October 15, 2024 - PhD student Emma Messinger has been awarded the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant for her project, Ritual Plant Use in the Maya Lowlands. Emma’s project combines macrobotanical, starch grain, and chemical residue analyses to gain insights into the cultural and ceremonial significance of plants in Maya rituals in the upper Belize River Valley. Emma completed her fieldwork with the BVAR Project in 2023, and this new funding will support her ongoing lab analyses.

June 26, 2024 - Dr. Claire Ebert, Olivia Ellis, and Nick Suarez, all members of the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance (BVAR) Project, presented their latest research at the 2024 Belize Archaeology Symposium in San Ignacio, Belize. Their talks and posters highlighted collaborations between archaeologists and local Maya communities, focusing on addressing climate change, human-environment interactions, ancient Maya foodways, and the reconstruction of obsidian exchange networks in the upper Belize River Valley.

May 29, 2024 - PhD student Nick Suarez’s poster “Interwoven Networks: Reconstructing Classic Maya Obsidian Economies in Western Belize” was voted the winner of the Craig E. Skinner prize for best poster at the SAA meetings in New Oleans, LA. The award was presented on behalf of the International Association for Obsidian Studies (IAOS). This is the third year the IAOS Board has assembled posters and voted on the top three. This year there were more than 10 posters to choose from, showing how important obsidian studies are in anthropological archaeology.

April 8, 2024 - The human isotope dataset for the Caribbean & Mesoamerica Biogeochemical Isotope Overview (CAMBIO), which is lead by Dr. Claire Ebert and colleagues, has just been published open access in Scientific Data. The consists of more than 16,000 isotopic measurements from human skeletal tissue samples from 290 archaeological sites from the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and southern Central America. The open-access dataset also includes detailed chronological, contextual, and laboratory/sample preparation information for each measurement. The collated data are deposited on the open-access CAMBIO data community via the Pandora Initiative data platform.

May 1, 2023 - You are what you eat: What ancient skeletons can tell us about diets in the past: From where you grew up to what you ate, your bones record your life. This talk discusses a unique approach to analyzing ancient bones, and stable isotope geochemistry, which can reveal food habits and migration in the past. This scientific technique also helps archaeologists document major social and economic transformations, like the origins of agriculture. This talk highlights case studies from the ancient Maya world of Belize and beyond to illustrate that you really are what you eat.

April 14, 2023 – A team of four Pitt Anthropology majors, led by grad student Nick Suarez, presented the results of a year-long project conducting technological analyses of obsidian artifacts from western Belize at the 1st Annual Pitt CCA Archaeology Research Fair. (In photo from left to right, grad student Nick Suarez, and underground Brandon Torres, Jia Tucker, Audrey Smith, and Mare LaRusse).

You can view and download the complete poster here.

April 1, 2023 – Several lab members presented their research at the 88th Society for American Archaeology Meetings. Graduate student poster presentations focused on strontium isotope evidence for the role of animals in rituals economies in western Belize, Terminal Classic ritual deposits at Xunantunich (Belize), examining archaeological patterns of feasting at Lower Dover (Belize), and a case study of treponemal infection from a 19th century Indiana cemetery.

March 15, 2023 –Dr. Claire Ebert and Dr. Julie Hoggarth were awarded a Wenner-Gren Foundation Workshop Grant for the project Sustainability and the Classic Maya 'Collapse’. Held in January 2024, the workshop united archaeologists, Maya community members, and heritage professionals from Belize and Guatemala to examine the resilience of ancient and modern Maya communities in response to climate change.

December 1, 2022 - For more than thirty years the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance project has studied the ancient Maya. Read the complete article published in American Archaeology Magazine that describes our fieldwork at Cahal Pech, Baking Pot, and Xunantunich, Belize.

November 3, 2022 - For students of any discipline, the world is a classroom. This is especially accurate for students of Anthropology, like PhD student Gretchen Zoeller. Zoeller’s studies have taken her to Italy; El-Kurru, Sudan; and most recently, Nuri, Sudan. Now in the third year of her program, Zoeller plans to return to Nuri in the winter of 2023 for her disseration research. Read more about Gretchen’s research here.

September 3, 2022 - The Caribbean & Mesoamerica Biogeochemical Isotope Overview (CAMBIO) is a collaborative effort led by Early Career researchers working in Latin America, the US, and Europe. CAMBIO collects isotopic data from archaeological sites across Mesoamerica and the Caribbean that are sensitive to the past diet and mobility of humans.

May 6, 2022 - PhD Student Ian Roa was awarded a Wenner-Den Dissertation grant for his project “Hallowed Creatures: A Zoontological Perspective of Human-Animal Interaction in Maya Ritual”. He will be completing his isotopic analyses of animal remains from Belize during a fellowship with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama in Summer 2022.

March 3, 2022 - Dr. Claire Ebert has received Pitt Momentum Funds for her research project "Agricultural Adaptations in Response to Environmental Stress". Combining archaeological survey and excavation with lidar remote sensing analysis and radiocarbon dating, this project will systematically investigate the subsistence and settlement practices of the earliest farmers who inhabited western Belize, placing these developments in climatic context. Funding will support field and lab research from 2023-2024.