Affiliation: Michigan State University
Gabriel Wrobel is a Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Anthropology at Michigan State University. He holds his degrees from Indiana University (Ph.D.), and Emory University. He is a bioarchaeologist of the ancient Maya region, particularly in Belize. He is the Director of the Michigan State University Bioarchaeology Laboratory, as well as the Central Belize Archaeological Survey Project, which he has been involved with since 2009. More recently, he has served as the co-director of the Marco Gonzalez Archaeological Project since 2023. His current publications include Mesoamerican Osteobiographies: Revealing the Lives and Deaths of Ancient Individuals (co-edited with Andrea Cucina) (UPF) and he co-authored “Catbirds and Crabholes: The 2023 Field Season at Marco Gonzalez, Belize” (Kratimenos et al.) published in Archaeology International.
The Marco Gonzalez Archaeological Project investigates the lives and deaths of Pre-Contact (AD 1 – 1500) Maya in a coastal Maya community in northern Belize. Excavations focused on residential and public architecture show how the settlement grew from a small fishing community to become a center of industrial-scale salt production, and later an important hub in long-distance trade networks. Analyses of the skeletons of many of those who lived at Marco Gonzalez help paint a humanistic picture of everyday life in this small, but once powerful community.
Use of caves by the ancient Maya appears to be ubiquitous. Archaeological explanations of Maya mortuary contexts in caves – in academic journals, television programs, and the popular press – have focused almost exclusively on sacrificial ritual. However, this rather sensationalist interpretation is not so clear-cut. This talk will cover some of the extensive pan-Mesoamerican corpus of ethnographic, ethnohistoric, epigraphic, iconographic, and linguistic sources to demonstrate how the Maya incorporated caves into their worldview and ritual. This talk then demonstrates the ways in which skeletal data can inform competing models of Maya mortuary cave use by highlighting recent bioarchaeological research in central Belize by the Central Belize Archaeological Survey(CBAS) Project.
