Pilgrimage to the Edge of the Watery Underworld: An Ancient Maya Water Temple at Cara Blanca, Belize (original) (raw)
Related papers
Materialized cosmology among ancient Maya commoners
Journal of Social Archaeology, 2010
Classic Maya inscriptions and iconography reveal more than just royal customs since their origins lie in traditional Maya practices. They provide a key to unlocking how commoners created their own domestic universe. To explore how commoners mapped their cosmology and recorded their history, I discuss domestic ceramic clusters based on color, placement, and association with other artifacts at the minor center of Saturday Creek, Belize. Results show that cached items served to contextualize their place in the cosmos. Commoners may not have had the written word, but they had the means to record their own history, one with which they interacted daily — under their feet, within walls, and under their roof.
Countermapping the Past: Reenvisioning Ancient Maya Spaces at Say Kah, Belize
Norwegian Archaeological Review, 2019
This paper explores possibilities for recognizing and analytically using culturally- specific understandings of artefacts and spaces at an ancient Maya archaeological site. In the case study that we present, we use Classic Maya material categories – derived from hieroglyphic texts – to re-envision our representations of artefactual distributions and accompanying interpretations. We take inspiration from countermapping as an approach that recognizes the positionality of spatial representations and makes space for multiple/alternative spatial perspectives. We present spatial analyses based on our work at the Classic Maya archaeological site of Say Kah, Belize, juxtaposing modern modes of visualizing the results of multiple seasons of excavations with visualizations that instead draw upon reconstructed elements of ancient inhabitants’ perspectives on the site, its spaces, and usages (based on information drawn from Classic Maya textual ‘property qualifiers’). We argue that even incomplete information, such as that available for archaeological contexts, allows us to reimagine past spatial perspectives and experiences. Furthermore, doing so represents a move towards inclusion that changes our understanding of sites in terms of ancient experience and usage. The outcome is a shifted perspective on the spaces of the site that decentres the modern, archaeological vision, accompanied by a more reflexive awareness of the processes we use to construct our interpretations. We end with larger reflections useful for archaeologists curious about translating these ideas to other cultural settings.
Social Memory in Maya Hinterland Communities: Recent Excavations at San Lorenzo, Belize (2016)
During the Preclassic period in the Maya lowlands, public structures became the materializations of ideology and memory, functioning to add permanence and significance to the growing ritual landscape. Most Preclassic public ritual structures, however, are documented within formal ceremonial centers. Little is known about Preclassic public spaces within hinterland communities. Recent excavations at the Xunantunich hinterland site of San Lorenzo have uncovered a Preclassic round platform buried beneath a Late-to-Terminal Classic settlement cluster. This platform sits on an expansive tamped marl surface and based on preliminary ceramic analysis dates to the Terminal Preclassic period. Comparative data suggests that this platform may have served a ritual or public function due to its size and form. The reuse and rebuilding on this location during the Late Classic has further implications for the maintenance of meaning and social remembrance of sacred places on the landscape outside formal ceremonial centers.
El Conejo, 2020
This paper examines 187 distinctive ceramic artifacts excavated from peri-abandonment deposits at the site of Baking Pot, Cayo, Belize between 2013 and 2017. These ceramic figurines and morphologic instruments were analyzed in an effort to better understand ritual acts in different spaces in Group B of the site core at Baking Pot. These artifacts were placed in deposits at the time that Baking Pot was being abandoned in the eight to ninth century CE. Our spatial analyses of the collection noted that over half of these artifacts were recovered in the corners of smaller, more secluded plazas, with fewer figurines recovered from the larger, more accessible public plazas. Chi-square tests were employed to determine if there is an association between different types of artifacts and public vs. private space in Group B, possibly signaling different types of rituals were conducted in different spaces during site abandonment. A brief discussion of ritual and the role it plays during these times of political and social change closes this paper. These studies help us to better understand one aspect of the Classic Maya of the Belize Valley during the pivotal period associated with the Classic Maya collapse.
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.
Envisioning Artifacts: a Classic Maya View of the Archaeological Record
This paper explores a Classic Maya (ca. AD 250–900) “material vision”—that is, a locally determined and culturally specific way of understanding the material world, its salient qualities, and associated meanings—based on evidence found in hieroglyphic texts from across the Maya world. Understanding Classic Maya ways of seeing the material world is an important undertaking as part of exploring alignments and misalignments between ancient indigenous and modern archaeological understandings of what today we view as “artifacts.” This topic is explored in the article through two related inquiries: first, I look at “artifacts” (i.e., materials that qualify as such, in an archaeological material vision) recorded in the hieroglyphic record, yielding thematic understandings of objects related to form and function, wholeness versus brokenness, and the relational potential of objects. Second, I use ten hieroglyphic property qualifiers that indicate Maya material perceptions and categories to gain explicit insight into some organizing principles within a Maya way of visualizing the material world. Throughout the article, I ask: can we envision archaeological objects using Maya conceptions, and how does this way of seeing align or misalign with archaeological material engagements?
