January 22, 2004

Looking beyond the big Maya temples

By Pat Vaughan Tremmel

Systematic explorations of sites that housed Maya cities and ceremonial centers date back to the 1830s. Coupled with the deciphering of the Maya’s intricate writing system, they have shed a dazzling light on Maya kings and elites and their religious worship of a pantheon of gods.

Cynthia Robin, assistant professor of anthropology, led the work on the Chan site in Belize.

photo by Stephen Anzaldi

But what about the daily lives and religious beliefs of ordinary Maya people who didn’t live in the ceremonial centers or have literature at their command?

By following the lead of contemporary Maya, who come together to worship at the geographical center of their communities, Cynthia Robin, assistant professor of anthropology, found an amazing answer to that question. An educated hunch turned into a major find as she and her Northwestern team excavated the center of the Chan site in Belize, a small farming community that was occupied for more than 2,000 years.

“We thought we might find some indication of activities from the past, but never in our wildest dreams did we imagine that people would have come together to worship continuously for more than 2,000 years at the exact center point of Chan — with rituals that are so similar to the ways the elites practiced,” she said.

Weinberg College students Ethan Kalosky (right) and Michael Latsch (left) measure aand draw a wall at the Chan site.

While massive ceremonial centers of Maya society rose and fell, the ordinary farmers maintained a powerful control over the sacred position of their community through more than 2,000 years of ritual performances consecrating its center.

Robin has been unraveling the mystery of ordinary Maya lives like never before at Chan, which was occupied from 1000 B.C. to 1200 A.D. — a period that spans the expansion of the Maya state and the rise and demise of central political authority.

She is the director of an international multi-disciplinary research team that is exploring Chan to understand the inhabitants of a farming community in the hinterlands of ancient Maya society and their relationship with elites from the nearby polity capital of Xunantunich.

The 2,000-year sequence of rituals in the center of the village and the river cobbles, which are found only in the home, telegraphed how the poorest of farmers were accessing sacred powers in the same way the region’s political leaders were, offering a context that Robin could not have imagined.

As the Maya kings’ use of symbolism placed them at the center of the cosmology, so did the farmers’. At the center of the site, Robin and her team found a small plaza, about 50 by 50 meters, with two shrines, where people had performed rituals, burying caches of ceramics, jade and stalactite from a nearby cave and burning incense and depositing figurines on altars. They also discovered human remains of an individual who may have been one of the farming village’s founders. The individual’s skull had later been removed for veneration.

Belizean archaeologist Edwin Camal excavates a cobble floor at the Chan site.

“Without the aid of written history, the farmers at Chan were able to recall the ritual practices of their predecessors,” said Robin. “The location of the ancestral burial was remembered, and the farmers re-entered the grave a number of times throughout history. They also broke and heirloomed a sacred object, burying the two halves on consecutive altars.”

The most remarkable find was a two-meter high stela (stone monument), the type that was carved by kings and found at larger sites all through the classic period. Robin didn’t expect to find such a monument at a place as small as Chan.

“As the power of Maya elites was waning at the end of the classic period, leaders of a small farming community were co-opting a symbol of power that was previously restricted to the upper echelon,” she said.

Instead of using green jade, red hematite, yellow gold or other elaborate objects in their homes, the farmers placed colored stones to indicate the four world directions, with their house as the sacred center.

“This site has taught us that the belief system we always ascribed to literate elites of Maya society may have been originally developed in the homes and communities of ordinary people,” Robin said.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that Gordon Willey at Harvard, an archeologist who was noted for his work on the social and economic lives of ordinary people, urged others to systematically look beyond the obvious large mounds that stick up in the jungle canopy to understand Maya culture.

“At Chan we are excavating an ordinary farming community with the intensity of archaeological research reserved for larger Maya sites,” said Robin. “The Chan project is a rare detailed excavation of a small farming community in the Maya area; and it’s critical for our understanding of Maya society, because it has such a long, continuous sequence of deposits.”

The Chan site is located on private property, and Robin’s labor-intensive work includes cutting paths through dense areas of forest. The lush area includes 583 mounds, many of which could easily be overlooked. Unlike the homes of the Maya elites, built on high stone platforms and whose remaining mounds are many meters tall, the farmers’ wooden houses often were placed on plaster or cobble floors on the ground’s surface. Once the wood deteriorated, all that remains are minor elevations.

Nestled on gentle rolling hills, the site also shows how the ancient inhabitants developed an intensive agricultural system using hill-slope and cross-channel terraces to create a highly productive and conservation-wise agrarian landscape that supported Chan’s many centuries of habitation. The knowledge of such agricultural systems is lost today, and the archaeological work at Chan is reclaiming this lost knowledge for local communities in Belize as well as scientific communities abroad.

Overall, Chan is an important case study that allows researchers to examine how changes in village life affected and were affected by broader political-economic changes in Maya society, particularly during the late rise of the nearby polity-capital of Xunantunich.

The rulers of the larger cities in the Maya area, such as Xunantunich, may have controlled the labor of hundreds, if not thousands, of slaves or commoners to build grand temples and monuments in sacred ceremonial precincts within their cities.

“When the political power of these rulers and their cities declined, the grandiose ceremonial precincts often lost their sacred power or were dismantled or defaced or were no longer used for ritual purposes,” Robin said.

“But in the hinterlands of Xunantunich, which claimed political prominence for only a few hundred years, the ordinary farming people of Chan were able to maintain the sacred nature of their community through more than 2,000 years of rituals practiced at its center.”