Beyond the Palace Walls: Daily Life and Domestic Activities during the Late Classic in the Maya Lowlands (600-875 CE)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This presentation centers on the daily life of Maya commoners from the Classic Maya site of Chinikihá in Chiapas, Mexico. The excavations are part of a regional effort to understand rural communities and social complexity. The presentation will offer an intimate view of the materiality of the daily life of non-elite groups from a domestic context, offering a bottom-up perspective. The residential group excavated was also associated with a specialized production area that illustrates the technological ability and social knowledge embedded in non-elite groups. The site of Chinikihá is located in the Maya Lowlands, close to larger nodes of settlement known for their epigraphy, urban complexity, temples, and elite groups; like Palenque. The presentation illustrates the results from the study of visual and non-visual evidence using different techniques to analyze and better understand the material culture of daily life and the use of space. This study will contribute to our understanding of social organization and the interdependence between commoners and elites during the Late Classic.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25435