Genomic and Isotopic Migration and Kinship among the Classic Maya of Belize

Summary

This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Emerging genomic and isotopic approaches have opened new doors to reconstructing diet, mobility, kinship, demography, and identity in the past and have the potential to transform our understanding of the ancient Maya world. These methods offer ways to reconstruct where people lived, who they were related to, how they organized their communities, what they ate, how they moved around the landscape, and how these dynamics changed over time. However, relatively few studies in Mesoamerica have combined genomic and isotopic approaches and grounded the collective interpretation of these data in archaeological contexts. What if we let archaeology drive what we learn from these emerging data, with collaboration of local communities, and combine all the tools and relationships at our disposal to understand ancient social worlds? We discuss the ongoing state of genomic and isotopic research in the eastern Maya lowlands in Belize and show how community engagement, cutting edge scientific approaches, and traditional archaeological data can enhance one another and contribute to the creation of anthropological models using examples from projects across Belize—from Classic period Caracol in the Vaca Plateau to polities in the Belize Valley such as Lower Dover and Postclassic Santa Rita (Chactemal) in northern Belize.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• “The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya, Part II

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39113.0