Classic Maya Provincial Politics: Xunantunich and Its Hinterlands

9. The Social Construction of Roads at Xunantunich, from Design to Abandonment

c h a p t e r 9 The Social Construction of Roads at Xunantunich, from Design to Abandonment Angela H. Keller roads are physical manifestations of power. They display the power to amass the labor required for their construction, the power to bring together previously disconnected entities, and the power to redefine the means and modes of communication across space. The Colonial Maya understood this basic equation and used the term road, or beh in Yucatec, as a metonym for the power and destiny of an entire polity. In the Chilam Balam of Tizimin, the destruction of the capital of Champoton in the beginning of the thirteenth century is conveyed by the phrase “they destroyed the road of Champoton” (ka u satah ob beh Chak’an Putun [Edmonson 1982:7]). It is not the city center, nor even the temples, but the road of the town that is destroyed (at least metaphorically) to convey the dissolution of the polity’s power. Worldwide, where formal roads and road networks are found, they are some of the most direct indices of the integration, scale, and complexity of a polity (Earle 1991; Trombold 1991). In general terms, centralized road systems tied to individual centers, like those found throughout much of Mesoamerica, have been interpreted as the ceremonial and political devices of chiefdoms and smaller “statelets” (Earle 1991:13). In the Maya area specifically, road networks have been interpreted variously as political boundary markers (Kurjack and Andrews 1976), physical manifestations of social and political links (Benavides 1977, 1981; Kurjack 1977), indices of economic and administrative integration (Chase and Chase 1996b), ceremonial pathways (Freidel and Sabloff 1984; Ringle 1999; Villa Rojas 1934), astronomical sight-lines (Folan 1991), or some amalgam of these functional categories (Eberl 2001; Gómez 1996). Many of the roads in the The Social Construction of Roads 185 Maya lowlands are short constructions, limited to the major architectural complexes in site centers. But at a number of larger Maya sites, such as Caracol (Chase and Chase 1987, 1996b), Calakmul (Folan and May Hau 1984), El Mirador (Demarest and Fowler 1984; Sharer 1992), Chichen Itza (Cobos and Winemiller 2001), and Coba (Folan, Kintz, and Fletcher 1983), extensive road systems have been identified that seem to map the expansion of the cities’ political control over their surrounding territories (see also Fedick, Reid, and Mathews 1995 and Mathews 2000 for a potential long-distance causeway in the northern lowlands). At Xunantunich, a mid-sized center, we have identified three short intrasite roads built in the Late Classic period that connect the site’s central plazas to nearby architectural groups (Braswell 1993; Keller 1994, 1995, 1997; see table 9.1).1 These roads attest to Xunantunich’s immediate authority over the hilltop upon which it sits, but the influence of the ancient polity was surely broader than the short roadways suggest. Thus, while the roads are not a straightforward map of the Xunantunich polity, their design, construction, use, and ultimate abandonment suggest some of the symbolic and concrete mechanisms by which the Xunantunich elite attempted to exert their influence in the valley during the Late Classic period. Xunantunich in the Late Classic Period By the end of the Late Classic period, Xunantunich was the ascendant regional polity in the Belize Valley, possibly under the authority of the much larger center of Naranjo to the west (Ashmore 1998, chapter 3; Ashmore and Leventhal 1993; Ball and Taschek 1991; see fig. 1.1). Xunantunich Archaeological Project (XAP) excavations suggest that the entire Xunantunich civic core was built, essentially from the ground up, over the course of fewer than two hundred years, with the bulk of the construction occurring during the latter part of the Late Classic in the Hats’ Chaak phase (LeCount et al. 2002; LeCount and Yaeger, “ A Brief Description of Xunantunich,” this volume; see fig. 1.4). Although we have evidence of an earlier Middle Preclassic period occupation of the hilltop, the construction was almost completely razed before the erection of the monumental structures we see today (Keller 1997; Robin et al. 1994; Yaeger 1997). The decision to remove the earlier constructions rather than to incorporate them into the new structures, as is more common at Maya sites, suggests a table 9.1 The Classic period roads of Xunantunich Sacbe I Sacbe II Northeast Walkway Construction details Surface treatment Plastered Plastered Plastered (limited evidence) Graded/ stepped Graded, sloping Graded, relatively flat Stepped, sloping...