A “table altar,” perhaps one described by Cabrera (1822) almost 200 years ago and since unreported, is the only complete example of a class of four-legged sculptures known at present from Kaminaljuyu. Iconographic similarities between the monument and sculptures from southern piedmont and coastal centers and comparisons with other Kaminaljuyu sculptures suggest an early Late Preclassic date (Late Verbena-Early Arenal, approximately 300-200 B.C.). According to depictions on other southern-area monuments many “table altars” were formal, emblematic seats for rulers, or thrones, which had specific ideologies associated with them Review of monuments, including identification as a four-legged throne of the well-known sculpture, Stela 10, numbers the Kaminaljuyu corpus of thrones to date at a minimum of seven. The presence of thrones as a sculptural class at Kaminaljuyu in the Late Preclassic period provides more evidence of a long throne tradition reaching from Olmec times through the Maya Classic and into the Postclassic. Kaminaljuyu's thrones conceivably also add to other evidence of complex sociopolitics at the city during the Late Preclassic.
Investigations begun in 2003 and continued through 2005 at Chocolá, in Southwestern Guatemala, have determined the existence of an extensive Preclassic network of well-engineered subterranean canals. The hydraulics discovered at the site, as well as other findings, add to long-standing evidence of Preclassic developments in the site's immediate region. While I consider an impressive Preclassic hydraulic system proven for Chocolá, a similarly early industry of cacao—a high-water demand plant of pan-Mesoamerican importance and native to the region—is discussed here admittedly only as a plausible hypothesis, based on copious ethnohistoric attestation but also on the long-known but disparate evidence of a temporal priority to many developments considered key to later Classic Maya civilization that are found in the Southern Maya area.
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