Community Identity and Shared Practice at Actuncan, Belize

Abstract

Shared identities create deep historical ties to community spaces and can facilitate or constrict political expansion. This research examines the relationship between the ways in which families engaged local landscapes and developed shared identities at Actuncan, Belize, during the Terminal Classic period, a time when the city experienced population growth as surrounding centers declined. The nature and location of activity patterns in and around three residential groups allow inferences about shared practices and the expression of identities that those activities enabled and constrained. Importantly, this research includes investigations of both residential groups and architecturally free areas. It uses multiple methods to explore activities and to produce overlapping datasets, including excavation and analysis of macroartifacts, microartifacts, and soil chemical residues. The results suggest that Actuncan residents used not only the formal patio spaces of residential groups but also the interstitial spaces between them. Moreover, one residential group, Group 1, appears to have been a locus for distinct activities including sequential burials and, possibly, affiliative ritual practices connected to ancestral landscape use. Understanding relationships among residents is an important foundation for exploring broader political dynamics, including relationships between residents and rulers and how rulers created, legitimized, and maintained power and authority.

Environmental legacy of pre-Columbian Maya mercury

“…The partial leaching of soils using diluted HCl (e.g., Wells, 2004) or a mixture of diluted HNO 3 and HCl acids (Aqua Regia) has been the most common method used in the Maya soil literature to date. LeCount et al (2016) and Fulton (2019) reported that their results using partial digestion methods showed ". .…”

“…Most of these contexts were Late Classic age, though a smaller number of floor areas sampled were from the earliest history of the site, from the Terminal Preclassic and Early Classic periods. Second, Fulton (2019) reported the results of inorganic chemical analysis of 703 on-site soils samples collected across Group 1 (Late to Terminal Classic occupation areas), Group 5 (Operation 47), Group 6 (Operation 46), and from excavated spaces between architecture (Operation 48), and also eight off-site control samples.…”

“…At the site level, Hg enrichment appears highly localised in "hotspots" on internal Maya floor areas or on external patio spaces, often at very small (<10 2 m) spatial scales. An extreme example of this pattern comes from the work of Fulton (2019) at Actuncan, where just four out of 196 samples collected across ancient Maya occupation spaces had measurable Hg. Less commonly, some former Maya sites have elevated Hg across entire occupation areas, such as at Piedras Negras.…”

Land Tenure Systems at the Ancient Maya Site of Actuncan, Belize

“…Group 7 grew haphazardly around a wide patio, indicating that its structures were either distinctly different in function or were the homes of incongruent social entities. Group 6 may have functioned as a Late Classic special-function building (Fulton 2015). Unlike other nearby patio-focused groups, it was constructed predominantly of perishable materials, and little plaster was found on platform floors.…”

Community Resilience and Urban Planning during the Ninth-Century Maya Collapse: A Case Study from Actuncan, Belize

“…Ruling families likely fled (or died) and poor populations chose to leave. Like the longest occupied households in the surrounding hinterlands, the households at Actuncan were deeply rooted, and their members chose to remain at the site through the Terminal Classic period (Fulton 2019;LeCount et al 2019;Mixter et al 2014). As Xunantunich's power contracted, Actuncan initiated a renewed programme of Community Resilience and Urban Planning during the Ninth-Century Maya Collapse civic construction and ritual activity and the site's long-lived households formed the core of a new, more inclusive socio-political order that was no longer led by divine rulers (LeCount et al 2011; Mixter 2016).…”