Late Classic Household Ceramic Production at Uxbenká, Belize

Summary

Uxbenká, an Early Classic to Late Classic period Maya polity, is the most extensively excavated site in southern Belize. Recent ceramic analyses have succeeded in refining our understanding of the extent and duration of occupation at Uxbenká as well as its position in regional interaction spheres. Like other sites in the Maya Lowlands, we know very little about household ceramic production due to the lack of workshops and tools, probable seasonal production resulting in low volumes of finished products, and firing areas located outside structures where excavations are focused, making it difficult to identify these contexts in the archaeological record. Recent analyses of previously excavated ceramic and lithic assemblages from settlement groups located in the southwest periphery of Uxbenká’s hinterland revealed evidence of Late Classic (AD 600-800) household ceramic production. Evidence includes polishing stones, ceramic tools, and unifacially retouched chert flakes that may have been to scrape ceramic vessel walls. This poster presents the results of use wear analyses on ceramic production tools. These data, in concert with contextual and spatial data, provide information on household production and intracommunity interaction at Uxbenká.

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

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage