With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Michael Love will conduct one field season of excavation and an additional period of analysis at the archaeological site of Ujuxte, located near the Pacific coast of Guatemala. Currently supported NSF investigations indicate that Ujuxte began as a planned city at approximately 600 BC and grew to reach considerable proportions. Survey has shown that at its peak, it covered over 4 sq kilometers and dominated a number of secondary centers which contained smaller copies of its ceremonial architecture. Through his work, Dr. Love wishes to understand the history of the site and how its social, economic and political organization developed and changed over time. To accomplish this goal, Dr. Love and collaborators will excavate four residential mounds to increase the sample to a sufficient size to capture the full range of variation. Additional test units will be placed in mounds already tested to expand ceramic and other material culture collections. The group will also excavate a central plaza area and test selected non-mound locations. Through the analysis of the materials collected it will be possible to reconstruct a social profile, determine the extent of economic differentiation and determine if a hierarchical form of organization existed. Early complex societies are now recognized as fragile and subject to cycles of integration and decomposition. Dr. Love will investigate one such cycle in a region which has remains of the earliest complex societies presently known for Mesoamerica. The evolution of those societies has basic importance for the understanding of Mesoamerican culture history and can shed light on the mechanisms of the development of complex society. During the Middle Preclassic period, from ca. 900-600 BC, the region's first large regional polity, centered on the site of La Blanca, was constituted and collapsed. Soon after that collapse the nearly site of Ujuxte first developed. Dr. Love's research examines the transition from the La Blanca polity to that dominated by Ujuxte. It will compare the two entities in terms of social organization, economic structures and ideological basis of power. The research seeks to understand the extent to which the structures of the Ujxute polity recreated those of La Blanca. To the extent that the structures are distinct, the research will then ask what conditions enabled Ujuxte to endure and grow where La Blanca did not.
