The RBAS project takes place in the Rio Bravo Conservation and Management Area (RBCMA), which is owned and operated as a wildlife and environmental reserve in northwestern Belize by the Programme for Belize, a non-profit conservation organization (full background here). This now heavily forested region was once thriving with dozens of cities, towns, and villages during the Maya Classic period (A.D. 250-800), supporting hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps more.
Project participants will stay for the duration of the Project and Field School at the Richard E. W. Adams Research Facility, a remote research camp in the RBCMA that operates under the direction of the University of Texas's Programme for Belize Archaeological Project (PfBAP). Several research projects, the RBAS among them, use this facility as a base from which they carry out investigations in the largely unexplored forests of the RBCMA.
The principal site of investigation within the RBAS zone is Chawak But’o’ob (Yukatec Mayan for “Long Land” or “Long Terraces”), a densely occupied community of about 400 household structures covering half a square kilometer of the sloping, 200-foot-tall Rio Bravo Escarpment. This site, which was occupied for the final century or so of the Late Classic period, is composed of several linear kilometers of terracing, dozens of water basins (and at least one reservoir), and clusters of ancient houses. In Prehispanic times, the houses consisted of stone-walled or wooden-walled domestic buildings placed atop rectangular platforms of stone, earth, and plaster. To a large degree, we focus on investigating these relic platforms, the majority of which are under 2 meters in elevation. In these platforms, we find burials, caches of ritual material, and household refuse, all of which we use to define the activities that took place at these buildings and estimate dates of occupation.