Us and Them: Regional Integration and Social Differentiation during the Terminal Preclassic at Ucanha, Yucatán, Mexico

Summary

Often overshadowed by the splendor of massive monumentality to the south, Late Preclassic life in the Northern Maya Lowlands is a period of material and social experimentation, a balancing act between emerging social differentiation and an ideology of communal integration. During the latter half of this period, the secondary site of Ucanha in Yucatán was physically integrated into a micropolity via an 18-km long sacbe and experienced the creation of integrative civic spaces, a population apogee, and an influx of ceramic heterogeneity. Unlike the more rigid and historically ingrained materialization of social differentiation seen in the Late Classic, the material components of distinction during this time were more fluid, in general, and more ambiguous during and after this process of larger regional integration. The presence of possible extrahousehold feasting at a relatively isolated, larger domestic platform, an elite residence covered in stucco with iconography indicating governance and/or economic distinction, and various ceramic forms and aesthetic embellishments highlight emerging new materialities of differentiation. With an apparent depopulation by the Early Classic, it is likely these new expressions favored social inequality over communal cohesion.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20247