Shared Practices and Identities in the Northern Settlement of Actuncan, Belize

Summary

This poster examines how urban families developed and shared neighborhood identities at the Maya city of Actuncan, Belize, ca. AD 800-900, a time when the city experienced rapid population growth as surrounding centers, including Xunantunich, declined. To investigate household relationships, this research considers the nature and location of activity patterns in and around three commoner households to infer shared practices and the shared identities that those activities both enabled and constrained. Multiple methods were employed, including subsurface testing, soil chemical residue analysis, and macro- and microartifact analysis. The data were examined spatially using geostatistics as well as with quantitative assessment. This research contributes to the understanding of urban processes of growth and decay in this region, and how they are linked to the behaviors of social factions in neighborhood communities.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage