With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Lisa LeCount and a team of international colleagues and students will conduct three field seasons of archaeological research at the ancient Maya site of Actuncan, Belize. The Actuncan Archaeological Project will examine the rise of hereditary kingship and how processes that led to centralized authority affected households during the Preclassic to Classic transition (B.C. 400 to A.D. 600). During this little known time span, many Maya sites became sufficiently large and complex to be considered archaic states. The first royal dynasties were recorded in hieroglyphic texts at the large sites such as Tikal and Copan, and rulers at smaller centers, such as Actuncan, actively commissioned the building of palaces, courts, temples, and elaborate tombs. Although most archaeologists acknowledge that a suite of causal factors led to centralized authority among the ancient Maya, the intellectual debate is polarized between materialistic approaches that view elite control over the production and distribution of resources as the source of paramount power and ideational approaches that emphasize moral and religious constructs and knowledge as the source of centralized authority. To move beyond this impasse, the project will investigate organizational changes in households as rulers increasingly centralized their authority during the Preclassic to Classic transition. A household approach to understanding the rise of Maya kingship is rarely explored, since most researchers investigating this question focus predominately on the monuments and tombs of rulers. The actions of rulers, however, cannot be fully understood without investigating households that held kin-based power through their control of land, labor and ancestral sources of religious authority. As independent sources of power, households are significant indicators of the successes and failures of political strategies to consolidate kingly authority.
Examining the affects of political authority on households requires the excavation of domestic structures and a Maya palace to document changing residential structure layout, size and prosperity through time. Two major alternative hypotheses are tested. If rulers successfully instigated strategies that limited kin-based control over land, labor, and wealth, then once powerful families would have experienced a loss of wealth and status as measured by reductions in house sizes and luxury goods, as well as novel changes to domestic activities. Alternatively, it is also possible that in some smaller polities like Actuncan kin-based authority remained well-developed, and rulers were unable to consolidate authority over social groups. Indeed, if this was the case, then residential structures will illustrate consistent patterning in size and access to wealth as they develop over time. Specific field and laboratory tasks include 1) excavating half of all Actuncan households from the latest to earliest construction phases, 2) mapping the layout and size of each construction phase, 3) analyzing soil and plaster chemistry to determine shifting use of domestic space, and 4) analyzing artifacts to determine access to luxury goods. The goal is to chart the status and wealth indicators for seven different structures through the thousand years that span the rise of centralized authority at Actuncan.
The broader impacts of this research have the potential to transform understanding of the nature of kingship in early Maya states. Indeed, the consolidation and coordination of political, social, economic and ideological powers may have developed very late in state-level societies. Further, the project will provide Belizean students at Galen University and local individuals' opportunities for increasing their knowledge of Maya prehistory and training in archaeology, especially for eco-tourism related ventures. The project's commitment to Belizean communities affords North American graduate students working on MA and Ph.D. projects closer interaction with modern Mayan peoples today.
