Material Relations: The Marriage Figurines of Prehispanic Honduras

Epilogue

159 DOI: 10.5876_9781607322788.c008 Epilogue Many accounts of the fundamental binding relations in ancient societies take the perspective of government , of political relations, especially political strategies that are recognizable to people living in contemporary nation-states defined by a claimed territory, favored language, and purported historical identity (Anderson 1991). The questions asked concern how an identified political leadership located in a visible capital generates power and how power moves out into the places where the citizenry lives. One of the strengths of archaeology, though, is its capacity to provide us with views of societies that are not just weaker, less-developed versions of those of today, but that are organized in other ways, making us question how governance might actually have been practiced in other times and places. Of the societies that flourished in what is now Honduras between AD 500 and 1000 that we have examined in previous chapters, only Copán has the kind of evidence traditionally used to examine state governance: inscriptions carved on stone monuments commemorating individual officeholders and their succession in office and spaces apparently dedicated to the work of governance,both local administration and diplomatic relations with distant peers. At Tenampua, Campo Dos, Currusté, Travesía, and Cerro Palenque, we are hard pressed to identify historical rulers.We do think we have identified the house sites of prominent families in some sites, like Travesía, Cerro Palenque, and Tenampua. Yet the kinds of nonresidential buildings and spaces we can point to as places for politics to happen, and the suite of activities that took place in those plazas and around those EPILOGUE 160 ballcourts, are not easily depicted as spaces and actions of state administrations or foreign relations like those known at Copán. To understand this network of Honduran societies,we have instead examined the spaces they created and the things they used in and around those spaces as evidence for social relations: how families created links through marriages that extended across societies of different scales and bound them over generations, by making some people kin of people in other places. The social relations we trace existed not at the scale of “ethnic” groups (Maya and Lenca) or even of regions (Copán Valley, Comayagua Valley, Ulúa Valley), but of families and individual actors. We believe that it is most likely that the families and individuals involved would have identified themselves with their town and its web of people rather than with the kind of fixed territories,ethnicities,or linguistic groups that define contemporary nation-states.It is on the level of the town that we see evidence of differentiation of identity, and it is in towns that visual media displaying badges of difference were produced, used, and discarded, in events clearly related to important changes in the social status of residents. Our argument is, further, that these events in the social lives of residents of a network of towns were the way coordination of claims on resources, agreements about joint actions, and contracting of economic and social ties at long distances took place. This is true as much for Copán,with its additional medium of historical texts, as for the other Honduran societies we have examined.All that really differentiates the towns connected through the social ties we have traced is the degree of unequal distribution of economic resources, the differential deployment of wealth to create objects of high culture that distinguished some families and individuals within the town, and the ability of some families and individuals to persuasively claim greater authority in arenas of critical importance to the community as a whole (Joyce 2000d). difference, idenTiTy, hierarchy, and heTerarchy We have demonstrated that the main medium for the display of badges of difference in this network of Honduran societies was ceramic figural objects used in social ceremonies at the scale of the town—from the smallest masks and musical instruments to the largest figural effigies, freestanding or incorporated in incense burners. Our goal in tracing connections forged through the production , use, and exchange of such objects, and differentiations made possible by their juxtaposition at particular events,has been in part to coordinate the scale of social relations with the scale of materials used to create them. Even at Copán, EPILOGUE 161 where archaeologists privilege stone monuments as the primary source of information about political structure, there was a parallel practice of creating social relations mediated...