Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Aquaculture and Small Finds in the Collections of Maya Archaeological Assemblages of the BREA Project in Belize.

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Sessions in Honor of Dr. Fred Valdez Jr. and His Contributions to Archaeology, Part 1" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This presentation addresses data from a region of Belize located between two areas, Programme for Belize in the northwest and Colha in northeastern Belize, where Fred Valdez has focused several decades of research. Following in Valdez’s interests in ceramics and material culture studies, I focus on aspects of the “small finds” category in the laboratory assemblage of materials from the Belize River East Archaeology (BREA) Project, which beginning in 2011 has been documenting and researching the cultural and environmental history of the Belize River drainage, comprising Preceramic period land- and resource-use, Maya settlements and landscapes, Spanish and British colonial contexts, and the Kriol heritage of current communities. This work examines aquaculture objects that have variously been referred to as fishing net weights or net sinkers, as well as objects described in the literature as perforated disks or interpreted as spindle whorls and weft weights, within a framework of depositional theory, use-lives of objects, and ceramic reuse behavior. The analysis of processes like discard and recycling within the context of pottery making, fishing technologies, and weaving, explores the links between material culture and social practice, with the goal of providing insightful queries into Maya ceramic production and economic specialization.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Sessions in Honor of Dr. Fred Valdez Jr. and His Contributions to Archaeology, Part 1   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51589