Tracking Cattle and Cowboys in the Colonial Maya Landscape

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Landscape Archaeology - Part 1" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Commercial cattle ranching fundamentally transformed and continues to transform the landscape of the northern Maya lowlands in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Many of these transformations trace their origins to a period of accelerated dispossession from the 1700s until 1847, when Indigenous Maya uprisings led to the abandonment of the region’s many cattle haciendas (plantations). While conflicts between hacienda owners and Maya sharecroppers are well-documented in the study of these transformative changes, this paper considers the role of an often-overlooked category of hacienda worker: the salaried ranch hands, including foremen and cowboys, who managed the day-to-day care of the cattle. Here I couple ongoing landscape archaeology at Hacienda Cetelac – a cattle hacienda that operated from 1773-1847 and is located in the agricultural landholding of the community of Yaxunah – with ethnohistorical insights from nineteenth century manuals written for hacienda foremen and ranchers, so as to analyze the dynamic roles of cattle and cowboys in shaping the colonial Maya landscape. Through an applied reading of these manuals, with their quotidian details and recommendations for ranch hands, new insights emerge into the granular actions that constitute larger structural processes of ecological extraction and dispossession, and that continue to constitute the landscape itself.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Interdisciplinary Approaches to Landscape Archaeology - Part 1   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50768