New Faces, New Pressures, New Pots: Collective identities in action in the ceramic record at Lamanai, Belize

Summary

For the ancient Maya residing at the urban center of Lamanai, the period encompassing the Maya Collapse and its aftermath (A.D. 750-1150) was a time of significant changes in the fabric of day-to-day life. Widespread economic and political instability across the Lowland region seriously impacted both community and extra-local affairs. Networks of socio-economic interaction and affiliation were disrupted and people were on the move, seeking to relocate to more stable environs. The strong evidence at Lamanai for the presence of migrants indicates that significant changes in community make-up did occur. Ceramic change during this period indicates shifts in manufacturing priorities, patterns of demand, and ritual and ceremonial practice that reveal a new emphasis on fostering a shared sense of community ‘oneness’. Although Lamanai’s story is ultimately one of community resilience, this paper examines the social dynamics of the process of community integration that enabled this outcome. Drawing from the extensive stylistic, petrographic, geochemical and microstructural data on the development of local ceramic manufacturing traditions, this paper examines: 1) how individual and collective social identities and relationships changed, and 2) how these social dynamics of community integration may have contributed to successful mitigation of real and perceived pressures on multiple scales.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Advances in the Method and Application of Ceramic Petrography: international perspectives on key archaeological questions, Part I

Keywords

Spatial Coverage