About BREA

The Macal River

The Belize River East Archaeology (BREA) project is directed by Dr. Eleanor Harrison-Buck, Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of New Hampshire. She has been doing archaeology in Belize for over 25 years. She initiated the Belize River East Archaeology (BREA) project in 2011 and began also running a field school through UNH at that time. The BREA project study area encompasses the lower half of the Belize River Watershed between Belmopan and Belize City, a roughly 2000 sq. km area. Their field research examines a deep history of human-environment interaction that extends from the Pre-Maya or Archaic period through Colonial times. Permission to survey and excavate sites in the BREA study area has been granted to Dr. Harrison-Buck by the Belize Institute of Archaeology.

Since 2022, the BREA project has been co-directed by Dr. Marieka Brouwer Burg, Assistant Professor at the University of Vermont, who first visited Belize in 2006 as a field school student at the Programme for Belize. Marieka has been a member of the BREA project since its inception and has held the role of lab director, GIS specialist, project illustrator/photographer, crew chief, and camp manager. She is heading up a subproject called the Northern Belize Archaic Adaptative Strategies (NBAAS) which is investigating Archaic occupations in the area around Crooked Tree Island. 

Funding

BREA is grateful for the generous support of their funders, including the Alphawood Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the University of New Hampshire, Washington College, and the University of Vermont. BREA’s success as a project is contingent on their continued generous support.

Drs. Brouwer Burg (PI) and Harrison-Buck (co-PI) were recently awarded a National Science Foundation, Senior Archaeology Grant (FAIN # 2120534) titled “Archaic Adaptive Strategies in Northern Belize: Investigating Dynamic Models of Land Use and Mobility in and Around Crooked Tree Island.” The aim of this grant is to investigate how Archaic hunter-gatherers adapted to unique micro-environments, including freshwater and brackish lagoons, swamp forest, pine/oak savanna, and tropical broadleaf forests, and how, if at all, these adaptations were impacted by the global climatic drying. This project will tease apart the multifaceted question of which Archaic subsistence and mobility/settlement strategies were most successful in the range of microenvironments located around the study area, and which zones would have been most conducive to early agricultural experimentation. This study will combine geospatial analyses, paleoecological studies, surveys and test excavations, materials analyses, and radiometric dating.

Dr. Harrison-Buck was awarded a Public Engagement Fellowship from the Whiting Foundation. This generous funding provided her a release from teaching to develop the Crooked Tree Museum and Cultural Heritage Center in partnership with the Crooked Tee community.

Drs. Harrison-Buck and Brouwer Burg are especially grateful to the Alphawood Foundation, which funds Pre-Columbian archaeological research and has contributed to BREA research since 2011. The continued success of the BREA project is due in large part to this generous support. Alphawood also provided support for the development of the Crooked Tree Museum and Cultural Heritage Center where the BREA project features the results of their long-term research.

To learn more about the Crooked Tree Museum and Cultural Heritage Center click here.