Topic: The Ancestral Maya Quarryscapes of the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, Belize

Speaker: Dr. Jon Spenard

The Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve in western central Belize has long been recognized as a major source of economically important resources for past Maya people including pine wood, slate, and granitic rock, the latter of which was used to make manos and metates, tools found in all Maya homes. Yet, despite the economic importance of the region, it has gone largely ignored in Maya archaeology due to its relatively unique geology that makes intensive farming prohibitive. Common wisdom in the field held that since past Maya people were unable to farm there, they did not live there, and thus the region holds little archaeological potential. The lack of archaeological attention given to the reserve has led to uncertainty about where exactly the resources were being extracted from, how they were extracted, and by who. Such questions guided my research as I initiated my Rio Frio Regional Archaeological Project in the reserve in 2018. To date, that project has revealed the Mountain Pine Ridge is actually a complex and multifaceted archaeological region with a wide variety of past Maya sites including settlement, ritual caves, and quarries. In this talk, I focus on the granitic rock industry found there with a particular emphasis on the Buffalo Hill Quarries, a quarry and workshop site where manos and metates were being produced on a near-industrial scale. The talk also considers the role that the site of Nohoch Batsó, first documented for science by my project in 2019, may have played in the control and exchange of goods made in the quarries.

Jon Spenard is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cal State San Marcos. He joined the department in 2016 after graduating with his Ph.D. in anthropology from UC Riverside. He also holds an M.A. in Anthropology from Florida State University, and a B.A. in Anthropology from Franklin Pierce University. Dr. Spenard is a landscape archaeologist and has spent much of his academic career investigating ancestral Maya ritual cave sites. In 2018, he initiated the Rio Frio Regional Archaeological Project (RiFRAP) in the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, Belize, a relatively unstudied region of the Maya Lowlands. The aim of Dr. Spenard's RiFRAP is documenting the various ways past Maya people lived in and interacted with that landscape. Currently, the project has three main research foci, ritual caves, settlement, and granitic rock extraction and ground stone implement manufacture.