Abstract Data from rock shelters in southern Belize show evidence of tool making, hunting, and aquatic resource exploitation by 10,500 cal b.c. ; the shelters functioned as mortuary sites between 7600 and 2000 cal b.c. Early Holocene contexts contain stemmed and barbed bifaces as part of a tradition found broadly throughout the neotropics. After around 6000 cal b.c. , bifacial tools largely disappear from the record, likely reflecting a shift to increasing reliance on plant foods, around the same time that the earliest domesticates appear in the archaeological record in the neotropics. We suggest that people living in southern Belize maintained close ties with neighbors to the south during the Early Holocene, but lagged behind in innovating new crops and farming technologies during the Middle Holocene. Maize farming in Belize intensified between 2750–2050 cal b.c. as maize became a dietary staple, 1000–1300 years later than in South America. Overall, we argue from multiple lines of data that the Neotropics of Central and South America were an area of shared information and technologies that heavily influenced cultural developments in southeastern Mesoamerica during the Early and Middle Holocene.
Recent research in the Bladen nature reserve: the preceramic occupations of Mayahak Cab Pek and Saki Tzul rockshelters
From the perspective of Central America, the peopling of the New World was a complex process lasting thousands of years and involving multiple waves of migration in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene periods. As the ice age ended across the New World people were adapting to changing environments and resources. In the Neotropics these changes would have been pronounced as patchy forests and grasslands gave way to broadleaf tropical forests. Investigations since 2014 are demonstrating that early Holocene humans lived, hunted, and were buried in and around rockshelters in the Bladen Nature Reserve. Data from these studies are illuminating the life histories and subsistence strategies of these earliest colonists of the lowland tropics
- Award ID(s):
- 1632061
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10209129
- Journal Name:
- Research reports in Belizean archaeology
- Volume:
- 17
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 199-208
- ISSN:
- 2079-1038
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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