and a home. In this paper, we review the evidence for human activity during the Postclassic period at Aventura. From identifications of Late Postclassic incensario fragments in surface material...

  • Urban Commoner Households: (In)Equality and Daily Life at Aventura (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Nissen.

    This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cities are locations of diverse human interaction where persons from different families and social affiliations can gather, exchange goods, and participate in community events. However, the management of these diverse interactions and activities requires social and political systems that do not value the...

  • Zooarchaeological Explorations at Aventura, Belize (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Kinney. Erin Kennedy Thornton.

    This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the results of a broad zooarchaeological analysis conducted on remains recovered from a variety of contexts at the ancient Maya community of Aventura (Corozal, Belize). Because this is the first analysis of faunal remains from Aventura, it provides valuable information about life in the...