Place-Making, Erasure, and the Death of Kingship at the Ancient Maya Site of Pacbitun, Belize

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

During the Late Classic Period (550–800 CE) at Pacbitun, a sequence of events took place that changed the landscape of power and sacredness in the site’s core during a tumultuous time in the Belize River Valley. The sequence of caches and burials likely began in order to consecrate a new courtyard (Court 3) and establish the new center of power at the site. These were dedicatory offerings that established the new court as the locus of new royal activity. At some point during the Late to Terminal Classic Period (800–900 CE), similar dedicatory offerings and burials were placed to the west of the central cache. Sometime after these new offerings were incorporated into the sacred landscape of Court 3, they were disturbed. The area was burned and neither the burials nor artifacts were covered up by later construction. Presumably the dedicatory offerings from this new royal line were desecrated, and Court 3 was abandoned, signaling the likely end to kingship at Pacbitun. We intend to explore how the processes of dedication, rededication, and desecration are visible in the other aspects of Pacbitun’s built environment, and how life in the hinterlands changed as power changed hands as kingship ended.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32964