At Yaxuna X Marks the Spot: Centering across in a Middle Formative Maya Landscape

Summary

From the placement of objects in household offerings, to monumental works of art and architecture, it is well known that the ancient Maya commemorated their cosmological center in a variety of ways. Even at the settlement level, quadripartite divisions of space are observed branching out from a central core giving modern researchers insight into the way ancient Maya peoples may have understood their world. At the Maya site of Yaxuná, Yucatan, Mexico investigations have made it apparent that traditions of marking the center were taking place as early as the Middle Formative. Yet, evidence from recent excavations in the E-group plaza reveal that the center was not marked in the same way, or even in the same space, over time. This paper has two purposes. The purpose of this paper is not only to explore the implications of change evident in practice, performances, and political displays once held within the central plaza of the ancient site but how such changes were reflected within the greater settlement. The second is to explore how the data from Yaxuná suggest the exchange of ideas with contemporaneous sites in the central lowland Petén, and how such an exchange likely changed over time.

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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