Water for the Keep: Hydrological Flow and Accumulation

Summary

This is an abstract from the "La Cuernavilla, Guatemala: A Maya Fortress and Its Environs" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper will present the final results and interpretations of data collected from La Cuernavilla’s aguada. Special emphasis is placed on new data collected through several types of soil and geoarchaeological analyses that crucially supplement the data that have already been presented. Previous presentations on this topic covered the ceramic chronology of the aguada and its dam, the dam’s manner of construction, the magnetic susceptibility of the dam’s soils, the aguada’s volumetric capacity, and the number of users the aguada could have sustained. New data now provide information about the elemental chemistry, isotope geochemistry, mineralogy, and carbon dating of the aguada and its dam. The combined data indicate that the aguada’s usage predates the construction of its dam. This earlier usage for the aguada likely reflects the results of initial quarrying. The construction of the dam, which was inferred to have occurred during a single phase, is now understood to be a particularly labor-intensive event, as soil analyses confirm that fill for the dam was collected from various areas. This occurred during the Early Classic, a key moment in La Cuernavilla’s development that is defined by its definitive transition to a large-scale defensive settlement in the context of siege warfare.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• La Cuernavilla, Guatemala: A Maya Fortress and Its Environs   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36855.0