Aventura’s Watery Landscape: Communities of People, Water, Houses, and Ancestors

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Water was essential for the longevity of ancient Maya cities, and Aventura was no exception. The site’s watery landscape consists of pocket bajos, defined as karstic depressions less than 2 km2 in area. While they are seasonally inundated today, this paper presents data from excavation, oral histories, and microbotanical analysis that demonstrate they were much wetter in the past, holding standing water year-round as recently as the late nineteenth century CE. These features were of great importance to the city during ancient Maya occupation, providing water for biophysical and metaphysical needs. Excavations of two households on the edges of different pocket bajos indicate that commoners and elites alike were able to physically access these spaces, as well as perform ancestor veneration to mark cosmological connections at the water’s edge. Based on these data, I argue that the watery landscape at Aventura was not part of a passive backdrop to human activity but was instead active in the creation and maintenance of the city, fostering communities that extended to include nonhumans.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36294.0