Shifting Prosperity amid Cycles of Collective and Autocratic Governance at Caracol, Belize

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Cooperative and Noncooperative Transitions in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The city of Caracol, Belize shifted back and forth between more collective and more autocratic governance at least four times over its 1,500-year history. In the Preclassic, early conurbation between three centers (Downtown Caracol, Hazcap Ceel, and Cahal Pichik) created the initial conditions for Caracol’s distributed system of administrative districts and more dispersed (and collective) governance. In the Early Classic, sharp differences existed between elites and the rest of the population, suggesting a high level of inequality. This changed in the early Late Classic after the elite broke away from Tikal in 562 CE and ushered in a period that saw tremendous population growth, greater overall prosperity, and increased collective governance combined with reduced expressions of elite wealth. For a century between 700 and 800, the city maintained widespread wealth sharing and city-wide accessibility of long-distance goods. However, in the Terminal Classic, patterns at Caracol demonstrated high inequality with the emergence of haves and have-nots, resurgent rulership, and a new system of political relationships between Caracol and sites along the Mopan and Belize Rivers. Archaeological data from Caracol shed light on periods of greater and lesser prosperity and how they related to shifts between more collective and more autocratic governance.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Cooperative and Noncooperative Transitions in the Archaeological Record   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52829