Work in Toledo was coeval with the rise of a movement for greater political autonomy among the Mopan and Kekchi inhabitants of the region, which impacted on archaeology in both positive and negative ways.

In the late 1990s European Union funds were used to carry out major restoration at both Lubaantun and Nim li punit, as one facet of tourism development for national as well as local benefit. Similar restoration had been done at Altun Ha and Xunantunich in earlier decades; the latter site has seen renewed work, and major developments have begun at Caracol and are planned for Lamanai. All of this is part of the Ruta Maya (the Mayan Route) program of cooperation between the five countries of the Maya area, by which Belize is belatedly benefiting from the economic impact of low-volume, high-value eco- and archaeotourism. Archaeology is also widely used in Belizean schools as part of nation-building education: in this ethnically diverse country, a significant proportion of the population has Maya blood. Sites of the contact period in the sixteenth century have been excavated at Lamanai and, notably, at Tipu (Pendergast 1993b), and a historical archaeology of the colonial period has begun (Finamore 1994). A national museum spanning the Maya and colonial periods has been planned for many years in the capital, Belmopan; it may now be built in Belize City, the epicenter of tourism and the nation’s largest population center.

Archaeology in Belize, almost entirely confined to Gann’s activities until the beginning of the institutional periodin 1924, developed slowly in the middle fifty years of the twentieth century but accelerated after 1975. During those years a large-scale investigation of the country’s three major Maya sites (Caracol, La Milpa, and Lamanai) began, and numerous regional and smaller-site projects were completed. Unlike Mexico, where an indigenous school of archaeological practice developed soon after the revolution of 1910 under the influence of manuel gamio, or guatemala, where an intense interest in colonial history spilled over into archaeological work by Guatemalans of European ancestry, Belize had too small a population to pursue archaeological projects in a similar fashion. It also had a colonial government attuned to a policy of benign neglect. As a result, virtually all archaeological research in Belize has been conducted by outsiders; apart from a short episode of British Museum interest in the 1920s, the colonial power left things to others. Institutions in the United States (primarily the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Rutgers, the University of Texas, and Boston University) and in Canada (the Royal Ontario Museum) have dominated research in Belize. Given the relatively informal administration of the archaeological commissioner’s office and the absence of political problems like those affecting neighboring countries, Belize has proved attractive to researchers over the past quarter century—so attractive, in fact, that it has ceased to be considered a backwater and become one of the most intensively investigated and productive areas for Maya research.

Norman Hammond

See also

Maya Civilization; Maya Epigraphy

References

Chase, Diane Z., and Arlen F. Chase, eds. 1994. Studies in the Archaeology of Caracol, Belize. Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute, Monograph 7. San Francisco.

Finamore, Daniel R. 1994. “Sailors and Slaves on the Wood-Cutting Frontier: Archaeology of the British Bay Settlement, Belize.” Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University.

Gann, Thomas. 1900. “Mounds in Northern Honduras.” Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, 19th Annual Report, for 1897–98. Part 2: 661–692. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.

Graham, Elizabeth. 1994. The Highlands of the Lowlands: Environment and Archaeology in the Stann Creek District, Belize, Central America. Madison, WI: Prehistory Press.

Hammond, Norman. 1975. Lubaantun: A Classic Maya Realm. Monographs of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, 2. Cambridge, MA.

———. 1983a. “Lords of the Jungle: A Prosopography of Maya Archaeology.” In Civilizations of the Ancient Americas: Studies in Honor of Gordon R. Willey, 3–32. Ed. R.M. Leventhal and A.L. Kolata. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Press and Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.