Regional Perspective of Ancient Maya Burial Patterns in Northwest Belize, Central America PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Regional Perspective of Ancient Maya Burial Patterns in Northwest Belize, Central America PDF full book. Access full book title Regional Perspective of Ancient Maya Burial Patterns in Northwest Belize, Central America by Stacy Marie Drake. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Stacy Marie Drake
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 482
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this dissertation I address common trends in ancient Maya burials recovered through excavations of the Programme for Belize Archaeological Project (PfBAP) in northwest Belize. The scope of this research includes 123 individuals (of the approximately 150 individuals that have been recovered through PfBAP excavations) from 12 different archaeological sites and 1,200 years of prehistoric Maya society (spanning from 400 B.C. until A.D. 900). My examination combines osteological and contextual information from these human burials in a bioarchaeological analysis of Maya mortuary practices. Biological sex, age at death, grave type, body positioning, grave goods, and other characteristics are compared across three main categories represented in the data: Site Type, Time Period, and Geographic Region. Additional data comparisons included in this dissertation consider the various burial characteristics mentioned above by sex and age at death of the decedents. By collecting and compiling 25 years’ worth of PfBAP burial data, this analysis successfully identified various trends in Maya burial practices in northwest Belize, many of which present opportunities for further research in the regard for life and death among these prehistoric peoples of Central America.
Author: Stacy Marie Drake
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 482
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this dissertation I address common trends in ancient Maya burials recovered through excavations of the Programme for Belize Archaeological Project (PfBAP) in northwest Belize. The scope of this research includes 123 individuals (of the approximately 150 individuals that have been recovered through PfBAP excavations) from 12 different archaeological sites and 1,200 years of prehistoric Maya society (spanning from 400 B.C. until A.D. 900). My examination combines osteological and contextual information from these human burials in a bioarchaeological analysis of Maya mortuary practices. Biological sex, age at death, grave type, body positioning, grave goods, and other characteristics are compared across three main categories represented in the data: Site Type, Time Period, and Geographic Region. Additional data comparisons included in this dissertation consider the various burial characteristics mentioned above by sex and age at death of the decedents. By collecting and compiling 25 years’ worth of PfBAP burial data, this analysis successfully identified various trends in Maya burial practices in northwest Belize, many of which present opportunities for further research in the regard for life and death among these prehistoric peoples of Central America.
Author: Stacy Marie Drake
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 178
Get Book Here
Book Description
The following report describes the excavation and preliminary analysis of Burial 5 at Group A of the Medicinal Trail archaeological site in northwest Belize. The excavation of Burial 5 occurred over the duration of the 2009 and 2010 field seasons, and this report focuses on the 2010 portion of this excavation, which was conducted within the field laboratory at the Programme for Belize Archaeology Project. In this report, I describe the methods utilized during the 2010 excavation and preliminary analysis processes. I also discuss some of the theory relevant to Maya mortuary practices as they relate to my interpretations of the findings from Burial 5.
Author: Julie L. Kunen
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816549400
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187
Get Book Here
Book Description
Human activity during centuries of occupation significantly altered the landscape inhabited by the ancient Maya of northwestern Belize. In response, the Maya developed new techniques to harvest the natural resources of their surroundings, investing increased labor and raw materials into maintaining and even improving their ways of life. In this lively story of life in the wetlands on the outskirts of the major site of La Milpa, Julie Kunen documents a hitherto unrecognized form of intensive agriculture in the Maya lowlands—one that relied on the construction of terraces and berms to trap soil and moisture around the margins of low-lying depressions called bajos. She traces the intertwined histories of residential settlements on nearby hills and ridges and agricultural terraces and other farming-related features around the margins of the bajo as they developed from the Late Preclassic perios (400 BC-AD 250) until the area's abandonment in the Terminal Classic period (about AD 850). Kunen examines the organization of three bajo communities with respect to the use and management of resources critical to agricultural production. She argues that differences in access to spatially variable natural resources resulted in highly patterned settlement remains and that community founders and their descendents who had acquired the best quality and most diverse set of resources maintained an elevated status in the society. The thorough integration of three lines of evidence—the settlement system, the agricultural system, and the ancient environment—breaks new ground in landscape research and in the study of Maya non-elite domestic organization. Kunen reports on the history of settlement and farming in a small corner of the Maya world but demonstrates that for any study of human-environment interactions, landscape history consists equally of ecological and cultural strands of influence.
Author: Shawn Gregory Morton
Publisher: British Archaeological Reports Oxford Limited
ISBN: 9781407316666
Category : Belize
Languages : en
Pages : 187
Get Book Here
Book Description
Asintegrated and varied ritual contexts, how do changing patterns ofpre-Columbian cave use inform the complex of historical, social, political,economic and related ideological processes in action during the inception,florescence, and collapse of Tipan Chen Uitz and other ancient Maya centres inCentral Belize? This book aims to highlight and, within a specific regionalcontext, to address, the tendency of the speleoarchaeology of the Maya area toisolate itself from broader topics of discourse. To this end, it explicitlycontextualizes primary research in several caves along a chain of relatedconcepts and datasets, extending from the broad body of literature on ritualand religion, through discussion of the conceptual cave context drawn fromepigraphic and iconographic sources, and its invocation as recorded incontemporary (or, at least, relatively recent) ethnographic contexts andearlier post-Columbian indigenous historic sources, to the well-travelled pathsof the archaeological study of caves.
