Maya Butchers in Santiago de Guatemala: A Technological Analysis of the Disassembling of Cattle in Colonial Guatemala

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers in Animal Management: Unconventional Species, New Methods, and Understudied Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In colonial Guatemala, cattle constituted a vital element of Hispanic lifestyles through the supply of meat but also by providing basic materials necessary to a multitude of crafts. By the mid-sixteenth century, this flowering industry was thriving thanks to the rapid growth of herds. While the butchering techniques were likely to have been imported from the Old World together with the livestock, the historical documentation suggests that Native wage laborers provided the bulk of slaughterhouse workforces. In this paper, I will explore the extent to which butchery practices differed from the pre-Columbian ways of disassembling the animals and what the likely consequences of colonization were on the Maya butchers. I use technological approaches (chaîne opératoire) combined with zooarchaeological (butchery marks), ethnographic, and historical evidence to investigate how these new practical constraints and rules concretely affected the gestures and even the body techniques of the workers. This paper will also highlight how a detailed analysis of the butchery marks and the reconstruction of the gestures and implements are likely to provide information on several aspects of the craft such as the settings of the butchering facilities and the rate of work.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Frontiers in Animal Management: Unconventional Species, New Methods, and Understudied Regions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23689