Joseph W. Ball

Late Classic Lowland Maya Political Organization and Central-Place Analysis: New insights from the Upper Belize Valley

Between 1984 and 1989, the San Diego State University Mopan–Macal Triangle Project carried out six extended seasons of fieldwork oriented toward documenting the internal sociobehavioral structure and organization of a representative Classic period community in the southern Maya Lowlands. The project also undertook to delineate the spatial boundaries of several such contiguous communities and to test a selected set of alternative models for Classic period political organization at the local and regional levels. This article summarizes our approach to understanding political organization and presents our preliminary conclusions: a model of the so-called segmentary state type as recently espoused by several researchers best approximates the reality of internal political organization at the single polity level during the Late Classic period of the southern Maya Lowlands.

OUT OF THE PALACE DUMPS

An interdisciplinary approach to Late Classic Maya polychrome-painted ceramics from Buenavista del Cayo and Cahal Pech, Belize allows for preliminary observations relevant to a better understanding of elite pottery production and use in the western Belize Valley. The combination of typological and contextual data from archaeological investigations of ceramics along with art-historical stylistic analyses and ceramic-paste chemical-composition data identifies ordinary and special-purpose vessels excavated from palace-midden contexts as having been created in the same elite-oriented or “palace” workshop(s) at Buenavista del Cayo. The method allows for the identification of unslipped, monochrome, and polychrome pottery excavated from “palace” contexts at nearby Cahal Pech as products of the “palace” school workshop(s) at Buenavista del Cayo, which implies movement of the ruling elite of the site between the two locales. The method also allows for the identification of a group of multiphase special-purpose ceramics excavated from Buenavista del Cayo “palace” middens whose chemical divergence from the other “palace-school” pottery provides evidence for the existence of different ceramic-paste recipes existing simultaneously within the same “palace” ceramic school or pottery tradition.

LAS RUINAS DE ARENAL

Las Ruinas de Arenal is a small “major” Lowland Maya center located at the southwest edge of the upper or western Belize Valley. This paper presents a preliminary description of Las Ruinas in formal, spatial, and temporal terms and reports the results of two short seasons of archaeological investigations carried out there in 1991 and 1992. Some aspects of the sites likely cultural, historical, and sociopolitical significance also are discussed.

RECONSIDERING THE BELIZE VALLEY PRECLASSIC: A case for multiethnic interactions in the development of a regional culture tradition

Despite more than two decades of extensive and highly productive research programs by a series of institutions and individuals focusing specifically on the Preclassic archaeology of the Belize River Valley, understanding and appreciation of the regions ceramic tradition and interpreted culture history today effectively remain based on, and dependent on, unmodified conceptual formulations from the 1940s through the 1960s. These incorporate a view of the zonal Preclassic ceramic sequence as the physical embodiment of a uniform and even unitary local producer–consumer system tied directly and genetically to the later Classic and Postclassic Maya inhabitants of the region. In this paper, we question both these assumptions and the soundness of the conceptual constructs (ceramic complexes) and framework (ceramic sequence) on which they are based. We examine the content and analyze the composition of the Belize Valley Middle and Late Preclassic ceramic complexes as dynamic, composite, producer–consumer circulation assemblages rather than as static, synthetic archaeological units, and we conclude that they reflect a much more complex socioeconomic, cultural, and sociopolitical landscape than has yet been recognized and appreciated by other investigators. We propose the presence and interaction within the valley during the Middle and Late Preclassic of at least two distinct dialectal, ethnic, or ethnolinguistic groups, and we argue that the local cultural tradition emerging in the area by the ceramic Protoclassic represented a ranked amalgamation of these. The paper also presents the first comprehensive and complete type-variety typologies for the Middle through Late Preclassic ceramic complexes of the upper Belize Valley, incorporating both new data from the 1980s and 1990s and substantive revisions of earlier work by J. E. S. Thompson and James C. Gifford.

Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Propaganda, Myth, and History in Four Ancient Civilizations.@@@Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americas through Their Literature.

List of illustrations Prefatory notes Acknowledgements Prologue: America as the fourth world Part I. Text: 1. Provenance 2. Language and its instances 3. Configurations of space 4. Configurations of time Part II. Political Memory: 5. Peten 6. Tollan 7. Turtle Island 8. Tahuantinsuyu Part III. Genesis: 9. Popol Vuh 10. World ages and metamorphosis 11. The epic 12. American cosmos Part IV. Into the language of America 13. The translation process Epilogue Abbreviations used in notes and bibliography Notes Glossary Bibliography Index.

Aftermath A.D. 696—Late 7th and Early 8th Century Special Deposits and Elite Main Plaza Burials at Buenavista del Cayo, Western Belize: A Study in Classic Maya “Historical Archaeology”

ABSTRACT Between 1984 and 1989, a number of depositional contexts were excavated at the Classic Maya center/site of Buenavista del Cayo in the upper Belize Valley that appeared to be products of sudden cessations of activity or architectural “terminations” dating to sometime in the late 7th to mid-8th century. Ceramic furnishings also linked at least two elite status burials on the Central Plaza of the site to these deposits. Conjunctive analysis of the deposits, burials, and their contents together with applicable epigraphic history recorded at a nearby major city, Naranjo, suggests that they are the result of and directly reflect successful military action by Naranjo against Buenavista in a.d. 696. An examination of the contexts and epigraphic history concerned; the archaeological grounds for linking the two; and the rich, composite understanding of the deposits and their behavioral, cultural, and historical significance illustrate the rewards and advantages of 21st century Maya archaeology’s new paradigmatic status as true “historical archaeology.”

CERAMIC HISTORY, CERAMIC CHANGE, AND ARCHITECTURAL SEQUENCE AT ACANMUL, CAMPECHE: A LOCAL CHRONICLE AND ITS REGIONAL IMPLICATIONS

Abstract Acanmul is a medium-size center located at the north end of the Bay of Campeche about 25 km northeast of the city of Campeche. Between 1999 and 2005, three independent sets of investigations and major architectural consolidation were carried out at the center by archaeologists from the Universidad Autónoma de Campeche (UAC), the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), Centro Regional de Campeche, and UAC in collaboration with San Diego State University. These efforts produced a wealth of new information on the archaeology of the central Campeche coast, including new insights into the emergence and evolution of the northern slateware tradition and the architectural history of the central coast from Preclassic through Postclassic times. New data concerning changing relationships through time of the central coast Maya to both the interior central and southern lowlands and to the northern plains also were documented, as was the mid ninth century sacking of the center. This article synthesizes the findings of the three separate institutional efforts at Acanmul and offers a number of new cultural historical scenarios and hypotheses based on them.