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2019, Archaeologies of the British in Latin America
In the mid-nineteenth century Maya refugees fleeing the violence of the Caste War of Yucatan (1857-1901) briefly reoccupied the ancient ruins of Tikal. Unlike the numerous Yucatec refugee communities established to the east in British Honduras, those who settled at Tikal combined with Lacandon Maya, and later Ladinos from Lake Petén Itza to form a multiethnic village in the sparsely occupied Petén jungle of northern Guatemala. This chapter discusses the analysis of the mass-produced consumer goods found at the Tikal village. The historic inhabitants of Tikal were well connected to exchange networks of the societies encircling the Petén, reaching the world through the global markets emanating from nearby British Honduras. This small village was poised to renegotiate social and economic relationships with peripheral societies from deep within the frontier zone, and may be demonstrating consumer behavior observed in refugee populations in the modern era.
This dissertation is an ethnographic work describing how foodways have become central to identity negotiation in a Maya village that has recently been impacted by evangelical conversion and tourism. This village is in the region of Quintana Roo, Mexico best known for its involvement in the Caste Wars of Yucatán and historic resistance to assimilation to Mexican identity. However, in recent years, the demand for inexpensive labor in the hotel zone of the Caribbean coast of Quintana Roo has led to improved infrastructure and transportation to these villages. With this improved infrastructure has come increased outside interaction including the establishment of evangelical churches and day labor buses. These combined influences of religion and labor changes have led to new ways of negotiating identity that had not previously existed in village life here. Because life in this village had always centered on subsistence farming and its associated food getting and food making tasks, the option for wage labor and evangelical religion have provided a support system for those unable or unwilling to participate in traditional forms of subsistence. The new social structures are often negotiated using food and foodways as a declaration of belonging or resistance. My work provides vignettes describing these processes of identity negotiation at the national, regional and familial levels.
in Indigenous Persistence in the Colonized Americas Material and Documentary Perspectives on Entanglement, eds. Heather Law Pezzarossi and Russell Sheptak, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque
From Cacao to Sugar: Long-Term Maya Economic Entanglement in Colonial Guatemala2019 •
At their patron saints’ annual fiestas, the Maya and the Ladinos of western highland Guatemala perform dances in costumes that take their inspiration from film, television, music, and the Internet. The two groups adapt the costume dance to their own interests, and the tension between them is evident in the different types of costumes they rent and purchase. Ladino costumes distinguish their wearers as modern consumers, while K’iche’ costumes stress communitas, adding to the borrowed images to connect with indigenous forms of subsistence and lifestyle and to allow comment on proper forms of behavior and on social ills. The costume makers act as cultural intermediaries, producing both the context and the meaning of the dances and enabling performers and spectators alike to construct different identities through them. Durante las fiestas anuales de sus santos patrones, los mayas y ladinos de los altos occidentales de Guatemala llevan a cabo danzas con vestuarios basados en el cine, la televisión, el ámbito musical y el Internet. Ambos grupos adaptan la vestimenta de acuerdo a sus intereses y la tensión entre ellos se hace evidente en el tipo de ropas que rentan y compran. Los vestuarios ladinos identifican a sus portadores como consumidores modernos, mientras que los K’iche’ enfatizan un sentido de comunidad, añadiendo imágenes prestadas que se conectan con formas de subsistencia y vida indígena a la vez que comentan sobre formas sancionadas de comportamiento y males sociales. Los fabricantes de vestuario fungen como intermediarios culturales, produciendo tanto el contexto como el significado de las danzas y permitiendo que tanto participantes como espectadores construyan diversas identidades a través de éste.
Anthropology Theses and Dissertations
Communities of Consumption on the Southeastern Mesoamerican Border: Style, Feasting, and Identity Negotiation in Prehispanic Northeastern Honduras2019 •
Prehispanic northeastern Honduran communities were situated at the border between southeastern Mesoamerica and lower Central America. Previous studies of pottery style suggest that local groups shifted their affiliation from north to south at the end of the Classic period (ca. AD 1000). This study examines the contexts in which pottery, as a medium for style, was used, and how the food people prepared, stored, or served in these vessels offers a perspective complementary to pottery style for understanding how identity was actively negotiated in this region. In this view, other parts of the foodways system – the foods chosen to be processed or cooked in pottery, the particular methods of preparation or serving – can also have their own form of style that has the potential to be as important in materializing identities as the designs on pottery vessels. Excavation at the Selin Farm site documented shell midden mounds containing large deposits of shell, pottery, and other materials disposed of as part of feasting events that took place throughout the Selin Period (AD 300-1000). These stratified deposits are the result of repeated consumption and disposal practices that represent groups of people that came together to form a community of consumption in the past. Data from excavation, lithic and faunal analyses, and typological, morphological, and residue analyses of pottery point to variation in theform, content, and motivations behind these events over space and time. By tracing the nature and scale of these feasting events over time and space at Selin Farm, this study provides data critical to situating the processes behind identity negotiation at the local level and tying the micropolitics of individual events to broader social and political changes in the region. The timing of changes in local pottery styles and foodways suggests they occurred partly as a result of interaction with groups to the north and south that both spoke to cultural understandings and similarities while also highlighting differences and reinforcing boundaries. However, variation in feasting practices across contexts at Selin Farm demonstrates, for the first time, internal heterogeneity within a northeastern community that helps explain processes of change without relying exclusively on external forces, while also not denying their influence in shaping local change. The study of identity negotiation at Selin Farm demonstrates that aggrandizers, expansionist chiefdoms, or outside influences were not responsible for cultural change in the small-scale societies of Central America. The people who lived and feasted at the site were not passive recipients of innovations from the north or the south. There were complex internal social and political strategies being employed by individuals and groups that led to the structural changes that took place in the region. Through interaction with each other and with outside groups they were continually guiding the formation, maintenance, and transformation of group identity through the manipulation of shared practices and everyday activities, punctuated by the feasting events described here.
1987 •
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology
Terminal Classic residential histories, migration, and foreigners at the Maya site of Ucanal, Petén, GuatemalaEarly scholarship on the disruption to political dynasties at the end of the Classic period in the Maya Lowlands argued that political collapse and the new material culture associated with it were due to the invasion of Putun/ Chontal peoples from the Gulf Coast. One of the sites thought to have been targeted by such an invasion was Ucanal, Petén, Guatemala. Although no excavations had been undertaken at the site when the Putun invasion hypothesis was formulated, recent archaeological research at Ucanal provides an opportunity to re-visit the question of foreigners. This paper examines residential settlement histories and isotopic values from human teeth at Ucanal to better understand the changes that occurred during the Terminal Classic period. Our research indicates that while the possibility of foreign rule remains, the invasion hypothesis cannot fully capture the complex dynamics, multi-directional movements, and pluralistic influences of this time period. Ucanal was a thriving, heterogenous city with connections to multiple regions and peoples. Individuals born outside the Ucanal region were indeed present at the site, although the ways in which foreign identities were constituted were as much about peoples' practices and performances of self (and others) as about where they were born.
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