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131 6 Tilling the Fields and Building the Temples Assessing the Relationship among Land, Labor, and Classic Maya Elite Power in the Copán Valley, Honduras John D. Wingard Archaeologists take different approaches to understanding the past. These approaches vary from those that rely heavily on data bound by the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology to those that rely much more heavily on the interpretive and inferential powers of the researcher. Archaeologists most closely associated with processualist approaches favor etic explanations of human behavior. They rely most heavily on empirical data collected using scientific methods. Over-reliance on only the highly scientific, however, can leave us with shallow, narrow, relatively uninformative images that tell us much about the “what” and “where” but often little about the “why.” Postprocessual archaeologists, on the other hand, strive for emic understandings of the cultures they study. They rely much more heavily on their interpretive, inferential, and, in some cases, intuitive powers. While this method often provides a richer sense of the past, in many cases, rather than gain a valid understanding of past human cultures , we may be left with just-so stories—stories that better reflect the researchers’ views and biases than the actual lives of the peoples under investigation. In this chapter I try to capture the complementarities among these different approaches. Recent interpretations of the Classic Maya rulers of Copán, postprocessualist interpretations based heavily on architectural data, and, in particular, elite architectural data have attempted to reconstruct the political culture of the Classic Maya. The political culture so reconstructed, however, relies on assumptions of demography and behavior that are not congruent with the ecological parameters and agricultural conditions of the Copán Valley, Honduras. Reinterpreting the elite architectural data within the context of ecological data derived using more processualist approaches allows for a more realistic reconstruction of the political culture of Copán. john d. wingard 132 RESEARCH AT COPÁN The Classic Maya site of Copán (figure 6.1) has been the focus of multiple research projects dating back at least to the early explorations documented in the works of John Lloyd Stephens and Fredrick Catherwood (Stephens 1841). For purposes of this chapter, however, the most relevant period of research began in the mid-1970s and has continued, more or less continuously, since then. This most recent period of research has included intensive and extensive research on the ecology, demography, and political history of the region and has given us a more complete picture of the Copán polity. COPÁN Humans have inhabited the Copán Valley for several millennia. The ceramic sequence at Copán stretches back to the Early Preclassic over 3,200 years ago. The evidence for these early inhabitants is very sparse. In fact, it is not until the Late Classic, post–AD 600, that fairly reliable population estimates for the Copán Valley can be made (Freter 1988; Webster and Freter 1990a, 1990b; Webster, Freter, and Gonlin 2000). Estimates for earlier populations can be derived only indirectly. Likewise, relationships between demographic variables and political developments can only be indirectly surmised. Further complicating the issues is the degree to which one can extrapolate outward from areas where direct evidence does exist to areas with less direct evidence. Recent interpretations of developments in the Copán Valley have employed a political perspective, derived primarily from architectural and ceramic data, to fill in the missing demographic pieces of the puzzle. The demographic picture thus derived, I will argue, is not supported by the ecological data. Conversely, I suggest that using an ecological perspective to fill in the missing demographic pieces and, furthermore, the demographic picture thus derived does not contradict the architectural and ceramic evidence. Specifically, as in any agricultural society, food was the fuel that powered Classic Maya Copañeco society. Maize was the primary source of food. Consequently, understanding both the capacity of the Copán Valley to produce maize and how the Copán Maya used this capacity is critical to understanding other aspects of their society , including relationships between elites and non-elites. To accomplish this, I first look at the ecological parameters that are key to assessing the agricultural potential for maize production of the Copán Valley. I then examine the long-term implications of human use patterns on the Copán Valley’s agricultural potential. Finally, I discuss what this may reveal about the relationships between elites and non-elites. [18.224.30.118] Project MUSE (2024...

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