The Buffalo Hill Quarries Site: Investigations of an Ancestral Maya Quarryscape in the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, Belize

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Rio Frio Regional Archaeological Project (RiFRAP) 2022 Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve regional survey resulted in documentation of the Buffalo Hill Quarries (BHQ), the first recorded ancestral Maya granitic rock quarry with a ground stone implement workshop site. Preliminary investigations indicate a complex multicomponent quarryscape with extraction pits and cut faces surrounded by debitage piles spread out over an area of at least 16 ha. Debitage piles contained discarded items, granite flakes, preforms, and production tools, including quartzite hammerstones. Regional aerial lidar data later received revealed the BHQ is at least three times larger than our initial surveys indicated, and that two other multicomponent quarry sites are in the region. Our RiFRAP returned to the BHQ in the 2023 season to ground truth the lidar results and to conduct systematic excavations of a quarry pit to investigate extraction techniques. Results confirm the site is approximately 45 ha in size, but many components are invisible in the lidar data, indicating the need to employ multiple remote sensing solutions and fieldwork for documenting such sites. We also present findings of our investigations into how granitic rock was quarried and survey results identifying the raw material source for hammerstones.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39845.0