Reconfiguring Communities in the Postclassic at Aventura

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent excavations have revealed that Postclassic Aventura was a very different place: both reverentially remembered and a home. In this paper, we review the evidence for human activity during the Postclassic period at Aventura. From identifications of Late Postclassic incensario fragments in surface material on domestic mounds to the 1974 excavation of a large deposit of censer fragments in the site core, Aventura is known to have been subject to ritual pilgrimage during the Late Postclassic. Due to the specialized nature of these Postclassic artifacts, it was uncertain if a permanent population was residing at Aventura during that time. Recent excavations by the Aventura Archaeology Project at Group B, one of Aventura’s six central plazas, identified Postclassic household remains associated with domestic artifacts. These data suggest that Aventura’s site core may have supported a small residential community during the Postclassic period, with excavations revealing reoccupation of earlier buildings in Group B. We conclude this paper by proposing a new hypothesis generated from lidar data and colonial records that Aventura’s residents may have moved to a river island in the New River during the Postclassic period, consistent with a pattern of resettlement seen across the region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36345.0