PROGRESSO LAGOON’S ARCHAIC PERIOD OCCUPATION AND THE ELUSIVE “ORANGE SOILS”

Over two decades ago, my colleagues and I identified preceramic occupation at multiple points along the Freshwater Creek drainage in northern Belize. During three recent field seasons, the Belize Archaic Project (BAP) has further documented the Archaic-period occupation at Progresso Lagoon revealing early human occupation and impacts on the local environment. This paper provides an update on recent findings that include: 1) systematic augur survey that has documents 160 locations of potential Archaic-period occupation based on the presence of orange soils; 2) excavations at seventeen of these sites that have recovered thousands of patinated lithics and AMS dates from the fourth and fifth millennia BP; and 3) sediment cores recovered from Progresso Lagoon and nearby closed-basin ponds that document 8000 years of pollen and charcoal evidence as well as a soil horizon in each core comparable to the orange matrix in which Archaic-age remains are found on land. I conclude with an assessment of what these data mean for understanding this early period of Belize prehistory, including the possibility that these orange soils were transported across the Atlantic Ocean at the end of a “Green Sahara” period during the fifth millennium BP.