Where the Temple Meets the Road: Salvage Burial Excavation in San Ignacio, Cayo District, Belize

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

No country is immune to crumbling infrastructure and (un)predicable weather that exposes archaeology. How we deal with these sudden assemblages and how we use the information gained from these quick and limited excavations can be a place of growth in our field. This can be most crucial in salvage burial excavations. The biological, especially the human, aspect of a site can be important, but tends to be overlooked in salvage projects due to time and financial constraints. This paper gives one such example of a salvage excavation of a burial outside the San Ignacio Resort in Cayo District, Belize. The limitations of time, access, and safety led to a partial excavation and therefore partial biological interpretation of the skeletal assemblage. Through this case study the authors will discuss what information was gained from the bioarchaeological analysis, the interpretation of the site within the larger Cahal Pech area, and future field protocols that could be put in place to aid in efficiency of excavation. It is the hope of the authors that having these conversations and learning from our experiences, will lead to new policies and methods for future bioarchaeology salvage excavations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36327.0