Development of sedentary communities in the Maya lowlands: Coexisting mobile groups and public ceremonies at Ceibal, Guatemala

Abstract

Our archaeological investigations at Ceibal, a lowland Maya site located in the Pasión region, documented that a formal ceremonial complex was built around 950 B.C. at the onset of the Middle Preclassic period, when ceramics began to be used in the Maya lowlands. Our refined chronology allowed us to trace the subsequent social changes in a resolution that had not been possible before. Many residents of Ceibal appear to have remained relatively mobile during the following centuries, living in ephemeral post-in-ground structures and frequently changing their residential localities. In other parts of the Pasión region, there may have existed more mobile populations who maintained the traditional lifestyle of the preceramic period. Although the emerging elite of Ceibal began to live in a substantial residential complex by 700 B.C., advanced sedentism with durable residences rebuilt in the same locations and burials placed under house floors was not adopted in most residential areas until 500 B.C., and did not become common until 300 B.C. or the Late Preclassic period. During the Middle Preclassic period, substantial formal ceremonial complexes appear to have been built only at a small number of important communities in the Maya lowlands, and groups with different levels of sedentism probably gathered for their constructions and for public rituals held in them. These collaborative activities likely played a central role in socially integrating diverse groups with different lifestyles and, eventually, in developing fully established sedentary communities.Mesoamerican archaeology | sedentism | Maya | public ceremony | subsistence R ecent archaeological investigations have shown that the development of agriculture and sedentism was more diverse than the simple model of agriculture leading to sedentism and then to social complexity. In Europe, for example, the farming lifestyle that originated in the Near East spread in complex ways, involving the coexistence of farmers and foragers in relatively small areas and differential adoptions of Neolithic cultural elements in different regions (1-3). Studies of early monuments, such as Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, Watson Brake in Louisiana, and Caral and earlier mounds in the Andes, show that large constructions involving significant collective labor could be built by preceramic people who were still foragers or were at the early stage of farming adaptation (4-7). These emerging understandings lead to important questions about how sedentary and mobile populations interacted and how their relations affected the process of social change. To address these questions, researchers need fine-grained chronological information and a broad spatial coverage, which are not easy to obtain in many cases. A uniquely rich dataset obtained from the Maya site of Ceibal (or Seibal) suggests the possibility that groups with different levels of mobility gathered and collaborated for constructions and public ceremonies, which contrasts with the common assumption that sedentary and mobile groups maintained...

Mayans: a Y chromosome perspective

“…The Ceibal, in the Pasión region of Petén, represents the earliest known Mayan sedentary community discovered thus far, dating back to about 3000 ya. 8 The Ceibal location corresponds roughly to the collection area of our Q'eqchi population. Increasingly complex City-States such as Nakbe appeared during the subsequent Pre-Classic Period, also in the region of Petén.…”

The Earliest Maya Farmers of Peten: New Evidence from Buenavista-Nuevo San José, Central Peten Lakes Region, Guatemala

“…However, due to the presence of waxy slips and forms characteristic of the Mamom horizon (e.g., cuspidor), the Swasey complex is now placed by Clark, Cheetham, Inomata, and colleagues slightly later than the other three pre-Mamom traditions, around 850 b.c. [4,7,43]. Lohse ([1]: 330-336) also confirms this interpretation in his review of 32 radiocarbon essays from Cuello, which concludes that the pre-1000 BC dates probably pertain to the Late Archaic.…”

“…These settlements would also lie deeply buried by later human activities and would have suffered major disturbances if not erasure at the hands of these later occupants, as several authors have pointed out [1,17,35,37]. In addition, at the moment, we have some evidence that these earliest lowlanders manipulated the bedrock to construct platforms [43], but such bedrock manipulations may be hard to identify in the small test pits that Maya archaeologists typically excavate down to bedrock. Another critical obstacle to the discovery of Archaic sites is that, in many parts of the southern Maya lowlands, substantial environmental changes at the beginning of the Holocene would have obscured early deposits under meters of sediments or water [19,27,44].…”

Why Settlement Scaling Research is a Good Fit for Archaeology

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