Place Making, Authority, and Ancestors: New Evidence of Developing Middle Formative Socio-Political Complexity from Ka’Kabish, Northern Belize

Summary

Northern Belize during the Middle Formative Period (1000-300 B.C.E.) 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 in Northern Belize. 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 offering pits housing thousands of shell beads, forty-seven greenstone objects and debitage, and extensive ceramic evidence indicating communal ritual and feasting. Significantly, this elaborate series of offering caches appears to center on the secondary, bundled bedrock-cist burial of an important personage and/or ancestor. Comparable contemporary evidence from Northern Belize 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 paper argues that the mortuary, caching, and architectural practices evidenced at Middle Formative Ka’Kabish represent a glimpse of the incipience of the ideological complex, the socio-cultural processes, and the material manifestations propagating the development of subsequent Maya socio-political complexity.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Here be Dragons: Archaeology in North Central Belize.

Keywords

Spatial Coverage