Settling down: alterations in activity patterns with changes from foraging to staple maize agriculture in southern Belize

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Black as Night, Dark as Death: Bioarchaeology of the Mesoamerican Subterranean" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Bladen Paleoindian and Archaic Archaeology Project (BPAAP) has recovered human remains spanning approximately 9000 years in two sites in the Maya Mountains of southern Belize. To investigate changes in limb bone dimensions reflecting changes in biomechanical use across the change to surplus farming, we evaluated external measurements of the femur, tibia, humerus, radius, and ulna, subdivided by sex (n=11 males; n=25 females). Our results show no clear trends in long bone length or femoral head diameter across the transition. However, and in common with diachronic trends elsewhere, the lower limb bones in males demonstrate strong evidence for a substantial decline in mobility with a higher cnemic index (tibia) and lower pilastric index (femur) over time. The increase in cnemic index is equally striking in females. An unexpected finding in the upper limb is that females show a substantial increase in humeral midshaft diaphyseal area between 5000 BP and the adoption of a staple maize diet. Male humeri show no clear trend in the same interval. This suggests that the increases in physical demands associated with agricultural intensification fell disproportionately on women. KMP’s research was funded by the Alphawood Foundation and NSF SBE1632061.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Black as Night, Dark as Death: Bioarchaeology of the Mesoamerican Subterranean

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51716