antiquities law was enacted in 1971, allowing the archaeological commissioner to demand a justifiable research design. Joseph O. Palacio became the first Belizean commissioner in 1972, and the practice of allocating half of the excavated material to foreign institutions in return for their investment of research funds (a practice begun by Anderson on the basis of successful schemes elsewhere) was eventually reconsidered. The practice was eventually phased out entirely in the 1990s, leading several major museums to redeploy their research funds.

Fieldwork in Belize included renewed efforts at Lubaantun, which placed the site within a regional context and studied its ecological and economic aspects (Hammond 1975). This work was followed by the Corozal Project (CP), an explicitly regional study of 3,500 square kilometers in northern Belize that located, mapped, and tested sites of all sizes and periods to investigate long-term landscape history. Sites discovered by the Corozal Project included Cuello, a preclassic settlement dating to 1200 b.c. (although initially thought to be much older—see Hammond 1991), and Colha, a major chert-tool production site that also dated to the preclassic era. CP excavations there and at Nohmul, Santa Rita, Corozal, and San Estevan engendered successive projects by a variety of former CP staff members and others interested in investigating different aspects of the postclassic, settlement patterns, lithic studies, and urban genesis. CP results also stimulated independent projects on drained-field agriculture at Pulltrouser Swamp (Turner and Harrison 1983) and on possible Archaic occupation of the Maya lowlands. Other investigators examined drained-field complexes on the Rio Hondo and the late-preclassic site of Cerros, where the plan of a preclassic community was elucidated for the first time and elaborate polychrome stucco masks were uncovered on several temples (Robertson and Freidel 1986).

Northern Belize was saturated with archaeologists, but the Royal Ontario Museum’s long-term project at Lamanai from 1974 to 1984 (see Pendergast 1981) was on a scale that dwarfed any other work. This was succeeded in 1985 by the equally ambitious surveys and excavations at Caracol that are still ongoing (see, e.g., Chase and Chase 1994), and, from 1992 onward, a large-scale investigation of La Milpa. Complementary investigation of dozens of smaller sites in the biological reserve around La Milpa, linking to earlier work immediately west across the frontier into Guatemala around Rio Azul, and recent surveys in southeastern Campeche, immediately north into Mexico, have created the largest database for ancient Maya landscape and settlement archaeology to date.

The Belize Valley has also seen a concentration of work, with major projects at Xunantunich, Cahal Pech, Buenavista del Cayo, Blackman Eddy, and other sites: the hills flanking the valley, largely ignored in Willey’s survey, proved to have been heavily populated and home to a number of important and early centers. Transects from the valley floor northward, extending to the new site of El Pilar (itself part of a transfrontier park established in concert with Guatemala), have linked the limestone uplands where La Milpa and San José lie with the corridor of the river valley and routes west into Peten. To the south, cave studies in the Maya Mountains, begun on an ad hoc basis by Anderson and Pendergast from the 1950s onward, were advanced by the recruitment of speleologists (cave explorers), who penetrated deep caves and found extensive Maya utilization there dating to the late-preclassic period. Such use, originally thought to be just for collecting zuhuy ha (virgin water) for rituals, has now been shown to be part of a concern with the chthonic realm that permeated Maya society at all levels. Recent work in the Xibun Valley by Patricia A. McAnany has integrated surface settlement history with the history of cave use.

The first systematic surveys east of the Maya Mountains were carried out in the Stann Creek District by Elizabeth Graham (1994), archaeological commissioner from 1977 to 1979, and the unexplored southeastern valleys of the massif in Toledo District were penetrated by Peter S. Dunham in the 1990s. At the same time, the more accessible lowlands of Toledo were restudied in several projects, including renewed work at Pusilhà, Nim li punit, and Wild Cane Cay.