Maya Structures for Wet and Dry Seasons: Adaptive Strategies and Microenvironments at the Site of Chulub in the Crooked Tree Lagoon System

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and the History of Human-Environment Interaction in the Lower Belize River Watershed" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This study evaluates a water feature and two associated structures within the Late Terminal/Early Postclassic Maya site of Chulub in the Western Lagoon Wetlands near the island of Crooked Tree, Belize. The term “pocket *bajo” is a term used to describe water features that are similar to *bajos in morphology, but smaller. Previous research in northern Belize, at the site of Aventura (Grauer 2019), posits these depressions were integral for a variety subsistence practices, blurring the lines between agriculture and opportunistic resource gathering. We present a spatial, material, and edaphological analysis of two structures located adjacent to a single water feature at Chulub to determine if “pocket *bajo” is an appropriate descriptor. The structures were excavated between 2018 and 2019 at different times of the year (wet vs. dry season), artifacts were recovered, and soil samples were taken. This paper outlines the preliminary assessment of water feature relationships with the local architecture in hopes of answering larger questions of adaptive strategies in response to drought and prehistoric aquaculture at this site.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeology and the History of Human-Environment Interaction in the Lower Belize River Watershed   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33130