Author: Thomas H. Guderjan
Publisher: BAR International Series
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume summarizes many aspects of more than twenty years of field research at the ancient Maya city of Blue Creek in northwestern Belize. Blue Creek was a medium-sized Maya kingdom whose wealth was built upon access to large-scale and high-quality agricultural lands and its location at the headwaters of the Rio Hondo. The Rio Hondo is the northern-most river draining the Maya lowlands into the Caribbean Sea and provided access to markets and polities of northern Yucatan. The studies in the volume provide an overview of Blue Creek combined with detailed studies of aspects of production, trade, distribution, and the organization and functional interactions within the community.
Author: Denise E. Knisely
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 126
Get Book Here
Book Description
The goal of this thesis is to examine the diet of ancient Maya living in Northwest Belize using stable isotopic analysis of human bone collagen. The specific area of study is within the boundaries of the Rio Bravo Conservation and Management Area, a nature preserve in the Three Rivers Region. This conservation district includes 250,000 acres (~1,052 km2) of land and more than fifty ancient Maya sites. The Programme for Belize Archaeological Project (PfBAP) has conducted original research in this area since 1992 and has amassed a large collection of artifacts from sites that varied in size and socio-political complexity. The scope of this study includes two primary regional political centers - La Milpa and Dos Hombres, and seven associated satellite sites. This thesis analyzes patterns of intra-site hierarchy and heterarchy using stable carbon (d13C) and stable nitrogen (d15N) isotope ratios obtained from human bone collagen from nine Maya sites. As these sites are geographically clustered and have similar access to dietary resources, I predicted that the individuals sampled will likewise have similar d13C and d15N values. As noted at similar Maya sites, the individuals in the Three Rivers Region should have consumed a diet consisting primarily of terrestrial animals and a mix of maize and forest resources. Beyond a few extreme outliers, this does seem to be the pattern of consumption in the majority of the sites sampled.
Author: Gail A. Hammond
Publisher: BAR International Series
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Get Book Here
Book Description
This work represents the archaeological investigation of a distinctive zone of the Three Rivers Region of northwestern Belize. It contributes to the knowledge of land use by the ancient Maya using excavation, mapping and environmental data, and situates the area within the local, regional and inter-regional context.
Author: James L. Fitzsimmons
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816541507
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 261
Get Book Here
Book Description
Scholars have recently achieved new insights into the many ways in which the dead and the living interacted from the Late Preclassic to the Conquest in Mesoamerica. The eight essays in this useful volume were written by well-known scholars who offer cross-disciplinary and synergistic insights into the varied articulations between the dead and those who survived them. From physically opening the tomb of their ancestors and carrying out ancestral heirlooms to periodic feasts, sacrifices, and other lavish ceremonies, heirs revisited death on a regular basis. The activities attributable to the dead, moreover, range from passively defining territorial boundaries to more active exploits, such as “dancing” at weddings and “witnessing” royal accessions. The dead were—and continued to be—a vital part of everyday life in Mesoamerican cultures. This book results from a symposium organized by the editors for an annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The contributors employ historical sources, comparative art history, anthropology, and sociology, as well as archaeology and anthropology, to uncover surprising commonalities across cultures, including the manner in which the dead were politicized, the perceptions of reciprocity between the dead and the living, and the ways that the dead were used by the living to create, define, and renew social as well as family ties. In exploring larger issues of a “good death” and the transition from death to ancestry, the contributors demonstrate that across Mesoamerica death was almost never accompanied by the extinction of a persona; it was more often the beginning of a social process than a conclusion.
Author: Stephen L. Whittington
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the ninth century, southern lowland Maya civilization went into a mysterious decline. Despite the wealth of information that bones could potentially provide towards explaining the collapse, bioarchaeologists have been traditionally unable to study Maya bones because the tropical climate and uninformed excavations have resulted in decomposed, poorly collected samples. But during the last twenty years, new techniques in osteology have yielded finds on Maya diet and health that challenge the accepted ecological model of overpopulation and overcultivation leading to collapse. Fifteen essays on skeltons from a wide range of sites in Mexico and Central America address such subjects as cranial deforamtion, tooth filing, damage caused by sacrificial rites and evidence of nutritional and infectious diseases. What emerges is a picture of regional variation and the importance of local context in order to reconstruct ancinet Maya culture and explain its demise.
Author: Taylor & Francis Group
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780367160470
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Get Book Here
Book Description
