Ancient Maya Commoners

Contents

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Acknowledgments

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pp. ix-x

We are grateful to the many individuals who contributed in some measure to this edited volume. Most of these papers were originally presented as part of a symposium organized for the 1999 American Anthropological Association meetings held in Chicago, IL, and we appreciate the various contributors’ efforts to revise their presentations into the chapters that ...

Chapter 1. Examining Ancient Maya Commoners Anew

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pp. 1-22

Studies of ancient complex societies are often charged with answering basic questions such as how such civilizations came about, how they adapted specialized strategies allowing them to contend with widely diverse environments, and why they ceased to exist. Archaeologists necessarily rely on theoretical models, sometimes using ethnographically or ...

Chapter 2. Daily Life in a Highland Maya Community: Zinacantan in Mid-Twentieth Century

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pp. 23-48

This chapter purposely focuses on Zinacanteco culture in the 1950s, when I first engaged in field research in the highlands of Chiapas in southeastern Mexico (Vogt 1994). The reason: it is being published in a volume on the culture of Maya commoners in pre-Columbian times, and I decided that the earliest systematic description I could provide of Zinacan- ...

Chapter 3. The Role of Pottery and Food Consumption among Late Preclassic Maya Commoners at Lamanai, Belize

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pp. 49-72

In recent years, ceramic research in the Maya area has adopted a number of approaches to help describe and explain ancient economic, social, political, and ideological organization. New trends in classification as well as those in chemical, statistical, petrographic, and iconographic studies have allowed researchers to expand beyond defining and refining site

Chapter 4. Of Salt and Water: Ancient Commoners on the Pacific Coast of Guatemala

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pp. 73-96

The study of commoners poses several problems in archaeology. First, the definition for commoners is a very broad one, normally referring to a person not of the nobility, a member of the common people, and second, it is difficult to clearly identify them on the archaeological record. Arlen and Diane Chase mentioned that the actual identification of ‘‘...commoners ...

Chapter 5. Down on the Farm: Classic Maya "Homesteads" as "Farmsteads"

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pp. 97-116

Several years ago, while interviewing Maya farmers about indigenous soil terms, I was often asked: ‘‘What is the land like where you live? Is it good for milpa?’’ (Dunning 1992a). Such questions underscore a fundamental aspect of Maya life. Both historically and in the more distant past the large majority of Maya have been farmers, a fact that influences almost all as- ...

Chapter 6. Intra-Site Settlement Signatures and Implications for Late Classic Maya Commoner Organization at Dos Hombres, Belize

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pp. 117-146

Mayanists have come a long way in their assessments of pre-Hispanic food production since Sylvanus Morley (1946) argued for the ubiquity of slash-and-burn agriculture. Today, there is a greater awareness of environmental variability and its effect on both agriculture and settlement systems (Fedick 1996b; Pohl 1985; Sanders 1977). However, although our ...

Chapter 7. Heterogeneous Hinterlands: The Social and Political Organization of Commoner Settlements near Xunantunich, Belize

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pp. 147-174

Scholars are moving toward ever more complex models of Classic period Maya society, models that include richly textured views of Maya commoners and their relationships to the Maya elite or nobility (Hendon1996; Marcus 1995; McAnany 1993). These emerging models are the result of new empirical evidence from the Maya lowlands on the one hand and ...

Chapter 8. The Spatial Mobility of Non-Elite Populations in Classic Maya Society an Its Political Implications

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pp. 175-196

Movements of non-elite populations over a landscape have significant implications in the study of political processes in a complex society. They are common means for non-elites to adjust to political and economic circumstances and to resist the oppression by the ruling class and state. The control of the subject population by the state tends to be more difficult when ...

Chapter 9. Commoners in Postclassic Maya Society: Social versus Economic Class Constructs

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pp. 197-225

The concept of a commoner class in Postclassic Maya society is an evasive one, suggesting that social status position does not vary evenly with conditions of economic life. As many of the contributors to this volume have demonstrated, when economic patterns of household production and local, regional, and distant exchange are compared, commoners are not ...

Chapter 10. Methods for Understanding Classic Maya Commoners: Structure Function, Energetics, and More

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pp. 225-254

In recent years of Maya archaeology, we have witnessed an unprecedented focus on Classic Maya commoners through the excavations of numerous humble house mounds all over the lowlands (Gonlin 1993; Johnston 1994; Kovak n.d.; Lohse 2001; Robin 1999; Sheets 1992). These excavations not only represent another dimension of Classic Maya society but provide the ...

Chapter 11. Maya Commoners: The Stereotype and the Reality

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pp. 255-284

Commoners made up the bulk of Maya society, though for various reasons, I suspect the percentage was closer to 90 percent than to the 98 percent proposed by some authors.¹ Ironically, commoners have received relatively little attention in spite of frequent suggestions that we should study Maya economies ‘‘from the bottom up,’’ building from the house- ...

Contributors

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pp. 285-287

Index

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pp. 287-299