Exploring Prehispanic Maya Marketplaces in Northwestern Belize: NSF Project Overview and Preliminary MNAP Results

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Prehispanic Maya Marketplace Investigations in the Three Rivers Region of Belize: First Results" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The 2023–2024 field seasons witnessed the beginning of an ambitious NSF-funded project to investigate the possible existence of marketplaces in the Three Rivers Region of northwestern Belize. This project is innovative in leveraging information from long-running, independent research programs, localized at different sites, to explore marketplaces using a collaborative, configurational approach. Because researchers had already investigated all the sites targeted by the project, specific techniques varied depending on the information that was missing from a particular site. All, however, used the same set of cross-culturally derived marketplace indicators, searching for those not yet explored by previous field research. Data on soils, botanical remains, and ceramics complemented the information obtained from current and previous survey and excavations. This paper presents an introductory overview of the NSF-sponsored research as well as the results from two sites explored by the Maax Na Archaeology Project (MNAP). One is the large site of Maax Na, the first in this region to reveal initial evidence of an ancient marketplace. There, excavations further investigated several structures, preliminarily identified as stalls, a shrine, and a marketplace manager residence. The second is the small site of Bolsa Verde, where soil samples and excavations explored different possible marketplace areas.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Prehispanic Maya Marketplace Investigations in the Three Rivers Region of Belize: First Results   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38988.0