Examining Early Maya Public Architecture at Gallon Jug, Belize

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent trends in archaeological research in the Maya lowlands focus on developing understandings of the nature of the entangled relationships between urban centers and peripheral populations. The Preclassic origins and development of centralized political authority at the urban center of Chan Chich in northwestern Belize is currently understudied in relation to its surrounding minor centers. During the 2018 field season, the Belize Estates Archaeological Survey Team began the first intensive investigations at the site of Gallon Jug, a minor center located in the northeastern periphery of Chan Chich. Following the distribution patterns of Preclassic material observed in preliminary testing conducted by Guderjan and colleagues (1991), testing uncovered a possible Preclassic structure beneath the western end of the site’s final-phase main plaza. This buried monumental platform provides a starting point for considering the form and function of early public architecture at this minor regional center and comparing peripheral public architecture’s formal and functional devices to the patterns observed in excavations of early phase architecture in the monumental site core of Chan Chich.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26045