Archaeological and Genetic Investigations of Human Remains from the Mirador Basin, Guatemala

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From Origins to Collapses:  New Insights in the Cultural and Natural Processes of the Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological excavations over the span of several decades within the Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin have recovered human remains from a variety of chronological periods, ranging from the Middle Preclassic to the Late Classic periods. However, of the 98 samples submitted to the Harvard DNA laboratory, few petrous bones were available for extraction, but usable data was recovered from 24 distinct individuals, and very good data of at least 100,000 positions was recovered on 7 individuals. Some of the most interesting discoveries was the identification of a series of 9 individuals who had been dismembered and placed in a lime kiln in the Late Preclassic period. DNA analyses of these remains and others from the Basin provide a new and fascinating insight in the human dynamics at play in a confined geographical area of northern Guatemala.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• From Origins to Collapses:  New Insights in the Cultural and Natural Processes of the Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53570