Belizean Archaeology

Investigations at the ancient Maya site of Pacbitun (Belize) in 1986 and 1987 unearthed a range of well-preserved musical instruments from Late Classic period elite and royal burials. Excavations in 2010 recovered additional, ceramic, sound-producing instruments associated with Late Classic interments in the North Group of the Epicenter at Pacbitun. In this paper the Classic Maya sound devices are described, including insights to their archaeological context, production, and meaning. A report is provided on the analysis of the construction and acoustics of the Pacbitun aerophones. Finally, a discussion is offered about the function of, and likely roles played by, music in ancient Maya society.

The 26th Annual report of the Blue Creek Archaeological Project. Edited by Thomas H. Guderjan and C. Colleen Hanratty. Submitted to the Institute of Archaeology National Institute Belmopan, Belize, (CSSR Research Report 6) Maya Research Program, Tyler, Texas (May, 2018).
Read more at http://www.mayaresearchprogram.org

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Extensive archaeological surveys are critical for understanding past human-landscape interaction, but they are frequently impeded by access difficulties, rugged terrain, or obscurant vegetation. These challenges can make extensive surveys prohibitively costly and time-consuming. Consequently, many archaeologists are interested in predictive techniques—i.e., methods that can estimate the potential for a given region to contain archaeological remains. Predictive techniques can reduce the costs of extensive surveys by allowing archaeologists to focus on the regions with the greatest archaeological potential. A few years ago, our research team developed a new technique called the Locally-Adaptive Model of Archaeological Potential (LAMAP) and used it to enhance our understanding of the relationship between the Classic Maya centre of Minanha, its surrounding landscape, and nearby Maya centres (Carleton et al. 2012). However, when we introduced the method its efficacy had yet to be comprehensively tested. Recently, we tested its efficacy using a combination of ground-truth survey and remote sensing of Classic Maya sites in west-central Belize. The test involved identifying previously unrecorded archaeological resources and comparing their locations to the LAMAP prediction and to a random model that acted as a null hypothesis. Our results indicate that the model performs very well. The high-potential areas of the study region contained three times more archaeological sites than low potential areas, a statistically significant result compared to our null model. Our findings indicate that the LAMAP is a useful new archaeological prediction tool and, as a corollary, that the hypothesis of human land-use behaviour underpinning it might accurately reflect the behaviour of the Classic Maya.

Keywords
Classic Maya; GIS; Predictive modeling; LiDAR; Survey; Human-landscape interaction

Since the late 1800s, significant archaeological exploration and investigation has been undertaken in what is now the Stann Creek District of Belize. While typically grouped with sites of the Toledo District under the label of "Southern Belize," as will be discussed, there is much that serves to differentiate the inland Maya sites of Stann Creek District from their neighbours to the south. Following Graham (2001) and Peuramaki-Brown (2017), in this paper we find it useful to differentiate the Stann Creek District as a separate material culture sub-region of the eastern Maya Lowlands. This sub-region has become an important focus for the study of resource acquisition and the movement of goods between identified highland and lowland zones along coastal and inland trade routes and communication corridors, but also in the revisiting of topics such as population movements and displacements, particularly during the Late to Terminal Classic periods. In the spirit of the theme of this RRBA volume-focused on the northern and southern reaches of Belize-this paper, essentially a literature review, briefly summarizes the 100+ years of exploration and archaeology of the ancient Maya that has taken place in the Stann Creek District.