2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II
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 "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
The 2023 Fryxell Award for Earth Sciences scholarship is awarded to Dr. Timothy P. Beach, Professor and C. B. Smith Sr. Centennial Chair in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. The 2023 Fryxell Award is presented in the Earth Sciences category due to the generous support of the family of the late, great, geologist Roald Fryxell, who built his career on the interdisciplinary importance of the geological sciences in archaeology. This symposium, organized as part of the award, brings together a group of scholars working in diverse regions and fields, but all with a common goal of advancing archaeology through a rigorous earth science focus. Here we celebrate Tim Beach’s distinguished and ongoing research career. Tim Beach is an accomplished geoarchaeologist and his research focuses on the reconstruction of past land-use patterns, agriculture, and human-environmental interaction over many temporal scales using many methods. He has worked most recently on using innovative geoarchaeological techniques in the Maya Lowlands, but Tim’s talent is not contained to one region or method. To compliment and honor Tim’s ongoing work, we showcase advances in our shared discipline related to geoarchaeology, soils, geochemistry, and remote sensing science.
Other Keywords
Geoarchaeology •
Environment and Climate •
Landscape Archaeology •
Maya: Classic •
Wetlands •
Soils •
hydrology •
Paleoenvironments •
Maya •
Agriculture
Geographic Keywords
Belize (Country) •
North America (Continent) •
United Mexican States (Country) •
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 1-12 of 12)
- Documents (12)
-
The Anthropogenic Wetlands of Northwestern Belize: Decades of Research and New Horizons for Study (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is now clear that wetlands were critical resources for populations throughout human history in the Maya Lowlands of Belize and adjacent regions, and that these wetlands serve as important ecosystems and cultural heritage zones today. In northwestern Belize, decades of research have transformed our understanding of...
-
Broadscale Machine Learning Model for Archaeological Feature Detection in the Maya Area (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Comprehensive maps of ancient structures across the Maya area of Central America can help archaeologists to deepen knowledge of past settlement patterns and regional interactions, potentially leading to enhanced understanding of thousands of years of Maya civilization. However, most Maya archaeological sites are not...
-
Buried Soils and Human-Environment Interactions within the Three Rivers Region of Northwest Belize (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper reports on recent excavations from the Birds of Paradise wetland field complex where we studied an ancient ancillary structure situated among wetland fields along the lower Rio Bravo of northwest Belize. Here we synthesize previous studies from this broader wetland field complex that includes...
-
Continuity and Change on the Gobi Frontier: Geoarchaeology of Human Adaptations to Desertification in Southern Mongolia (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Northgrippian climatic stage of the mid-Holocene epoch in East Asia was marked by a period of pronounced warm/moist climatic conditions. This had a profound impact on the hydrology and vegetation in the northernmost region of the Gobi Desert located in southern Mongolia. Our geoarchaeological and archaeological...
-
Drought and Cultural Instability (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geologists and biologists work with archaeologists to address compelling questions about cultures of the past. Earth scientists who study tree rings, ice cores, speleothems, and lake sediment cores can provide information about the paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental contexts in which ancient cultures developed,...
-
Exploring Long-Term Environmental Dynamics and Human Transformation of Aquatic Spaces in Lake Texcoco, Mexico (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lake Texcoco was the largest of the five lakes that existed in the Basin of Mexico. Drained almost completely in the early 1900s, most of its western part has been occupied by Mexico City’s metropolitan area, though its eastern part remains undeveloped, which permits exploring the prehistory of the lake. In addition...
-
Exploring the Effect of Ancient Landscape Modifications on Current Vegetation Structure in the Rio Bravo Conservation Area, Belize (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Airborne laser scanning (ALS), also referred to as lidar, has enabled archaeologists, geologists, geomorphologists, and many others to identify and map ancient modifications of the landscape under dense forest canopies. The impact of ALS in archaeological settlement research has been profound and, to some, even...
-
Morgantina's Lost Port: Geoarchaeological Insights into the Paleohydrology of Central Sicily (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient city of Morgantina is today located deep in the dry Sicilian interior, more than 50 km from the sea’s edge and the expansive maritime networks of the Mediterranean. Yet, despite the site’s remote inland location, there is ample archaeological evidence that in antiquity Morgantina enjoyed the status of an...
-
Reconstructing the Ancient Maya Wetland Fields of the Central Rio Bravo, Belize (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lidar acquired in 2016 in northwest Belize revealed an expanse of ~7 km2 of ancient Maya raised fields and canals along the Rio Bravo floodplain near the ancient Maya site of Wari Camp. This is half of all the wetland field area found from lidar in this region. Excavations and multiproxy data provide the first...
-
Revisiting the Laguna Tortuguero Paleoenvironmental Record in Puerto Rico: New Data for an Old Record (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I present an interpretation of a 5 m sedimentary sequence from Laguna Tortuguero, Puerto Rico, based on new radiocarbon dates, X-ray diffraction, magnetic susceptibility, and carbon isotope data. I also highlight the merits of revisiting old but significant paleoenvironmental records to understand past...
-
Searching for the Early Archaeological Record in the Big Bend Region of Southwest Texas: A Lithostratigraphic Approach (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the 1930s and 1940s, Kirk Bryan and Claude C. Albritton Jr. studied the stratigraphy of late Quaternary alluvial fills in the Chihuahuan Desert of the Big Bend region, southwest Texas. A significant outcome of that work was the recognition of three stratigraphic units that were differentiated based on...
-
A Thousand Years of Wetland Management at Hacienda Zuleta in the Ecuadorian Andes (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nestled within a deeply incised valley in the eastern cordillera of the Andes, the archaeological site of Zuleta is an immensely humanized hydrologic landscape. A complex network of perennially and seasonally wet streams and canals crisscross the pastures along the valley floor carrying water from the paramo to the...