A Human Geography of Aventura: Lidar and Settlement Survey

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.

A human geography perspective provides our broadest lens to envision the entwined relationships of people, communities, and environments at Aventura. Drawing from an 18 km2 lidar survey and 1 km2 pedestrian survey, this paper presents a human geography of Aventura that links people, settlement, agriculture, land, and water. The site of Aventura is situated along the Belizean New River with the city epicenter located approximately 2.5 km west of the river. Aventura’s city center consists of six adjoining plazas and a seventh connected by an intersite causeway. City infrastructure is also comprised of a ballcourt, a marketplace, and eight temples, the tallest rising 20 m in height. The city and its households were built around pocket bajos, karstic depressions less than 2 km2 in area, that Kacey Grauer identified as water management features. Households across Aventura are diverse and variable, with some mounds just barely visible above the ground surface. Between Aventura’s settlement and the marshes of the New River lies a vast area of raised fields, larger than the footprint of the city itself, identifying Aventura as a potential site of major food production.

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): 36239.0