Archaeology's Problematic Relationship with Artifacts: A Critical Examination of Implicit Assumptions in Maya Cave Archaeology

Author(s): Jeffrey Rosa Figueroa

Year: 2025

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in MesoAmerican Sacred Landscapes: A Multidisciplinary Assessment" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

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Archaeology is invariably defined along the lines of the scientific study of material remains to reconstruct past human history. This would appear to make artifact analysis central to archaeological research. In the course of my research on the Midnight Terror Cave artifact assemblage, however, I have found this to be far from the case. Examining the historical development of Maya cave archaeology, a major problem for the development of the subfield was the failure to define the nature of cave artifact assemblages. The field's first analyses appeared during the second half of the twentieth century, setting the model for the analysis of cave artifact assemblages. Rather than further developing these, artifact analyses all but disappeared from research and dissertations in the 21<sup>st</sup> century. Shortly after Maya cave archaeology was recognized as a legitimate area of study, only two dissertations produced cave artifact analyses. This raises some disturbing questions about the empirical foundation of these studies. This presentation explores the decline in artifact analysis over the last thirty-five years.

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Cite this Record

Archaeology's Problematic Relationship with Artifacts: A Critical Examination of Implicit Assumptions in Maya Cave Archaeology. Jeffrey Rosa Figueroa. Presented at The 90th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 2025 ( tDAR id: 509125)

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Keywords

General
Caves and Rockshelters • Mesoamerica

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52655