Domestic Activity Areas in a Late Classic Residential Courtyard Group at Chan Chich, Belize

Summary

Households represent a foundational element of any society. The everyday activities that occur within domestic spaces construct and reinforce the social, economic, and political framework upon which societies are built. The 2017 field season of the Chan Chich Archaeological Project saw the first explicit study of domesticity and everyday life at the ancient Maya site of Chan Chich with investigations of final phase domestic activity areas in Courtyard D-4. This Late Classic residential group consisted of three structures centered around a shared courtyard space approximately 550 m east of the Main Plaza. We analyzed the use of structural, courtyard, and extramural spaces by using multiple lines of evidence from multi-elemental analysis of plaster samples and artifactual and architectural data. Analyzing these categories of evidence associated with three different contexts allowed us to reconstruct domestic activity areas at different phases of everyday life: the production, consumption, and disposal of household objects. This research contributes some of the first information about the functional and sociocultural relationship between domestic spaces, activities, and individuals at Chan Chich.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22245