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137 DOI: 10.5876_9781607322788.c007 7 Cerro Palenque Hosting and Power The site of Cerro Palenque sits above the confluence of the Río Ulúa, Río Chamelecón, and Río Blanco on one of the hills at the southern end of the lower Ulúa Valley. Dorothy Hughes Popenoe visited Cerro Palenque some time before her death in 1932 and Doris Z. Stone was there in 1936 (Stone 1941, 57–58). Materials from the site were acquired in the 1930s by Gregory Mason on behalf of the Heye Foundation and are now part of the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). Systematic excavations there took place in the 1980s by Rosemary A. Joyce (Joyce 1982, 1985, 1986, 1987a, 1987b, 1988a, 1988b, 1991) and in the late 1990s through early 2000s by Julia A. Hendon, assisted by Jeanne Lopiparo (Hendon 2002, 2007, 2010, 2011; Hendon and Lopiparo 2004). Taken together, these projects recovered figurines, whistles, other figural artifacts, and molds but no conjoined paired figurines of a man and a woman. Our review of the NMAI’s collections from Cerro Palenque also did not turn up any paired human figures. The people living there were part of the same cultural tradition and social networks as the residents of Currusté, Campo Dos, and Travesía. Cerro Palencanos made and used figurines in ways that underscore their importance as person-like objects that embodied social identities distributed through exchange across time and space. Modern excavations have recovered figurines and fragments of figurines in a range of carefully documented contexts, in a community that became the largest in the region after AD 800, providing our best understood case of how figurines worked in one of the most socially complex settings of the lower Ulúa Valley. At Cerro Palenque we see the life cycle of figurines and CERRO PALENQUE 138 whistles from creation to participation in social significant rituals to destruction and burial.Their use of gendered imagery presents us with yet another example of how these iconic representations become indexes of particular kinds of social relations, adding a third possibility to the two we have already discussed—male and female conjoined pairs indexing marriage at Copán, Tenampua, Campo Dos, and Currusté, and same-sex conjoined pairs indexing other siblings or similar related identities at Travesía. The communiTy of cerro palenque Cerro Palenque started out as a small settlement placed on the highest elevation of the hill.This first occupation of Cerro Palenque is notable for the quality of its architecture. The buildings here recall those of Travesía in their use of cut stone and plaster, materials not used at contemporary sites such as Campo Dos and Currusté. The founding settlers of Cerro Palenque also decorated buildings with stone sculpture similar,although not identical,to that of Travesía.These features reinforce the suggestion by Joyce (1988b; 1991, 130–32) that Cerro Palenque was originally a subsidiary of Travesía and stand as another sign of Travesía’s efforts to establish a broader sphere of influence in this part of the valley. Cerro Palenque did not remain a subordinate site, however. Its expansion began in the mid-ninth century, coming in part at the expense of Travesía, which saw a parallel decline as people shifted residence from its hinterland to the newly attractive hilltop center, with which they already had social relations . Cerro Palenque’s residents abandoned the original area of living quarters and monumental architecture and moved downhill (figure 7.1), building some 500 new structures, including houses, household ritual platforms, kitchens, and monumental ceremonial architecture on a lower series of ridges that run in a roughly north-south direction (Hendon 2010; Joyce 1991). For about 150 years, during the Terminal Classic period, Cerro Palenque was the largest settlement in the lower Ulúa Valley. Through her survey and mapping of the site,Joyce (1982,1985) discovered that each of the ridges where people had built houses also contained an area of public buildings. The largest of these, the Great Plaza, is an impressive space that maintained the orientation toward Montaña de Santa Barbara first established by the earlier settlement (Lopiparo 2003, 255–63).The plaza itself is 300 meters long (figure 7.2). It connects to a second area of monumental buildings to its north by way of raised ramps. At its opposite end, a set of stairs leads to a raised platform supporting a ballcourt. Just...

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