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<< Text Pages >> Quebrada de Oro - Ancient Village or Settlement in Belize

Submitted by bat400 on Wednesday, 16 November 2011  Page Views: 6719

Multi-periodSite Name: Quebrada de Oro
Country: Belize
NOTE: This site is 46.844 km away from the location you searched for.
Type: Ancient Village or Settlement

Latitude: 16.539460N  Longitude: 88.8151W
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
 no data Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
 no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
 no data Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
 3
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Ancient Settlement in the Toledo district of Belize. Buildings and structures include small pyramids and a ball court. Recent excavations indicate that this town was a small ceremonial center.

Note: Scientists uncover clues to how the Classic Maya sustained their dense population
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"Quebrada de Oro" | Login/Create an Account | 2 News and Comments
  
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Scientists uncover clues to how the Classic Maya sustained their dense population by Andy B on Wednesday, 16 November 2011
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The Maya lowlands during the ancient Maya Classic period (250 - 900 A.D.) were known to have been among the densest populated areas in the world. And archaeologists have estimated that, even in places such as the southern Maya Mountains area of Belize where geographic and other environmental conditions could be assumed to have mitigated population growth, population density has been estimated to have been approximately 300 persons per square kilometer at one time.

How did the ancient Maya sustain these numbers?

Recent studies shed new light on how they may have done it, and how they kept their people healthy.

By taking and analyzing soil samples and microscopic phytoliths from Classic Maya archaeological sites in Belize, coupled with ethnographic data drawn from living Maya groups, a team of researchers from Cleveland State University, University of Nevada and the PaleoResearch Institute, along with Q'eqchi Maya bushmasters and Q'eqchi Maya traditional healers in the field, have uncovered evidence that could reveal clues to a sustainable agricultural strategy used by the ancient Maya to manage and exploit a variety of nutritional and medicinal plants that were key to promoting general good health and sustaining large, dense populations. The researchers also suggest that application of this traditional knowledge and practice to today's communities may be the way of the future.

The team took soil samples from excavations conducted at three Classic Maya sites located in the Bladen Branch region of the southern Maya Mountains of Belize. They dug into ancient agricultural terraces at the site of Sahonak Tasar, and into several refuse deposits (known in the archaeological lexicon as middens) associated with known ancient residential or household sites at other classic Maya locations within the Bladen Branch region. They produced some eye-opening results.

First, based on the researchers' preliminary interpretation, the excavated layers or strata from the terraces at Sahonak Tasar revealed a practice of intense cultivation that involved management and diversion of rich soil runoff from the higher elevations, and alternate growing, burning, and flooding, a technique that, while growing the needed plants, also enriched the soil.

Reports the study team, "In short, not only was a unique soil enrichment process involving slope soil catchment, burning and flooding being utilized to maintain soil fertility but a myriad of plants were being grown on these terraces."

Read more in
http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/september-2011/article/scientists-uncover-clues-to-how-the-classic-maya-sustained-their-dense-populations

with thanks to Coldrum for the link
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The discovery of a Maya stela at Quebrada de Oro, Belize by bat400 on Saturday, 23 May 2009
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Submitted by coldrum---

Marc A. Abramiuk, Phil Wanyerka & Todd Pesek

Deep in the Maya Mountains of southern Belize, a stela has been discovered at the Classic Maya centre going by the modern site name of Quebrada de Oro, a site previously believed to have had no stelae. Although the stela has yet to be examined in detail, this article reports on the circumstances of discovery and discusses the hypothetical sociopolitical scenarios it suggests for the ancient community of Quebrada de Oro.

The Maya Mountains of southern Belize are one of the remotest regions on earth and, logistically, one of the most difficult in which to conduct archaeological operations. For this reason, relatively little is known of the prehistory of the region.

Early investigations conducted by the Maya Mountains Archaeological Project (MMAP) revealed that one valley in particular, the Bladen Branch, had a Classic Maya population of impressive density (Dunham 1996). This population was compressed into small creek valleys feeding into the Bladen Branch, the only areas sufficiently arable for sustaining human settlements (Abramiuk 1998). The Classic Maya populations in each of these alluvial pockets constructed their own modestly sized centres. From east to west along the Bladen Branch, these are: Quebrada de Oro, the RHF Site, Ek Xux, and Muklebal Tzul.

It can be inferred, on exchange patterns, that the Bladen Branch centres constituted a regional interactive sphere (Abramiuk & Meurer 2006), which was probably incorporated into a much larger polity (Wanyerka 2008). That is, the Bladen Branch centres exchanged goods extensively with each other, but also brought in goods from abroad and exported goods to other communities outside the Bladen Branch region. Both intra- and inter-regional interactions probably facilitated the development of the Bladen Branch centres and their rise to prominence on the economic stage.

With the exception of Quebrada de Oro (Figure 3), the Bladen Branch sites contain elite residential complexes and stelae within their site cores, suggesting that authority at each of the centres was centralised. Until the discovery of the Quebrada de Oro stela, Quebrada de Oro was seen as an anomaly, since it was the only site within the Bladen region without stelae. The discovery of a stela in the surrounding settlement of Quebrada de Oro challenges this premature assessment, and the presence of this stela makes for some interesting speculation.

For more, see Antiquity Journal.
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