Place-Making in Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities Past and Present

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Place-Making in Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities Past and Present" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Throughout prehispanic Mesoamerica, community was defined by a shared identity based on a relationship to sacred geography and a charter with specific progenitor deities. Nahuatl-speaking communities were conceptualized as altepetl "water-mountain," a concept shared broadly across Mesoamerica. Classic Maya foundational narratives feature a central water source surrounded by four sacred directional mountains. More recent expressions of these concepts are seen among the Tz’utujil Maya in highland Guatemala, where creation is said to have begun at Lake Atitlán, and in Yucatecan communities organized around cenotes. This symposium explores examples of place-making strategies utilized in prehispanic sites in the Maya area and Oaxaca, protohistoric settlements in Chiapas, sixteenth-century communities in Guerrero and Yucatán, the late nineteenth-century Caste War period in Yucatán, and highland Guatemala today. Strategies discussed include the creation of sacred space—and community building—through ritual processions, artistic programs, and reengagement with ancestral structures; mapping communal history to maintain control over lands; transferring wealth to reproduce sociogeographic identities; activating domestic and sacred space through renewal rituals; defining particular places as living space by enacting ceremonies to harness the energy within the natural and built worlds; and the performance of traditional Maya rituals within built environments derived from European models.