House-building, Communal Labor, and Place among the Maya

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.

This paper examines communal labor as a principal means by which people make and experience their place in the world. Emplacement is an active and ever-evolving phenomena that emerges from the things people do together. For Maya communities past and present, building a house is a paradigmatic example of communal, place-making work. A house, of course, is not just a physical space but also a sociocultural place laden with meaning. To build such a place is an act of engagement and negotiation: with the structures that orient society at large, with the properties of the natural world, with embodied knowledge shared between generations of practitioners, and with the cosmos itself. Through communal labors like house-building, Maya peoples maintain community bonds and socialize the youngest among them. And the house, itself a new member of the community, must be socialized, too. Rites guide both house and household into proper communion, recreating cosmic order. In a literal act of world-making, the construction of a house (re)centers and anchors the cosmos around the household and community. This paper builds on archaeological, art historical, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic evidence of Maya house-building to demonstrate how place-making and community-building go hand-in-hand.

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): 53068