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

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.