From Rural Hinterlands to Urban Centers: Investigating Ancient Maya Settlement in the Lower Belize River Watershed

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.

One of the primary objectives of the Belize River East Archaeology (BREA) project has been to identify and document archaeological sites in a relatively understudied part of north-central Belize that encompasses the lower Belize River Watershed. In this area, which measures roughly 6,000 km2, the BREA team has been pursuing such a goal with a suite of methodologies tailored to the wide range of micro-environments characterizing the survey area. The methodologies employed include informant survey, pedestrian reconnaissance, and total station and unmanned aerial (drone) mapping, as well as surface/subsurface sampling and excavation. This has resulted in the identification of nearly one hundred discrete archaeological sites comprising thousands of archaeological structures. Using a series of site typologies, we classify and compare the ancient Maya settlement in the lower Belize River Watershed, which ranges from urban political centers to rural residential hamlets. This regional settlement study demonstrates how site location and settlement histories were shaped by the micro-environments found in this low-lying coastal zone (i.e., the rivers, creeks, wetlands, estuaries, dense forests, open savannah, etc.) and how these natural features impacted people’s movements and their relationships with the landscape as human-environment interactions changed through time.

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): 33298