Xunantunich is an Ancient Maya archaeological site in western Belize, about 70 miles (110 km) west of Belize City, in the Cayo District. Xunantunich is located atop a ridge above the Mopan River, well within sight of the Guatemala border – which is a mere 0.6 miles (1 km) to the west. It served as a Maya civic ceremonial center in the Late and Terminal Classic periods to the Belize Valley region. At this time, when the region was at its peak, nearly 200,000 people lived in Belize.
Cahal Pech is a Maya site located near the town of San Ignacio in the Cayo District of Belize. The site was a palatial, hilltop home for an elite Maya family, and through the most major construction dates to the Classic period, evidence of continuous habitation has been dated to as far back as 1200 BCE during the Early Middle Formative period, making Cahal Pech one of the oldest recognizably Maya sites in Western Belize.
Tell Ta'yinat is a low-lying ancient tell on the east bank at the bend of the ancient Orontes river, in the Hatay province of southeastern Turkey about 25 kilometers south east of Antakya. It has been proposed as the site of Kinalua, the capital city of a Iron Age Neo-Hittite kingdom, and of biblical Calneh.
Frank Raymond Allchin FBA with his wife, Bridget Allchin FSA (1927–2017), represent one of the most influential British partnerships in the post-Independence study of South Asian archaeology. Producing a large body of scholarship ranging from archaeological excavations, ethnoarchaeology as well as epigraphy and linguistics, the Allchins made their work and that of others highly accessible through a series of sole, joint and edited publications. Seminal works include The Birth of Indian Civilisation (1968), which was later superseded only by their books The Rise of Indian Civilisation in India and Pakistan (1982) and The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia (1995).
Uxbenka is a pre-Columbian Mesoamerican archaeological site located in Belize's southernmost district of Toledo. An urban settlement of the pre-Columbian Maya, it is the earliest-known Maya polity in the southern Belizean lowlands, with evidence of occupation dating to the Early Classic period of Mesoamerican chronology. It is one of five major Maya sites in this region, whose archaeological sites also include Nim Li Punit and Lubaantun. Settlement of Uxbenka has been suggested to have occurred originally by Peten peoples. The site is approximately 40 square kilometers in size, and Uxbenka is referred to as a medium-sized polity ). Uxbenka rose shortly after the expansion of another Mayan site: Tikal. The site is thought to have been first inhabited during the late Preclassic period.
The Pre-Columbian Belize history is the period from initial indigenous presence, across millennia, to the first contacts with Europeans - the Pre-Columbian or before Columbus period - that occurred on the region of the Yucatán Peninsula that is present day Belize.
Nohmul is a pre-Columbian Maya archaeological site located on the eastern Yucatán Peninsula, in what is today northern Belize. The name Nohmul may be translated as "great mound" in Yucatec Maya. It is the most important Maya site in northern Belize. The site included a large pyramid, about 17 meters (56 ft) tall, built around 250 BC. Most of the pyramid was destroyed in May 2013 by contractors tearing it apart for rocks and gravel to use to fill roads, leaving only the core of the pyramid behind.
The Belmopan Museum is a long-planned national museum in Belmopan, the capital of Belize. The originally planned building was to be an ambitious state-of-the-art center for displaying information about the environment and society of Belize, including an exhibit of Mayan archaeology. The project was cancelled, but recently there have been plans to revive it. The Institute of Archaeology's library and collection of Mayan artifacts has been sporadically open to the public in the Archaeology Museum and Research Centre, Belmopan since the late 1990s.
KaʼKabish is an archaeological site in the Orange Walk District of Belize, Central America, located near the Maya sites of Lamanai, El Pozito, and Blue Creek. It was once a moderate sized city, built as part of the Maya civilization, and has been determined to have been largely autonomous throughout its history. The modern communities of Indian Church and San Filipe are in close proximity to KaʼKabish, and the Mennonite community of Blue Creek is slightly further afield. A road connecting Indian Church to San Filipe separates the site into two areas, the North Complex and the South Complex.
David Michael Pendergast, is an American Archaeologist, and is most famous for his work at Altun Ha and Lamanai, Belize. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology in 1955 from the University of California, Berkeley, and earned his Ph.D. in 1961 at the University of California, Los Angeles, studying with Clement Meighan. He was later married to Elizabeth Graham, also a Mesoamerican Archaeologist.
Arlen F. Chase is a Mesoamerican archaeologist and a faculty member in the anthropology department at Pomona College, Claremont CA. Previously, he was a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and served a variety of administrative roles at the University of Central Florida over the course of his 32 year stay at that institution. He is noted for his long-term research at the ancient Maya city of Caracol, Belize and for exploring landscape traces of Maya civilization using lidar.
Pusilhá is an archaeological site in Belize. The location of this Late Classic Mayan urban complex, along the east and west flow of trade, made the city a major transfer point for economic activities in the whole region. In addition, the city gave archaeologists a historical view of a secondary Mayan site. Large and extended excavation efforts have changed the overall picture of Maya social and political relationships between larger and smaller cities and challenged the prevailing view of conquest and absorption of smaller cities into the larger cities in the region. The research conducted at Pusilhá began in 1927 and continues to this day.
La Milpa is an archaeological site and an ancient Maya city within the Three River region of Northwest Belize bordering Mexico and Guatemala. La Milpa is located between the sites of Rio Azul and Lamanai. Currently, La Milpa lies within the nature preserve owned by the Programme for Belize, a non-profit organization. PfB acquired land for the preserve from the Coco-Cola Company, who purchased land in Belize in 1988 with the goals of tearing down the rainforest to create a citrus plantation, however donated the land to conservation and management project in 1990 and 1992. Following Caracol and Lamanai, La Milpa is the third largest site in Belize with the Main Plaza alone covering 18,000 square meters, making it one of the largest in the entire Maya region.
Colha, Belize is a Maya archaeological site located in northern portion of the country, about 52 km. north of Belize City, near the town of Orange Walk. The site is one of the earliest in the Maya region and remains important to the archaeological record of the Maya culture well into the Postclassic Period. According to Palma Buttles, “Archaeological evidence from Colha allows for the interpretation occupation from the Early Preceramic (3400-1900B.C.) to Middle Postclassic with population peaks occurring in the Late Preclassic and again in the Late Classic ”. These peaks in population are directly related to the presence of stone tool workshops at the site. Colha's proximity to an important source of high quality chert that is found in the Cenozoic limestone of the region and well traveled trade routes was utilized by the inhabitants to develop a niche in the Maya trade market that may have extended to the Greater Antilles. During the Late Preclassic and Late Classic periods, Colha served as a primary supplier of worked stone tools for the region. It has been estimated that the 36 workshops at Colha produced nearly 4 million chert and obsidian tools and eccentrics that were dispersed throughout Mesoamerica during the Maya era. This made it an important player in the trade of essential good throughout the area.
Baking Pot is a Maya archaeological site located in the Belize River Valley on the southern bank of the river, northeast of modern-day town of San Ignacio in the Cayo District of Belize; it is 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) downstream from the Barton Ramie and Lower Dover archaeological sites. Baking Pot is associated with an extensive amount of research into Maya settlements, community-based archaeology, and of agricultural production; the site possesses lithic workshops, and possible evidence of cash-cropping cacao as well as a long occupation from the Preclassic through to the Postclassic period.
David Cheetham is a Canadian archaeologist. He works primarily in Central America and specializes in the identification of Preclassic/Formative era structures and pottery.
Pook's Hill is a private forest reserve, bird sanctuary, and archaeological site in Cayo District, Belize, 12 miles (19 km) west of Belmopan. The Mayan site contains temples, a plazuela, midden, banquet hall, and burial sites. Facilities within the reserve include Pook's Hill Lodge, an ecotourism resort.
Pacbitun is a Maya archaeological site located near the town of San Ignacio, Belize, in the Cayo District of west central Belize. The modern Maya name given to the site means “stone set in earth”, likely a reference to multiple fragments of stone monuments. The site, at about 240 m above sea level, is one of the earliest known from the southern Maya Lowlands, and was inhabited for almost 2000 years, from ca. 900 BCE to 900 CE. Strategically, it straddles a territory of rolling, hilly terrain between the Mountain Pine Ridge and the tropical forest covered lowlands of the Upper Belize River Valley.
Jaime José Awe is a Belizean archaeologist who specializes in the ancient Maya, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University, and the Director of the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance Project.
Elizabeth Graham is a Professor of Mesoamerican Archaeology at UCL. She has worked, for decades, on the Maya civilization, both in prehispanic and colonial times, specifically in Belize. She has recently turned her attention to Maya Dark Earths, and conducts pioneering work in the maya region as dark earths have mostly been studied in the Amazonia. She particularly focuses on how human occupation influences soil formation and production.
Belize 
