Landscape Archaeology in Northern Belize: The Need for a Critical Reassessment

Summary

Michael Smith and Katharina Schreiber note that, "For the Classic Maya, studies of sacred landscapes are dominated by research on caves." Unfortunately, northern Belize lacks large caves that have attracted archaeological interest and no large cave survey has been conducted in the region. Lacking such studies, archaeologists appear to be at a loss on how to engage sacred landscapes. An underappreciated aspect of the Petexbatun Regional Cave Project was its articulation of an explicit model of the general principles on which ancient Maya landscape was conceptualized. The California State University, Los Angeles Archaeological Field Program has applied this model to three studies in northern Belize at Maax Na, Chawak But’o’ob and La Milpa. This presentation discusses the nature of sacred landmarks in the region which abound in the karstic landscape and provide surface archaeologists with abundant opportunities for empirically documenting the sacred landscape within their site boundaries.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Caves, Sinkholes and Chultuns: New Evidence for the Importance of Earth Openings in Ancient Mesoamerica Religion   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage