Changing patterns of social organization: The Late and Terminal Classic communities at San Lorenzo, Cayo District, Belize

Abstract

Anthropology has persistently sought to understand the links between local contexts and larger, regional structures. Settlement survey and household archaeology in the Maya lowlands have demonstrated that Classic-period hinterland settlements were heterogeneous, but these findings are rarely incorporated into our models of Precolumbian Maya society. This dissertation addresses these issues through the examination of the social and economic organization of San Lorenzo, a Late-to-Terminal Classic (AD 600–890) hamlet in the Xunantunich polity in western Belize. Data from four seasons of survey and household-level excavations permit the comparison of the occupational histories, spatial organization, social composition, and construction techniques of the hamlet's residential groups. The data reveal striking differences in material culture and architecture among the settlement's 17 residential groups, which I use to evaluate a model of the development of Maya hinterland communities as localized lineages. I employ a practice or agent-oriented perspective that focuses on the roles of intra-community social interaction and changing practices of affiliation in constituting the local San Lorenzo community and its larger regional context. The data suggest a relatively weak role for lineage structures at San Lorenzo. In the context of polity formation and political expansion at Xunantunich, the residents of San Lorenzo negotiated multiple types of identity, in part through their manipulation of material culture to create and represent social bonds. Ceramic data attest to structured sets of practices that bridged gaps between the different inhabitants of the site, highlighting shared experiences and beliefs and reinforcing a shared sense of community. Practices of house construction, costuming, and hosting of ritual celebrations simultaneously helped to constitute and preserve inequalities within the hamlet, while linking the hamlet into the larger political and economic networks of the Xunantunich polity. Concurrent with the decline of Xunantunich in the Terminal Classic period, material differences at San Lorenzo all but disappear. The much smaller Terminal Classic community is notably homogeneous and lacks both the differentiating and the integrating practices of the preceding Late Classic.

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