Dangerous Places and Ambivalent Architecture at Ucanha

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Emplacement and Relational Approaches to the Ancient Americas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In Perils of the Soul, Manuel Arias Sohóm described the nature of nonhuman entities to anthropologist Calixta Guiteras-Holmes (1961). Daily life and the real-world transpire through the interactions of both human and nonhuman persons – animals, springs, thread, instruments, and houses – which all live and possess souls. Humans and nonhumans express mutual responsibility toward each other, and failure to fulfill these roles causes disorder in the form of illness, hunger, or physical harm. A well-nourished house, for example, shelters their occupants, whereas a neglected house endangers them. This paper emplaces excavations from Yucatán, Mexico, within the ambivalent social universe of the Maya house. Near the end of the ninth century CE, the royal family at Ucanha broke through their home’s stucco floors and exposed two ancestral buildings constructed several centuries earlier. The precise pit used to excavate the earlier construction phases indicates that several generations of royal family members passed down the precise locations of these buried structures, which remained woven into the social fabric of their lives. I conclude that the ancient excavation relates to a practice described ethnographically in Mesoamerica, in which residents revisit offerings made to the house in order to repair a relationship gone awry.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Emplacement and Relational Approaches to the Ancient Americas

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51479