Analyzing Periphery Ritual Practice through Time to Identify Intra-polity Relationships at the Ancient Maya Center of Pacbitun

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ritual and its practice were essential mechanisms for negotiating social identity, status, and political involvement for all members of ancient Maya society. Yet, changes to ritual practices through time are often framed around the legitimization of royal elite, reifying traditional models of dominant ideology. Identifying how ritual of periphery households changed alongside the politically charged Preclassic and Classic period alterations of epicenter rituals can provide a glimpse at intra-polity social interactions by revealing the agency of everyday people. Recent investigations of household and public ceremonial contexts in the periphery at the ancient Maya center of Pacbitun, Belize, examined alterations to ritual practices through time and how these changes coincide with known shifts in epicenter elite rituals associated with Late Preclassic emerging elite leaders, Early Classic institutionalization of kingship, and Late Classic dynastic interruption. My discussion will compare Pacbitun’s epicenter and periphery ritual data through time, materialized through special deposits and architecture. Findings suggest that while changes to periphery ritual activity and practices do coincide with alterations to epicenter rituals through time, household and communal practices in the periphery are independent of epicenter elite until the Early Classic period. These findings support a negotiated shift from semi-autonomous to dependent intra-polity interactions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37720.0