Of Water and Ancestors: Landscapes of Resilience Throughout Aventura’s Long History

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This paper explores how water contributed to community resilience throughout centuries of occupation at the Maya site of Aventura, Belize. While human-landscape relations changed with shifting sociopolitical and ecological contexts, water and ancestors remained consistently important. During Classic Period occupation, households accessed water for ancestor veneration, regardless of economic status. In the Postclassic (1250-1500 AD), Aventura drew Maya pilgrims, while a small community of permanent residents likely maintained shrines, fields, and water resources. The water at the city later (1848) drew in Caste War refugees who settled amidst ruins and grew rice in the inundated landscape. Today, Maya residents in the area trace their lineage to this population of refugees. In this paper, I draw from household excavations, settlement surveys, historical documents, and oral histories to demonstrate that water and ancestors were integral to the resilience of Aventura’s communities for centuries, even as regional politics shifted and the landscape dried.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow