Crafting Prehispanic Maya Kinship

Introduction: Crafting Prehispanic Maya Kinship

Introduction Crafting Prehispanic Maya Kinship This book is about the ways that models (hypotheses) on prehispanic Maya kinship have been crafted by scholars and about the ways that prehispanic Maya societies variably crafted kinship.after more than eight decades of research to identify an ancient Maya system of kinship and social organization , ethnohistorians and ethnographers have failed to reach a consensus. a number of major hypotheses on the nature of prehispanic Maya kinship and social organization have been forwarded and debated:patrilineal descent with patrilocality (also with omaha and segmentary lineage versions), cognatic kinship, double descent, Kariera kinship, and “house societies.”With the exception of the “house” perspective (the most recent), this is not a historical sequence of models,but rather a list of competing hypotheses during practically all post-1950s periods of study.Whereas identifying kinship and social organization in archaeology has its set of challenges in any region, this goal is made all the more difficult for Mayanist archaeologists when ethnologist experts on the subject continue to produce competing models for the 16th century.Whereas investigators of other cultural regions might be surprised to read comments to the effect that archaeologists cannot understand social organization with their data, such comments are now well known in Maya archaeological literature (e.g.,a. Chase and d. Chase 1992:7–8, 2004;Hageman 2004), suggesting the topical area has reached a crisis. Goals and objectives of the Book From this departure,the goal of the book is to inspire a fundamental and optimistic change in the direction of research on ancient Maya kinship and social organization.Because this topic has been dominated by the models proposed 2 / Introduction and debated through ethnohistorical and ethnographical analyses, one of the main objectives is to outline multiple reoccurring problematic assumptions in those studies: that a pan-Maya kinship system existed, that naming systems and kin terminologies can predict a specified type of kinship-based social organization,that kinship is static,and that different social classes in state societies share the same system. The purpose of this critique is not to favor one ethnological model over others, but rather to illustrate that the directhistorical approach to analogy for the prehispanic Maya is the problem.However , direct-historical analogy is not the only means for interpreting kinship in any region, and this book suggests that it is the least useful approach in the case of the ancient Maya. Therefore, a second objective for this book is to bring to the analysis cross-cultural ethnologically confirmed material indicators of kinship behavior used in other regions, but which have largely been ignored in Maya archaeology due to a tradition of assigning preeminence to the direct-historical approach. Whereas the problematic application of problematic historically derived models results in confusion for archaeologists, the use of cross-cultural indicators of kinship behavior allows archaeology to independently build kinship models from the ground up,so to speak.Thus,a third objective in this book is to demonstrate that archaeology is in a better position to model ancient Maya kinship than are ethnohistory and ethnography. such an approach allows archaeologists —those with the most direct data on actual patterned behavior among prehispanic Maya populations—to model the diversity of kinship behavior within any given Maya social formation, across the numerous societies of the Maya macroregion, and over time. In other words, this book is a call for Maya archaeologists to produce their own models on kinship for the prehispanic periods that could expand and enrich our understanding of change within that era. additionally, with an equal status as ethnohistory and ethnography , Maya archaeology could contribute better understandings of how kinship and society changed from the prehispanic era, to the postconquest era, and to the present. For a case study demonstrating this potential,I use recent data from an archaeological project within the Chontalpa Maya region of Tabasco, Mexico. Islas de los Cerros (Islands of the Mounds) was a large late Classic period coastal settlement occupying five islands and the peninsular site of el Bellote downriver from the interior capital of Comalcalco. although there are some drawbacks to this selection, Islas de los Cerros still provides an ideal case study for the third objective as multiple social classes and kin groups are easily recognized (ensor et al.In press).When applying cross-culturally con- Crafting Prehispanic Maya Kinship / 3 firmed material indicators of kinship behavior, social classes are observed to have...