The Middle Formative Period (1000 – 400 B.C.) has increasing become recognized as a critical locus in the development of Lowland Maya socio-political complexity. This period witnessed the founding of numerous ceremonial centers, substantial material cultural innovation, and the advent of mortuary practices indicating developing social differentiation. Recent excavations at the site of Ka’Kabish in Northern Belize have uncovered evidence significantly strengthening this view. Excavations underlying Plaza D-South at Ka’Kabish have revealed a series of bedrock-hewn pits containing offering caches of thousands of shell beads, forty-seven greenstone objects, and extensive ceramic evidence indicating communal ritual and feasting, which is argued by the author to represent a cosmographic diorama of the cave-riddled Underworld. Significantly, this elaborate cosmographic offering event appears to center on the secondary, bundled bedrock-cist burial of an important personage and/or ancestor who is accompanied by a number of finely crafted jade ornaments representing motifs and forms that have previously been interpreted as symbols of authority, rulership, and divine kingship. Comparable contemporary evidence from Northern Belize and beyond has been interpreted through models foregrounding site-founding, place-making, ancestor veneration, and aggrandizer driven social differentiation. By integrating and contrasting these existing models with new evidence from Ka’Kabish, this thesis argues that the mortuary, caching, and architectural practices evidenced at Middle Formative Ka’Kabish represent a glimpse into the incipience of the ideological complex, the socio-cultural processes, and the material manifestations propagating the development of subsequent Maya socio-political complexity, specifically the institution of divine kingship or ch’uhul ahau.
2020
This thesis considers ritual as it was used by the Classic Maya at Baking Pot, Belize, during the site’s abandonment circa 800-900 CE. Ritual was deeply woven into the daily life of the Classic Maya. This study reviews Classic Maya rituals and problematic deposits in order to address peri-abandonment deposits made by the community of Baking Pot during its abandonment. To understand aspects of the role ritual took at the time of site abandonment at Baking Pot, 207 ceramic “special finds” artifacts were analyzed, all having been excavated and recovered by the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance Project. A vast majority of the ceramic artifacts were recovered from peri-abandonment deposit excavations located primarily in the ceremonial architecture of Group B, with a smaller sample recovered from nearby domestic housemounds. The peri-abandonment deposits at Baking Pot and at sites in the greater Belize River Valley are complex and include a variety of material remains, but this thesis considers the special finds artifacts that compose the Baking Pot figurine collection in order to address rituals involved during site abandonment, their similarity to known Maya rituals, and their variability across contexts including ritual expression in different spaces of the site. This research finds evidence for activities related to termination rituals that lead to the buildup of peri-abandonment deposits during site abandonment. The figurines and other ceramic special finds artifacts analyzed here were consistently included in both terminal and peri-abandonment deposits. The artifacts that make up the Baking Pot figurine collection were deposited by the Ancient Maya in different locations throughout the site. By depositing items used in termination rituals, the Classic Maya were calling upon rituals they had enacted for centuries prior to abandonment, indicating that ritual held important roles for the residents of Baking Pot during a time of stress and uncertainty.
The ancient Maya expressed their highly developed and complex ideological and cosmological systems through diverse methods. The Maya conveyed these beliefs through a range of symbols and various ritual practices. Imagery on ceramics and other media, as well as written texts, also indicate that many cultural traditions, such as the Maya creation story and the myth of the hero twins, were shared across broad temporal and spatial landscapes (Sharer and Traxler 2006). The methods used to express these ideologies, however, differed from region to region, in contrast to other shared Pan-Maya ideologies and symbolic systems. This ritual variation is principally observed in burial practices, architectural styles, and settlement configuration (Ashmore and Sabloff 2002; Becker 2004; Pendergast 1990). Ritual caching activity was a Pan-Lowland Maya tradition (Coe and Houston 2015). The ritual caching of objects, particularly offerings containing eccentric chert and obsidian lithics, was a common Lowland manifestation of the complex ideologies of the ancient Maya. The wide variety of eccentric forms suggest that these ritual implements further served to communicate elements of ancient Maya ideology through ritual expression. It appears, however, that distinct styles of eccentric caching practices existed from region to region. Regional variation is evident in the context of cache deposition, as well as in the forms of eccentrics used in these caches. Factors influencing the production, morphology, and use of eccentric lithics may reflect differences in social function of cache, as well as differential access to raw materials or distinct collectives of craftspeople. My thesis presents a methodological and theoretical framework, within which I will investigate ancient Maya ritual caching of chert and obsidian eccentrics. Specifically, I will focus on eccentric caches recovered from sites in the Upper Belize Valley, with an emphasis on data from the major polity of Xunantunich. I examine forms and contexts of eccentric lithic caches from these sites. Using these data, I explore the eccentric caching traditions of the major and minor centers in the Belize Valley. I then use this comparative data to compare local traditions with other regions within the Central and Southern Maya Lowlands to determine whether the caching of eccentrics can yield information on regional differences in ritual behavior.