Drones, mapping, and excavations in the middle belize valley: research investigations of the belize river east archaeology (brea) project

The Belize River East Archaeology (BREA) project has continued to focus on survey, mapping, and excavations of sites in the middle Belize Valley, particularly the ancient Maya site of Saturday Creek. Previously, we have suggested that Saturday Creek and its associated Hats Kaab “E-Group” marked an important crossroads in the middle Belize Valley. Here, we present an overview of our work this past season, which included re-mapping the site core of Saturday Creek using a Total Station and performing several test excavations. We also flew several unmanned aerial vehicles (otherwise known as “drones”) in the areas of cleared agricultural fields that surround the Saturday Creek site core. The drone mapping revealed an extraordinary density of mounds, particularly just north of the site core in the vicinity of the “E-Group,” indicating that this locale was a major focus of population aggregation in ancient times. The results of our mapping complement our previous GIS spatial analyses and studies of ceramic distribution patterns for this area in the eastern Belize Watershed. Combined, our studies leave little doubt that Saturday Creek and its vicinity marked a central node in the landscape, arguably because it served as a nexus between eastwest and north-south trade and communication networks from Classic to Colonial times.