Julia A. Hendon

Bodies Moving in Space: Ancient Mesoamerican Human Sculpture and Embodiment

Judith Butlers proposal that embodiment is a process of repeated citation of precedents leads us to consider the experiential effects of Mesoamerican practices of ornamenting space with images of the human body. At Late Classic Maya Copaan, life-size human sculptures were attached to residences, intimate settings in which body knowledge was produced and body practices institutionalized. Moving through the space of these house compounds, persons would have been insistently presented with measures of their bodily decorum. These insights are used to consider the possible effects on people of movement around Formative period Olmec human sculptures, which are not routinely recovered in such well-defined contexts as those of the much later Maya sites.

Working with clay

Abstract Evidence from sites in the lower Ulua valley of north-central Honduras, occupied between a.d. 500 and 1000, provides new insight into the connections between households, craft production, and the role of objects in maintaining social relations within and across households. Production of pottery vessels, figurines, and other items in a household context has been documented at several sites in the valley, including Cerro Palenque, Travesía, Campo Dos, and Campo Pineda. Differences in raw materials, in what was made, and in the size and design of firing facilities allow us to explore how crafting with clay created communities of practice made up of people with varying levels of knowledge, experience, and skill. We argue that focusing on the specific features of a particular craft and the crafters perspective gives us insight into the ways that crafting contributed to the reproduction of social identities, local histories, and connections among members of communities of practice who comprised multicrafting households.

Feasting at Home

While there is a considerable amount of information available relating to feasting in small-scale societies lacking permanent institutions of political authority (e.g., Kahn 1986; Kan 1989; Young 1971), and on how feasting could lead to the development of these institutions (Clark and Blake 1994; Hayden 1996), relatively few studies have focused on the role of feasting in complex societies whose members potentially had more varied options for signaling social status and prestige. In this paper, I examine archaeological evidence from the Late to Terminal Classic period Maya settlement in the Copan valley, Honduras (Figure 8.1) to determine how feasting may have figured in the politics of complex societies in Mesoamerica. I begin with a discussion of what is known of Mesoamerican feasting practices based on the ethnohistoric documentation, including the sixteenth-century writings on the Maya of Diego de Landa, Bishop of Yucatan (Tozzer 1941; see Restall and Chuchiak 2002), and the sixteenth-century compilation of information on Aztec culture known as the Florentine Codex (Sahagun 1953-1982). I then move to a consideration of the ceramic and architectural data recovered from several elite patio groups in the Copan valley. After assessing vessel functions and reviewing the Copan assemblage’s functional groupings, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the spatial distribution of these groupings in the elite compounds as they