Monumental Recycling: The Inevitably Perilous Relationship between Shifting Integrative Strategies and Yaxuná’s E-group Plaza (900 BCE to 100 CE)

Summary

Over four consecutive field seasons, the Proyecto de Interaccion Politica del Centro de Yucatan investigated the plaza and several buildings in Yaxuná’s E-group, granting new insight into the site’s origins and development from a modest ceremonial complex into a monumental urban center. Excavations over the east-west centerline of the plaza generated data on several distinct commemorative events spanning 11 floor phases. Nonetheless, each of the observed traditions is fraught with continuities and disjuncture’s between phases that I argue marked distinct strategies for fixing identities, fostering community wide integration over generations. Furthermore, the shifts in commemorative traditions coincide with gradual developments in sociopolitical complexity and increased stratification apparent throughout Eastern Mesoamerica between 1000 BCE and 100 CE. Although the E-group was a nexus where experiences, identities, and memories were repeatedly fixed, after 350 BCE commemorations and architectural campaigns became distanced. Though Yaxuná remained occupied, further constructions and visible activities in the E-group came to a gradual halt, shifting the former politicoreligious importance of the space to that of a resource for masonry stones. This paper will explore how monuments serve to foster social integration between groups as well as fractures.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Integrating and Disintegrating in Central Yucatán: Archaeological Approaches to Social Change at Multiple Scales

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 17002