Wetland Field and Paleosol Geoarchaeology of the Three Rivers Region, Belize and Beyond

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Sessions in Honor of Dr. Fred Valdez Jr. and His Contributions to Archaeology, Part 2" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The view of archaeology from Fred Valdez in the lineage of his advisor Gordon Willey at Harvard allowed for a big tent archaeology that included ecology and technology of past societies. Our work in the Three Rivers transboundary region has fit into that part of the science and humanity of archaeology. We have used the whole toolkit of geoarchaeology and environmental archaeology to explore ecology and technology through the doppelganger of landesque capital and human impacts from geospatial to pedological to multiple proxies. One persistent theme has been the positive adaptations of wetland agroecosystems to climate and environmental change, and we have documented more of these systems —through mapping, excavating, and multi-proxy laboratory analysis— in the Three Rivers than any other part of Central America. In contrast we have also documented numerous paleosols that in some cases imply maladaptation. Here we contrast these positive and negative adaptations in this region where Fred Valdez has collaborated with us in the wider purview of his decades of project direction and help with conceptualization.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Sessions in Honor of Dr. Fred Valdez Jr. and His Contributions to Archaeology, Part 2

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51636