Under the direction of Dr. David Freidel, Diana Fridberg will analyze remains and depictions of animals excavated since 2003 at the Classic Period (ca. 200-750 CE) sites of El Perú-Waka and La Corona, Guatemala. The sites of El Peru and La Corona are located in Laguna del Tigre National Park, a protected jungle enclave in northwestern Petén, Guatemala. Although these ancient cities were politically important during the Maya Classic Period (ca. 200-750 CE), research has not yet addressed how inhabitants utilized the surrounding environment. Ms. Fridberg's research will address the ways in which humans interacted with and made use of tropical forest fauna in activities related to both daily living and ceremonial pursuits. The research is innovative in combining data from multiple sources since both actual faunal remains as well as iconographic images will be combined within a single analytic framework. This will provide a model for similar approaches to sites from multiple time periods and multiple regions of the world.
Human-animal relations underpin many aspects of food consumption, craft production, and the development of cultural and religious practices. They are understood to vary in time and space, but little is known about this variation in the vast Maya region. Knowledge of the ways in which human populations have managed and utilized the natural environment, including animals, is essential for understanding the success or failure of these strategies. This study will utilize material that has been excavated from El Perú and La Corona but for which specialized analysis has not previously been available. Skeletal analysis of animal remains will be performed to determine taxonomic identity of represented fauna. The abundance and diversity of animals represented in ceremonial and mundane contexts such as palaces, temples, tombs, and residential areas will be used to assess the nature of animal use. Depictions of animals in art and architecture will also be analyzed. Considering the ways in which people both used physical animals and represented the natural world artistically has been fruitful for untangling how ancient populations elsewhere in the world thought about and interacted with their environments.
This project involves collaboration with between American and Guatemalan archaeologists and universities. The results of this research will be presented in conferences and peer-reviewed journals in the United States and Guatemala. The specimen collection portion of this research will aid the biology departments at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala and Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala in augmenting sparse faunal collections used for teaching and research. In addition, public outreach efforts will involve the production of accessible and publically available media to aid in the dissemination of knowledge about both ancient culture and modern wildlife. This will include Internet publication of datasets and the creation of English and Spanish language brochures on ancient uses and modern conservation status of animals in Laguna del Tigre. Although a protected zone, the Park and its endangered habitats are threatened by the encroachment of settlement. The presence of ongoing research camps, such as those of the El Perú and La Corona archaeological projects, slows encroachment while gathering data on threatened natural and cultural resources.
The ancient Maya of Central America survived and thrived in the Neotropics, building civilization with the resources available in the rainforest and other tropical settings. Although much research has been performed on this society, few studies have focused on how the ancient Maya utilized their environment. This study focuses on the ways in which animals impacted ancient Maya life during the Classic Period (250 – 700 CE), both in meeting daily resource needs and in influencing ideology and religion. The region studied, northwestern Petén, Guatemala, is a crucial area in Maya political and economic history. The sites discussed in this study, El Perú-Waka’ and La Corona, are in Laguna del Tigre National Park and are still covered with rainforest today. By studying the depictions and remains of animals recovered from archaeological investigations at the site, the aim of this study is to illuminate the ways animals contributed to civilization in this demanding environment. The iconographic focus of the study (animal depictions) centered on collecting a photographic database of animal depictions from excavated materials. These include bone, stone, and ceramic artifacts. This is the first such data set collected for an archaeological site in the region, and as such it provides a rich data set for current and future studies of Maya art, religion, and ritual. The iconographic study revealed that use of certain animals, such as monkeys and owls, appear to be restricted to the representational domain, whereas other animals, such as large rodents, dogs, and deer, were utilized in representation and in kind. Further visual analysis was performed on utilitarian and crafted bone objects. Due to the close study of each specimen required to perform zooarchaeological analysis, several bone artifacts were discovered that previously had not been identified as tools or ornaments. Most notable was the discovery of two bone needle fragments bearing glyphs in fine-line incision. The larger component of this study was zooarchaeological, focusing on the analysis of animal remains. Over ten thousand specimens from across El Perú-Waka’ and La Corona were analyzed to assess taxon, body part, human and natural modification, and other characteristics. This study represents one of the largest zooarchaeological analyses completed in the Maya area and provides information on dietary and ritual use of animals. The ancient diet included a wide range of taxa, including fish, turtles, large rodents, deer, peccary, and a variety of game birds. These and more were included in ritual deposits, which showed greater taxonomic diversity. This study included material from across El Perú-Waka’ and La Corona. These included remains from tombs, temples, and residential areas. Two ritual feasting deposits, one from each site, were identified and analyzed. These deposits were dated to the Classic Period and offer rare windows into discrete events. As part of this study, bones from the El Perú-Waka’ deposit were dated using accelerator mass spectrometry. The resultant date of ca. 675 CE directly ties this activity to historical events and persons known through other archaeological research at the site. In addition to providing information on the ancient Maya, this study also provides information on ancient environment. A number of taxa represented archaeologically, such as the Central American river turtle (Dermatemys mawii) and jaguar (Panthera onca), are now endangered. Identification of their remains offers the potential for their use by biologists studying these populations. The identification of several species not currently documented in the region, such as the iguana, may indicate decreased biodiversity today. Furthermore, by documenting the presence of animals during the Classic Period it is possible to reconstruct which biomes were accessible during this time. The presence of animals that preferentially inhabit high canopy rainforest, for instance, indicates that the landscape surrounding these ancient cities was not denuded of vegetation. However, the forest was not a limitless resource, even for the high elites of Maya society. Rather, they too were dependent upon the small animals that are able to live within and around human settlement to meet their dietary needs. This has important repercussions for discussions of tropical sustainability. By reconstructing those adaptive strategies that were successful in the past, we may be able to apply what worked in ancient times to the modern problem: how can humans have urbanism in a tropical setting without destroying the ecosystem? This project has fostered collaboration between American and Guatemalan researchers in anthropology, archaeology, and organismic biology. Within the United States, the project has been involved in undergraduate training in archaeological methods. Results have, and will continue to be presented to the academic and general public in lectures and papers.
