Ceramics of a Lost Age: A Typological Study of the Late Formative Assemblage of Betulia in Northeastern Honduras

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Northeastern Honduras has long been considered an isolated region of Central America, sitting at the peripheral edge of Mesoamerica and the Isthmo-Colombian Area. This preconception was particularly strong against its Late Formative period, since no site had previously been identified between the Cuyamel (ca. 1200 – 400 BCE) and Selin (ca. 300 – 1000 CE) periods, leading to the region being considered a backwater.

The newly excavated site of Betulia, near Trujillo, challenges this prejudice. Its material assemblage wasn’t only markedly distinct from Cuyamel or Selin contexts, but also provided Usulután fragments. The latter are diagnostic artifacts of the Late Formative period in Central America as well as indicators of the site’s involvement in interregional Central American interaction networks.

This paper investigates the first stratified Late Formative (ca. 400 BCE – 300 CE) context in northeastern Honduras through a typological study of its ceramic material. This classification offers an initial understanding of the area’s relationship with its neighboring Honduran regions to the west and southwest, but also with more distant regions in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, which shared elements of a “Central American culture”.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53343