About Aventura
Since 2013, our international archaeological team has conducted survey, excavation, and lidar research at the ancestral Maya city of Aventura in the Corozal District of Belize. Our research has focused on the settlement, households, and water resources of the city. We work collaboratively with local communities to study city life and ancestral Maya resilience.
PROJECT GOALS
The goal of the Aventura Archaeology Project is to understand the people who made up the city of Aventura. Aventura has an extensive five millennium history that spans periods of climate change and drought, political turbulence, shifting trade routes, European invasion, and colonialism. Given this expanse of time, our primary research question asks: what did Aventura’s residents do to develop resilient households and communities through time? To date, our research has identified four factors that fostered resilience at Aventura including minimizing inequality across the city, household economic flexibility and local production, ecological management fostering conservation, and memory and spirituality
MINIMIZING INEQUALITY ACROSS THE CITY
Inequality and difference were part of life at Aventura as is visible in the variation in residential architectural forms across the city. However, the ancestral Maya residents of the city avoided extremes of wealth and power and no one group had monopoly control over goods and resources. Instead, city residents promoted shared aspects of community life, and this fostered resilience. One example comes from Kacey Grauer’s research. Grauer found that during times of drought people shared access to water, rather than restricted access to it, allowing them to weather periods of drying climate.
Another hallmark of life in the city was more equitable access to goods and resources. Zachary Nissen’s research identified that even lower status residents at Aventura had access to some jadeite, one of the most valued possessions in Maya society, that is typically restricted to people of elite and royal status. From the water they drank, the food people ate, and their practical and luxury belongings, there is greater comparability than difference between households of different statuses at Aventura. These less hierarchical relations minimized inequalities by ensuring that people could fulfill their basic needs and access objects of value, spiritual worlds, and community; things that today would be referred to as a quality of life.
HOUSEHOLD ECONOMIC FLEXIBILITY AND LOCAL PRODUCTION
Economic flexibility and local production are two means through which the ancestral Maya of Aventura grew their city and its regional marketplace into the paramount center in the Corozal Bay region during the Late Classic (600-800 CE) and buffered themselves against turbulent times in society. Aventura was situated in a geopolitically intermediary region between powerful core regions of the Maya area, the Peten and northern Yucatan. Aventura’s residents built upon the city’s intermediary position to develop socio-economic relations with multiple regions. This proved beneficial for the city because when there were disruptions in one external region, residents were able to shift their socio-economic ties to mitigate against the disruptions.
Another key to Aventura’s economic resiliency was local production. There were expansive systems of raised field agriculture, making Aventura a regional breadbasket. As well, householders produced ceramic, lithic, and shell goods for the market. These local household economies provided Aventura’s residents with a foundation to grow their city and a means to buffer themselves in the face of external economic changes.
ECOLOGICAL MANAGEMENT FOSTERING CONSERVATION
Ecological management fostering the conservation and sharing of natural resources provided a basis for sustainability at Aventura. After the advent of agriculture, Aventura’s landscape was a partly forested and partly cultivated garden in a forest landscape where agriculture, forests, and gardens were deeply integrated and integral to one another. Even during Aventura’s Late Classic population maximum, when city residents would have required increasing amounts of timber for construction and fuel, people practiced forest management strategies such as pruning, removing dead branches, and removing competing trees, to promote growth. This low impact forest management promoted forest conservation alongside development. The ancestral Maya at Aventura developed and passed down inter-generational knowledge about ecological management that fostered conservation and sustainability.
MEMORY AND SPIRITUALITY
Today Yucatec Maya residing in the Corozal Bay region regard Aventura as one of the sacred three sisters, the other two being the sites of Santa Rita Corozal (Chactemal) and Cerro Maya. We honor this contemporary spirituality in our archaeological work at Aventura through incorporating prayers and ceremonies offered by some of our collaborators in Belize, Nojoch Máak (great knowledge keeper) Ramón Aban and the NPO To’one Masehualoon (translated as: We are Maya). These sacred acts though distinct from those in the past resonate with all the ways that Aventura was sacred in the past as we see from evidence of musical instruments, altars, ancestral ceremonies, ritual offerings, ancestral burials, and feasts, all of which were integral to life at ancestral Aventura. Today and in the past ritual practices at Aventura help build resilience because they carry traditional knowledge, shape group identities, and foster social cohesion between participants in sacred rites.