A Tale of Two Cities: Holtun, Holmul, and Permeable Ceramic Boundaries between Guatemala and Belize

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Making and Breaking Boundaries in the Maya Lowlands: Alliance and Conflict across the Guatemala–Belize Border" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this paper we use frequency distributions of ceramic types and modes to identify and assess the presence and strength of permeable ceramic boundaries between sites in the northeastern Peten and west central Belize in the early Middle Preclassic through Postclassic periods. We use the data to argue there was no immutable geographical, social, or political boundary between Guatemala and Belize, but there existed a series of temporally and geographically specific permeable ceramic boundaries marked by the ebb and flow of types and modes across the contemporary geopolitical border. These permeable ceramic boundaries certainly could have reflected ephemeral socio-political boundaries, but they could also have represented ancient technoscapes unaffiliated with socio-political processes. Ceramic data from Holtun and Holmul, two sites in different sub-regions of the northeastern Peten with long periods of occupation, are used to substantiate our argument.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Making and Breaking Boundaries in the Maya Lowlands: Alliance and Conflict across the Guatemala–Belize Border

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24648