The Development and Resilience of Complex Polity in the Southern Maya Lowlands: A Decade of Research at Uxbenká, Toledo, Belize

Summary

The original goals of Uxbenká Archaeological Project were to understand the geopolitical history of the polity in the context of wider regional developments during the Classic Period. Long suspected to be the earliest complex polity in southern Belize had intrigued archaeologists for decades based on its prominent locations between the Petén and the Caribbean Sea as well as its long history of descendant communities farming lands around the archaeological ruins. From 2008-2015 the Human Social Dynamics project greatly expanded our understanding the ecological context of human occupations in the region. These studies included detailed landscape histories of occupations throughout the Holocene, the development of extremely high-resolution climate proxies from nearby caves, and expanded archaeological research into the sociopolitical development and decline of the polity and its associated settlement system. Parallel to these studies, ethnographic and human-ecological research in the local community detailed linkages between past and present and developed integrated educations programs in cultural and environmental heritage for children and adults.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studying Human Social Dynamics: A Case Study from Southern Belize   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 17108