The Consequences of State Collapse: Evidence from the San Lucas Neighborhood during the Terminal Classic

Summary

Understanding the growth and dissolution of state entities has long been a topic of anthropological inquiry. More recently, archaeologists are promulgating dynamic and careful conceptions of how leaders acquire power, and whether and why surrounding residents may support them. By turning our attention to the political economic relationship between Maya rulers and the local population, we can identify successful and failed attempts to maintain states. In this paper, I combine political anthropology with urban studies and practice theory to illustrate how the intermediate scale of neighborhoods can be useful for assessing state dynamics. I focus on the neighborhood of San Lucas during the Terminal Coner ceramic subphase (ca. AD 820-900) to examine the transition between the death of the last major ruler and the full onset of the Postclassic. Multiple lines of evidence from four architectural groups indicate that San Lucas residents enacted different living strategies in response to the dissolution of central government. For example, households established in the Preclassic continued to support small families, while higher status living arrangements were quickly abandoned. Such data offer a more nuanced picture of who emigrated from Copán and when, allowing us to infer the aftereffects of state collapse on residing populations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Copan II: The Late Classic, Terminal Classic, and Postclassic Periods   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15499