William R. Fowler

INTRODUCTION: MAYA ARCHAEOLOGY AND SOCIAL MEMORY

The past decade or so has witnessed a burgeoning of studies on memory, collective memory, and social memory in the humanities and social sciences (Climo and Cattell 2002; Klein 2000; Olick and Robbins 1998). Berliner (2005) employs the phrases “memory boom,” “memory craze,” and “obsession with memory” to describe the current state of affairs of social memory studies in anthropology and history. Archaeology joined in this trend, and about ten years ago many citations to the foundational literature in social memory studies (Assmann 1995; Connerton 1989; Halbwachs 1980, 1992; LeGoff 1992; Nora 1996) started to appear in connection with archaeological research on historic and prehistoric societies (Golden 2005). Studies of intersubjective personal memory and social memory as a process in ancient Mesoamerica, however, have been a bit slow to develop compared to some other contemporary topics such as landscape, materiality, embodiment, spatiality, and temporality which are entangled with memory and which can (or must) be linked in any archaeological study of social memory. Even at sites with no written texts, such as some of those treated in the present collection, this conceptual entanglement allows a reading of social memory from settlement patterns, architecture, monuments, burials, votive caches, and portable material culture (Bradley 2002; Chesson 2001; Hodder and Cessford 2004; Holtorf 1997, 2001; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003; Williams 2003). With specific regard to past Mesoamerican societies, several recent studies have begun to explore the importance of history and social memory in the everyday lives and affairs of individuals, social groups, and communities (Clark and Colman 2008; Hendon 2010; Joyce 2003; Megged 2010; Schortman and Urban 2011; Stanton and Magnoni 2008). These publications demonstrate that studies of social memory have reached a vigorous stage of development in Mesoamerican archaeology and ethnohistory, if indeed a young stage in which a coherent methodological and theoretical framework is lacking (Golden 2005:273). In this Special Section we offer a collection of papers on social memory among the ancient Lowland Maya of southeastern Mexico and northern Central America that continue this trend and will perhaps stimulate further debate with regard to methodological and theoretical elaboration. In the first paper, Miranda Stockett advocates a view of archaeological sites as spaces where human dramas unfold, stages for the enactment of power and processes of social memory through the “making, altering, and remaking” of important places during the Late to Terminal Classic transition (A.D. 650-900) in southeastern Mesoamerica, and specifically the site of Las Canoas, Honduras. She argues that this making, altering, and remaking of places in the past reflect the dynamics of the manipulation of memory for political strategy. Sonja A. Schwake and Gyles Ianonne, in the second paper, discuss ritual remains and collective memory from the Late Classic sites of Minanha and Zubin, in west-central Belize. While the former is a medium-sized major center, the latter is a minor center; both provide intriguing archaeological evidence of ritual commemorative events spanning several generations. In the third paper, Lisa J. LeCount offers a bottom-up approach to the formation of community identity and social memory at Xunantunich, in the upper Belize River valley. With a primary emphasis on domestic foodways, LeCount argues that a distinctive type of common vessel for cooking and serving became a collective symbol of social identity for the people of the Xunantunich region in the Late Classic period. These foodways, she argues, served as a powerful source of collective memory that reinforced group identity. Gyles Iannone follows with his examination of the role that collective memory plays in defining territorial boundaries and in producing and reproducing frontier identities, from the perspective of the case study of the Late Classic Minanha site in Belize. In the fifth paper, Charles Golden also examines borders, social memory, and history with reference to the peripheries of the Classic Maya kingdoms of Piedras Negras, Guatemala, and Yaxchilan, Mexico. Greg Borstede follows with an examination of social memory and sacred sites in the western Maya highlands region with examples from Jacaltenango, Guatemala. In the penultimate paper, Matthew Restall presents a historiographic essay on the politics of social memory, the writing of history of the non-Hispanic inhabitants of Yucatan, the Maya mystique, Afro-Yucatecan invisibility, and the need to bridge the social distance created by temporal and culural gaps within and between these two groups. Finally, Susan Gillespie presents a most perceptive critical overview of the contributions. We strongly agree with her that these papers demonstrate the great potential for anthropologically oriented social memory studies in Maya archaeology.