Recent excavations in a remote rainforest in southern Belize have recovered a wide range of archaeological and biological remains from a near-continuous sequence from 13,000 years ago to the present. Ongoing analysis of remains from these excavations allows vivid insights into early human behaviors, subsistence, and worldview during a poorly understood time period in the neotropics.
Keith M. Prufer is a Professor of Anthropology, Center for Stable Isotopes at the University of New Mexico and an environmental archaeologist interested in how humans adapted to environmental changes during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene in the American neotropics. Since 2012 has directed the Bladen Paleoindian and Archaic Project which has been excavating two large rockshelters in the remote Bladen Nature Preserve in southern Belize. These sites are providing new data on human biology, subsistence, and social behaviors of some of the continents earliest colonists.