The Integration and Disintegration of Ancient Maya Urban Centres: Charting Households and Community at Buenavista del Cayo, Belize

Abstract

This study examines processes of urbanization, including elements of integration and disintegration, at the low-density/dispersed Classic Period (ca. 300-900 C.E.) Maya centre of Buenavista del Cayo in the Lower Mopan River Valley of west-central Belize. Through an examination of the “biographies” of specific non-elite group constituencies (households and communities -people), represented by their material remains (places and things), I examine their impact on the visibility and characterization of urbanization processes at Buenavista through a multi-temporal, materialistic, and nuanced lens known as “life history”. Survey, testing, excavation, and analysis methods promoted by a life-history approach include those research designs that consider settlement sites from a diachronic perspective. This involves an investigation of settlement from a point of initial occupation, built environment construction, activity/use characterization, and abandonment, incorporated within a multi-temporal perspective. In the application of criteria developed in New Urban Theory that serve to emphasize the role of “places” in community assemblages, and from High Modernist State Schemes and associated theories surrounding knowledge bases that highlight the “people and things” of community assemblages, I chart and evaluate the integrative potential of the Buenavista del Cayo civic centre as it developed over time and eventually disintegrated. The insights into Maya civic and community organization that are generated by this research not only allow us to reach a better understanding of Classic Maya civilization and its rich diversity, but also contribute to the larger dialogue in anthropological archaeology concerning households and communities and their diachronic relationships to political authority and the institutions of archaic urban centres and states.

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