Situating Power and Locating Knowledge: A Paleoethnobotanical Perspective on Late Classic Maya Gender and Social Relations (original) (raw)
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Gender, power, and status in Classic Period Caracol, Belize
Textiles formed a major part of any ancient Mesoamerican economy. Based on ethnohistory and iconography, the Maya were great producers of cloth for both internal and external use. However, the archaeological identification of textile production is difficult in any tropical area because of issues of preservation. This paper examines the evidence for the production and distribution of cloth that is found in the pre-Columbian Maya area and then focuses on archaeological data relative to textiles from the ancient Maya city of Caracol, Belize. Archaeology at Caracol has been carried out annually from 1985 to the present and has resulted in the collection of data that permits insight into the economic production and social distribution of cloth at the site. This is accomplished through examining the contexts and distributions of spindle whorls, bone needles, bone pins and hairpins, bone awls, and limestone bars. All of these artifacts can be related to weaving, netting, or cloth in some way. Importantly, perforated ceramic disks are not included in this grouping because of contextual information from the archaeological record that these artifacts likely functioned as backings for ear assemblages. Spindle whorls are the artifacts most clearly associated with textile production and 57 of these have been recovered at Caracol, 38 of them in 20 different burials. Several of these interments are of high-status women placed in the most important architectural constructions at the site. The contextual placement of these burials stresses not only the link between women and weaving, but also the high status associated with such an activity, thus signaling the importance of cloth and spinning in ancient Maya society. The prevalence of female interments in the major ritual buildings at Caracol also reflects the importance of women to Maya social structure during the Classic period (A.D. 250-900), pointing to difficulties in hieroglyphically based interpretations of ancient Maya social organization and suggesting that the traditional focus on males in the sociopolitical organization of the Classic Maya is incorrect.
STANDARDIZED LITHIC TECHNOLOGY AND CRAFTING AT THE “GATEWAY GROUP” FROM CARACOL, BELIZE: IMPLICATIONS FOR MAYA HOUSEHOLD ARCHAEOLOGY, 2014
Households make up the bulk of the ancient Maya archaeological record. These are the historical places where the Maya lived, reproduced, remembered, and worked, thus archaeologists can analyze the artifacts of what peoples did at their living groups. This paper presents and analyzes one of only a few case studies of small chert tools or "drills" from the Maya lowlands to identify what ancient peoples did and possibly infer their potential impact at the local scale. Lithic data from the "Gateway Group" at Caracol, Belize, located approximately 300m southeast of Caana, Caracol's largest structure, and the Conchita Causeway yielded a highly standardized tool assemblage. These data in conjunction with other investigated assemblages enable discussions of the organization of intensive localized lithic and non-lithic craft production. I conclude by describing the importance of this research on how archaeologists might draw relational connections between households using standardization studies and thereby consider the technical learning, sharing, and doing that took place between ancient Maya residences.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON CLASSIC MAYA SOCIAL ORGANIZATION FROM CARACOL, BELIZE
Ancient Mesoamerica, 2004
Inferring ancient social and political organization from the archaeological record is a difficult task. Generally, the models used to interpret the Classic-period Maya (a.d. 250-900) have been borrowed from other societies and other times and thus also reflect etic conceptions of the past. Maya social and political organization has been interpreted as varying in complexity. Those who would model a less complex Classic Maya social structure have tended to employ lineage models and segmentation. Models of a more complex Classic Maya civilization focus on different social levels and on a breakdown of some kinship systems. Other models, such as that of the "noble house," represent attempts to find a middle ground. Yet archaeological and epigraphic data that have been gathered for the Classic Maya place parameters on any interpretation that is generated. Data collected from Caracol, Belize, over the past 19 years can be used to illustrate the problems that arise in the strict application of "ideal" social models to the Classic Maya situation. These same data also provide parameters for the reconstruction of ancient sociopolitical organization.
Latin American Antiquity, 2022
In embedded economies where multiple modes of production and exchange exist, artifact distributions in households alone do not reflect the strength of specific modes. We use a diachronic perspective tied to changes in political economies and artifact class densities standardized by excavation volume at the Maya site of Actuncan, Belize, to elucidate changes in the strength of individual production and exchange modes in the Preclassic and Classic periods. We focus on ground stone densities as a measure of grinding intensity across elite and common households. Data indicate that common households always ground more maize than elites, but intensity peaked in the Late Classic when tax and tribute demands and market exchanges were greatest. In the Terminal Classic, common household grinding intensity decreased by half as tribute burdens diminished, illustrating the impact of political hierarchies on household economies.
Craft specialization, gender, and personhood among the postconquest Maya of Yucatan, Mexico
Archeological Papers of the American …, 1998
The early ethnohistoric sources from Yucatan contain a wealth of information concerning Maya artisans, their craft activities, and the special goods they produced. We examine the principal sources for information on the sexual division of labor, engendered craft activities, and the influence of crafts and related domestic arts on Maya perceptions of self. Lexical data from the dictionary sources demonstrate a clear gender complementarity in the organization of work and craft activities. Detailed observations of native practices by early Spanish clerics further suggest that mastery of the basic domestic arts was critical in Maya self perceptions of full personhood.
Christophe Helmke Front Cover: Photo of the Hokeb Ha vase is based on the poster to the Albuquerque Museum exhibit (1986) called: Maya: Treasures of an Ancient Civilization. Logo drawing -Christophe Helmke based on the same vase Back cover: Photo-Montage / collage on the back is based on the poster from last year's symposium (design Rafael Guerra) Here we take the perspective that ancient Maya commoners contributed to the continued formation of Maya belief systems through local ritual activity. At the Chan site, construction of a tri-partite "E-group" architectural complex at the beginning of the Late Preclassic (300 B.C. -A.D. 100/150) developed a space for community ritual and linked this agrarian community to broader social and political changes in the Maya lowlands. The "E-group" was the nexus of ritual behavior at Chan throughout its 2,000 year history, evidenced by a series of caches and burials recovered from its eastern and western structures. Using bioarchaeological, ceramic, and architectural evidence, we express how the residents acted within a pan-Maya belief system and structured this belief system given their unique social and historical context. We find that mortuary practices and caching behavior changed from the Late Preclassic to the Terminal Classic period, and suggest that these changes conveyed an increasing emphasis on community ritual by the Late Classic that may reflect changes at Chan as well as sociopolitical changes elsewhere in the Belize Valley and the Maya lowlands.
Women’s Voices in a Male World: Actions, Bodies and Spaces among the Ancient Maya
"Feminist archaeology has prompted scholars to reconsider gender roles in ancient Mesoamerica. Current research, however, tends to focus on elite women, classes and sites. Although I do not ignore the potential of these sources, in this paper I am mainly concerned with issues such as the phenomenology of bodies and spaces, subroyal ritual actions, and daily activities such as cooking and weaving. My aim is to offer an overview of the most recent studies on gender in Maya archaeology and to provide ideas for further research by emphasising the need to engender ritual and individuate female discourses in the archaeological record."