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Announcements

Introducing Dr. Eshleman

Sara Eshleman successfully earned her PhD. Her dissertation, “Sensing Human Legacies in the Tropical Forests of Northern Central America,” focuses on using lidar imagery to correlate Maya infrastructure to modern forest structure in northwestern Belize. Her degree is conferred from the University of Texas at Austin Department of Geography and the Environment. She has already joined Bladen Legacy as a Postdoctoral Research Associate for remote sensing and ecological modelling.

Faunal Remains Practicum with the HumAnE Centre

Dr. Mark Robinson and Oscar Wilkinson, an MSc Bioarchaeology: Zooarchaeology student, led a hands-on practicum for the HumAnE Bioarchaeology Centre around a Bladen faunal assemblage. Mark started with a brief presentation titled “Food production in the Mesoamerican neotropics through the Holocene.” Then HumAnE members engaged with tropical fauna from the rock shelter contexts and developed an initial classification of the material.

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Fieldwork

Collaboration with LASTJourney in Serranía de La Lindosa, Colombia

Dr. Mark Robinson and Sara Eshleman were invited to partake in an abbreviated field season in the Serranía de La Lindosa, Colombia with the LASTJourney project. The stunning rock shelter sites contain evidence of early peopling of the tropical Americas, an interesting corollary to the Bladen rock shelters. The fieldwork centred on digitally documenting rock art panels and collecting pigment samples to determine the age of the artwork.

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Conferences

Bladen Legacy at VI EIAA

Members of the BLADEN Legacy project attended the EIAA (Encuentro Internacional de Arqueología Amazónica) in San José del Guaviare, Colombia from 16 to 22 September, 2024. Dr. Keith Prufer, in collaboration with other project members, presented a paper titled “The search for the earliest ancestors of the Maya: early population structure and the origins of farming reveal links between Central and South America.” All project members exchanged ideas with Amazonian archaeologists, particularly around early peopling of the tropical Americas, long-term human-environment interactions, and archaeological and geospatial methodologies.

Due to his long-term work and collaborations in Amazonian archaeology, Dr. Mark Robinson co-authored five papers with themes around long-term human-environment interaction that span Latin American geographies.

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Conferences

Belize Archaeology Symposium 2024

Project members attended the 2024 Belize Archaeology Symposium (BAS) in San Ignacio, Belize from 26 to 28 June. Dr. Mark Robinson presented a paper titled “Early Emergence of Domestic Spaces in the Tropical Forest of Belize”, tied to Bladen Legacy and the ongoing Bladen Paleoindian and Archaic Archaeological Project (BPAAP).

BAS is organized by the Belize Institute of Archaeology to bring together archaeologists, Belize residents, and those interested in archaeology to exchange knowledge and celebrate the cultural history of Belize. Thank you to the Institute of Archaeology (IA) and the National Institute of Culture and History (NICH) for organizing another excellent symposium and for their ongoing support of our project and all archaeology projects in Belize.

Categories
Fieldwork

Bladen Legacy Field Season 2024

The Bladen Legacy team had a successful field season in the Bladen Nature Reserve in southern Belize. It included: