Ancestral Maya Ground Stone Tool Industry in the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, Belize

Lecture from 10/12/2023. While conducting opportunistic regional survey in summer 2022 in the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, Belize, Dr. Jon Spenard’s Rio Frio Regional Archaeological Project was informed of a series of granitic rock debitage piles nearby. Investigations revealed them to be ancestral Maya quarries and ground stone tool workshops, the first of their kind recorded anywhere in the Maya region. Naming the site the Buffalo Hill Quarries, the project mapped over a dozen extraction features (quarry pits and cut faces) surrounded by debitage piles spread over an area of approximately 16 hectares (40 acres). The site continued, but time did not permit its full documentation. Noted throughout the mapped area were dozens of production tools and discarded objects in various stages of reduction. Aided by data from an aerial LiDAR survey of the region, the project returned in summer 2023 to finish mapping the site and conduct test excavations on an extraction locus to investigate ancestral Maya quarrying methods and techniques. In this talk, Dr. Spenard will present the results of those two field seasons, introduce more results from the LiDAR survey, and discuss the next stages of the project, including examining who the quarry workers were and how their products may have been distributed.
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The San Diego Archaeological Center is a nonprofit museum, education, and research facility where visitors can learn the story of how people have lived in San Diego County for the past 10,000 years. Located in San Pasqual Valley, it is the only local organization dedicated to the collection, study, curation, and exhibition of San Diego County’s archaeological artifacts.
Note: The views and opinions expressed in this video are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the San Diego Archaeological Center.