Ongoing Research at Hun Tun and Medicinal Trail Community: The Ancient Maya Hinterland of Northwestern Belize

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part I" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper discusses features and material culture from two hinterland settlements located in northwestern Belize, Hun Tun and the Medicinal Trail Community, east of the ancient Maya urban center of La Milpa. Residential groups include formal courtyards with "expensive" structures at one end of the continuum to numerous informal clusters of mounds at the other end. Also present at these two settlements are numerous cultural landscape modifications such as terraces, depressions, chultuns, chich mounds and linear berms. The ancient residents of these communities were non-elite agriculturalists and crafts people. Archaeological evidence shows that substantial internal social stratification occurred throughout both sites indicating a complex social structure among ancient Maya commoners in the hinterlands. The function and interpretation of these two hinterland settlements will be discussed, and the role they played in contributing to the larger, regional influence of the La Milpa polity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part I   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25502