Chan: An Ancient Maya Farming Community

9. Recognizing Difference in Small-Scale Settings: An Examination of Social Identity Formation at the Northeast Group, Chan

9 Recognizing Difference in Small-Scale Settings An Examination of Social Identity Formation at the Northeast Group, Chan Chelsea Blackmore From the small-scale grandeur of the community center to its single-phase domestic mounds, Chan contains a wide array of material culture—some of which belies traditional archaeological notions of commoner life and behavior . The diversity of the community forces us to question archaeological assumptions of who commoners were and how static models of commoner life have affected our interpretations of ancient Maya society. Because evidence for social diversity is less tangible than for other aspects of the past, archaeologists tend to focus on the more dramatic and better-preserved remains of elite centers. Although such work has produced a rich and textured picture of elite life, it has created an unfortunate by-product, whereby elites are assumed to be the template for the rest of society. Because our analytical categories are based on the rich, wealthy, and powerful, commoner populations, in comparison, appear unobtrusive, static, and relatively simplistic . While the categories of “elite” and “commoner” reflect the extreme ends of a social continuum, they inadequately characterize, if not obscure altogether, the reality of day-to-day social interactions and organization. Research at the Northeast Group challenges these assumptions by examining how its occupants were themselves internally diverse. Specifically, how were differences in social identity and status expressed by community members, and how did these manifest within the settlement unit of a neighborhood ? This chapter examines commoner social diversity through an analysis of the material and ideological practices carried out at the Northeast Group, one of several “neighborhoods” that make up the Chan community (figure 9.1; see figure 1.2 for the location of the Northeast Group 174 · Chelsea Blackmore Posthole Boundary Midden Midden 1 Midden 2 Midden 3 Midden 4 Midden 5 NE-6 NE-1 NE-8 NE-2 NE-3 NE-4 NE-5 NE-7 32m 0 N Figure 9.1. Northeast Group. within Chan). By examining the function and organization of space and the corresponding distribution of material goods across the neighborhood, we can identify the activities in which people engaged; how these varied in relation to resource access; and the restriction and elaboration of particular spaces. Understanding how people distinguished themselves within the context of a neighborhood provides direct evidence of class complexity, challenging traditional models of commoner behavior and more importantly the role they played in ancient Maya society as a whole. Class Identities and the State Exploring constructed identities—the production and reproduction of diversity—is a key issue in the study of state-based societies such as the Examination of Social Identity Formation at the Northeast Group · 175 Classic Maya. Relationships of power are a necessary avenue of inquiry for understanding the creation, maintenance, or rejection of different identities . Power and politics have been viewed, traditionally, as an outcome of the political economy—more specifically, how luxury goods, mass production , long-distance trade, and particular technologies (that is, ceramics) secure elite power and establish social affiliations among and between polity centers. Control over economic resources (that is, wealth) was seen as giving validation to claims of superior social standing; in effect naturalizing hierarchy so that power appears a priori. Power should be viewed, instead, as a simultaneous process of choice, resistance, and coercion, in which all people negotiate their position within society. According to Gledhill (2000: 38, emphasis in original), this stresses “the importance of cultural strategies of affiliation and negotiating relations of domination as central variables in these processes [i.e. state formation].” In precapitalist states, people retain access to the means of production. Although social relations form differently in capitalist modes of production in comparison to others, structures of social inequality still exist in precapitalist states. These identities, in their multiple and messy forms, construct the social processes that we tend to divorce from daily life. Inequality , in particular, shapes economic and political processes, even when they emerge from the most “mundane” of social classes. Archaeologists have begun to ask how inequality and social distinctions shape, influence, and impact the larger political and economic spheres of society (Ashmore et al. 2004; Brumfiel 1991, 1992; Yeager 2000a, 2003). As a state-level society, the ancient Maya were enmeshed in multiple, overlapping levels of social organization, including factions, class, gender, status, lineage, occupation, and ethnicity. An important research direction is to examine how these facets of identity...