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Etiology The name “Playas de los Muertos” literally translated means “beaches of the dead”. Location Located on the Caribbean coast of northwest Honduras, the archaeological cemetery site of Playas de los Muertos is located on the Ulua River. It is also located 10 km from the archaeological site of Puertos Escondido which is locate on a small tributary of the Chamelecon River, one of two tropical rivers that form the lower Ulua Valley on the Caribbean coast of Honduras (Joyce and Henderson 2007:643).

Dorothy Popenoe Born Dorothy Kate Hughes, Popenoe was born June 1899, in Ashford, Middlesex, England. She attended the Welsh Girls’ School in Ashford until the beginning of World War One when she joined the English Land Army. After the war, she worked at the Kew Garden in London, England as an assistant to Dr. Otto Knapf until 1923 when she was invited by Agnes Chase to join the staff of the Unites States National Herbarium in the Office of Foreign Plant Introduction. She conducted numerous studies of cultivated bamboo. Once there, she met and married William Popenoe, the agricultural explorer and later gave birth to their five children. In 1952, her husband accepted a position with the United Fruit Company as the director of agricultural experiments and moved the family to Tela on the Atlantic Coast of Honduras. While in Honduras, Popenoe developed an interest in archaeology and worked on several Honduran archaeological sites including in the Mayan fortress of Tenampua in 1927. Between 1928 and 1932 she excavated in the pre-Columbian cemetery at Playa de los Muertos. However she could not complete her work because in December of 1932, she ate an unripe, uncooked akee fruit, which is believed to have poisoned her and as a result she passed away. The results of her excavations at Playas de los Muertos were published posthumously in 1934. (Jstor 2011)

George Vaillant George Clapp Vaillant was born 1901 in Boston, Massachusetts and attended Harvard University where in 1927 he received, his doctorate in Anthropology with a thesis that established the chronology of Mayan ceramics. After finishing his doctorate, he joined the American Museum of Natural History in 1927 and then began working in the Valley of Mexico (O’Brien andLyman 1999: 192.) In terms of the excavations at Playas de los Muertos, Vaillant used the pottery found at the site in order to trace the development of the Middle Cultures of Mesoamerica. He did this by using the Law of Superposition, comparing the ceramics found at other sites and to those found at Plays de Los Muertos and cross dating (Kidder, 1945:596).