A Two Decade Assessment of Maya Cave Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Subterranean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Twenty years ago, Ann Scott presented "The Historical Context of the Founding of Maya Cave Archaeology" at the SAA meetings in Montreal documenting the history of Maya cave archaeology from the 1970s to its emergence as a self-conscious field in 1997. It is fitting, therefore, that this presentation considers the expansion the field has undergone in the last two decades, its current state, and directions for the immediate future. Thematically, the investigation of the constructed subterranean and the interpretation of human skeletal material in caves appear to be two dominant directions that current research is taking while the analysis of speleothems may be an underdeveloped interest coming into its own. I see the field at a crossroads due to the lack of active cave surveys and few cave archaeologists still actively involved in field research. Scott’s original paper suggested that the beginning of her Foundation Period in the 1980s was a generational transition. Now 40 years later, the field appears to be heralding a new dawn from survey to cave studies expanding to the subterranean.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Subterranean   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39122.0