Archaeological Field School in Belize 2008

Project Staff

Excavation Supervisors

Justin Lowry I am in my second year of the doctoral program in the UAlbany department of anthropology.  I am a Mesoamerican archaeologist interested in urbanism, economy and resource distribution and how they change from Late/Terminal Classic to the Postclassic in the northern Maya lowlands.  I finished my undergraduate work at University of Miami, where I received a BS in geological sciences and a BA in anthropology.  I hope to continue to learn about field methodologies, and will count this first UAlbany field school as a valuable opportunity to work in Belize.
Jason Paling I am a now graduate student at SUNY-Albany and received a bachelor's in archaeology from Boston University and a master's in underwater archaeology/maritime history from East Carolina University.  I am currently working on a master's paper that examines projectile points from the Postclassic Maya city of Mayapan.  My future research goals include understanding the origins of complexity by examining the change of lithic technology from the Middle and Late Formative Periods at San Estevan.  I hope to use the lithic data collected during the 2008 field season to understand how technological change contributed to complexity, and also to source a sample of the lithic material to explore exchange patterns in the Formative period.  This is my first season working on the SUNY-Albany field school, but not my first trip to Belize.  Almost a decade ago I was enrolled in Dr. Patricia McAnany's Sibun River Valley field school, and I am looking forward to returning to Belize.
Jared Latimer I received my undergraduate degree in anthropology from the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center, and I am currently finishing my Master’s degree in Anthropology at SUNY Albany.  I specialize in Mesoamerican archaeology with an emphasis on the Mayan culture in the Postclassic period.  My current research projects include an analysis of the ceramic figurine assemblage of Mayapán, the capital city of a large Maya polity on the Yucatan peninsula, and an analysis of the oval biface stone tools found at Laguna de On Island in Belize.  My research interests also include the evolution of Maya ritual practice during the Classic/Postclassic transition and methods of civic governance in the Postclassic period.
Sean Higgins I have recently joined the graduate program at SUNY-Albany to get my Master’s in Anthropology. I received my Bachelor’s in Anthropology from SUNY-Albany in 2004. Since then, I have been a crew chief and recent project director for the New York State Education Department’s Cultural Resource Survey Program. My research interests are in Mesoamerican archaeology, zooarchaeology, hierarchy, and mortuary analysis. A recent topic of interest has been the osteological evidence for human sacrifice as it appears in the archaeological record. My field school training was done through the UAlbany Belize Postclassic Project in 2002, and the following summer, I returned to work on a colonial period site on the shores of Progresso Lagoon.  I plan to use faunal remains collected in the course of the San Estevan 2008 field season for my Master's thesis.  My preliminary question is to see if/how food resources relate to status.