Institute of Maya Studies

The search for the earliest ancestors of the Maya

with Keith Prufer

Recent research at two rockshelters in the Maya Mountains of southern Belize are changing the way archaeologists think about some of the earliest humans in the tropical Maya Lowlands. The sites were utilized for over 10,000 years as sheltered domestic spaces for processing plants and animals, making stone tools, and as cemeteries with over 100 human skeletons spanning the Holocene. Interdisciplinary research that includes population genetics, isotope ecology, and palaeobotanical analyses are revealing surprising details about the long-term presence of human groups in the Maya Mountains, and remarkably early evidence of food production and related technologies.

Keith Prufer and tree
Keith Prufer
Keith Prufer is an archaeologist, isotope ecologist, and core faculty in the Center for Stable Isotopes (CSI) at University of New Mexico. He has directed long-term interdisciplinary field and laboratory studies for the past two decades focused on human adaptation in the neotropics throughout the Holocene. Since 2015, he has worked collaboratively combining archaeometric and genomic data on tropical foragers and farmers in Central America. He has also worked extensively public archaeology outreach and consultations with Indigenous Maya communities and other stakeholders. His current research addresses issues of mobility, migration, diet, and social organization.


Keith is a Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, Harvard University, Washington DC,