Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Ancient Maya Underworld: Exploring the rise and fall of Maya centres in central Belize from the cave context

As integrated and varied ritual contexts, how do changing patterns of pre-Columbian cave use inform the complex of historical, social, political, economic and related ideological processes in action during the inception, florescence, and collapse of Tipan Chen Uitz and other ancient Maya centres in Central Belize? This book aims to highlight and, within a specific regional context, to address, the tendency of the speleoarchaeology of the Maya area to isolate itself from broader topics of discourse. To this end, it explicitly contextualizes primary research in several caves along a chain of related concepts and datasets, extending from the broad body of literature on ritual and religion, through discussion of the conceptual cave context drawn from epigraphic and iconographic sources, and its invocation as recorded in contemporary (or, at least, relatively recent) ethnographic contexts and earlier post-Columbian indigenous historic sources, to the well-travelled paths of the archaeological study of caves.