The Maya Commoner Culture
Guest lecture: Cynthia Robin
Reading: Mesoamerican Archaeology: Cynthia Robin, Chapter 6
The Classic Maya created vast cities, filled with temples, palaces, and plazas (slides). The years 250-900 CE, known as the Classic Maya Period, mark the height of Maya civilization. This era is marked by hieroglyphic texts (slide), produced by the Maya nobility. It is also marked by incredible achievements in the arts, for example, jade masks, with jade traded over 100s of miles from its source in Guatemala (slide), painted polychrome ceramics with hieroglyphic inscriptions (slide), again pertaining to the Maya nobility, also obsidian eccentrics (slide) and shell necklaces (slide). The Maya elite lived in beautiful stone palaces, with many rooms, with each housing a different function or family member (slide). This is what most Mayanists study, and you can see why. The sculptures and figurines supply images of rulers, weavers, potters, and warriors, of royal and non-royal people (slides). But there are no images of or texts referring to farmers, and farmers were 90% of the population!
Not only are the elites more visible in art and writing, their homes, built of stone and plaster, are more visible than the homes of farmers, constructed of wooden pole walls and thatched roofs (slide: modern Maya house). Archaeologists can find large stone structures in the tropical forests, but how do you find pole and thatch houses. You might find the stone floors of these houses, but they are covered over by grass and vegetation (slide). In fact, nobody notices them until the 1960s, producing the first model of Maya society as supporting "vacant ceremonial centers." However, current investigators have found not just houses, but entire communities of farmers.
Chan was occupied for 2,000 years, both preceding and following the rise and fall of the powerful state of Xunantunich. It was found when a team of archaeologists walked over the countryside between two centers, Xunantunich and Dos Chombitos, to map the residences of rural people living outside of these centers. Chan consisted of a concentration of houses and agricultural terraces midway between the two centers (slide:map of the transect). The terraces resembled very large green pyramids (slide).
The white-plastered, monumental temple at Xunantunich looms in the background at Chan (slide). Would the constant presence of the temple have promoted inequality or resistance? The farmers of Xunantunich would have remembered the extravagant events that they had attended at Xunantunich, which they may have remembered fondly, but they might also have thought about oppression, their own goods that had gone to support the Xunantunich nobility and how they had labored to construct the temple. They may have had mixed feelings. But the pyramid was not central to daily life at Chan. From the top of the temple at Xunantunich, Chan is invisible (slide), the common people were invisible to elites, and they are to modern archaeologists if they choose to work only at temples.
At Chan, archaeologists found more than 500 houses and more than 1,000 agricultural terraces. The community center was located within the densest concentration of houses, on the highest hilltop, with the biggest buildings (slide). It was one of three areas settled by Chan's first families in 1000 BCE. The residents of this household were farmers, but also limestone workers and chert workers. They produced utilitarian goods for other members of the community. This was an economically self-sufficient community. This raises the question of how commoner communities operate. What are the relations between farmers and craftsmen, between the first family and later families?
The archaeological survey of Chan revealed that during the Late Classic, when Xunantunich was at its height, the population of Chan was larger than it is today. A study of the agricultural system revealed that the terraces supported this dense population by conserving soil and water. Multi-cropping in terraced fields conserved soil nutrients. Chan archaeologists are working with local communities to restore the ancient agricultural system so that farmers living in the area today can increase their standard of living.
Artifacts from the farmers houses included grinding stones, hoes, unpainted pottery, chert knives, ceramic spindle whorls, obsidian (coming from outside the community), and bark beaters (slides).
Last summer, excavations in the center of the patio of the community center revealed a series of pits with ritual offerings covering the entire 2,000-year span of the community's occupation (slide). The earliest offerings included small pieces of jade and incense burners (slide). Colored stones marked the four directions (slide), as they do in Maya communities today (?). Later offerings included alters and incense burners, and after Xunantunich was abandoned, a plain stone stele was erected at Chan and later broken and the pieces scattered (slide). A ceramic figurine depicting Maya jaguar god of the underworld was found in one of the offerings (slide). These ritual practices suggest that Chan's farmers adopted some forms of elite ritual as their own. The oldest ritual deposit was a burial from 1000 BCE (slide). This burial had been re-entered at least twice, and the top part of the parson was missing. The bones of the legs were present, but they had been rearranged, with an upper arm bone (humerus) laid along one of the legs, and one of the thigh bones replaced upside down. This burial may represent the oldest settler of Chan, the ritual head of the community, throughout its 2,000 year history.