Creating Ruins, Creating Heritage at Actuncan, Belize

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Vibrancy of Ruins: Ruination Studies in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The precolonial Maya city of Actuncan was occupied as a monumental center, then a city, for approximately 2,000 years from its establishment prior to 1000 BC until its abandonment around AD 900. As at any long-occupied urban center, the city grew when it thrived economically and politically, while it contracted and became ruined when times were more difficult. Over time, the city’s built environment became a patchwork of new and well-maintained spaces next to old, ruined locales. I have previously described how Actuncan’s community drew on the city’s ruined landscape to legitimize a new inclusive political ideology during the Terminal Classic period (AD 780–1000). In this paper, I focus on the creation of those ruins. Ruins were created at Actuncan during multiple political moments. The specific contexts of these moments conditioned how the community managed these spaces. I draw on examples of ruining from Actuncan to show how the growing theoretical literature on cultural heritage in the modern world can be used to understand the management of ruins in the past. Combining general heritage theories with specific Indigenous perspectives provides a rich framework for understanding the challenges and importance of ruins to past communities in Mesoamerica.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Vibrancy of Ruins: Ruination Studies in Ancient Mesoamerica   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36633.0