Colha

Colha lies in northern Belize, about 52 kilometres north of Belize City near Orange Walk. Its importance came from high-quality chert embedded in the region’s Cenozoic limestone and from routes able to carry worked stone far beyond the settlement. Occupation is documented from the Early Preceramic period, between roughly 3400 and later BCE, through the Middle Postclassic, about 1150 to 1300 CE. Population reached notable peaks in the Late Preclassic, from 400 BCE to 100 CE, and the Late Classic, from 600 to 850 CE.

Stone working drove that growth. Thirty-six workshops at Colha are estimated to have produced nearly four million chert and obsidian tools and eccentrics, which circulated through Mesoamerica and perhaps reached the Greater Antilles. Much later Postclassic workshops used local chert alongside imported chalcedony and more obsidian. New forms such as side-notched dart points appeared, while the surviving society seems to have been smaller and more agrarian. Great quantities of discarded flakes record the repeated reduction of stone and the daily labour behind a trade that supplied practical and ceremonial objects far beyond any royal court.