North Acropolis
As in the case of the Yaxuna Ill-IVa transition, we found no termination activities marking the Yaxuna IVb arrival at Stmcture 6F-3. However, the Yaxuna IVa Stair A may provide some detail on the end of the Puuc-allied occupation at Yaxuna. Even among other Yaxuna IVa constmctions. Stair A represents atypical constmction techniques and materials: unworked stones in a matrix of loose, dark soil. This is the only place at Yaxuna where we encountered this type of fill. Normal fill for Yaxuna IVa was a mix of dry core fill underlying a concrete core with veneer exterior. The overall inferior nature of Stair A implies hurried con-
20JO North Acropolis with wall
Struction. Additionally, the staircase was never completed, ending some six meters below the top of the vaulted passage. The use of atypical construction techniques and low-grade materials suggest to us that the staircase was built in a time of stress, when the authorities were impaired. Its unfinished state points to Stair A as one of the last Yaxuna IVa monumental constructions at Yaxuna, its completion interrupted by the siege and fall of the city.
In the case of Structure 6F-68, the Puuc-style council house along the southern edge of Structure 6F-4, a termination carried out at this building was deliberate, focused, and extensive enough to require construction of support structures appended to the building (Figure 20.12). Large amounts of culinary wares around the base of the low, rectangular Structure 6F-7 platform are remains of Itza-led feasts celebrating Structure 6F-68’s desecration. A Sotuta tripod grater bowl fragment from the central floor cut in Room 2 fit another from the northwestern side of Structure 6F-7. This artifactual relationship ties the two deposits together and establishes that feasting began while the Structure 6F-68 vaults were intact. Additionally, the presence of Sotuta ceramics interspersed with the Yaxuna IVa Cehpech materials represents what we call “signature materials.” Such artifacts occur in contexts that demonstrate the dominance of their makers while ritually overpowering an enemy place. They might have been smashed during feasting, or deposited whole with the burned and smashed materials of the enemy.
Contextually, the destruction visited upon Structure 6F-68 manifests many of the hallmarks we have come to associate with termination events: large holes were dug through each of the three-room floors, intense fires were burned within each room, whole ceramic vessels, fragments, and large amounts of elite material culture were smashed and scattered throughout the rooms and in a roughly five-meter-wide strip along the face of the building (Ambrosino 1998.) Particularly hard hit was the westernmost room. Burial 25, a stone-lined crypt intrusive to the original structure, had been re-entered, an attempt was made to remove all grave goods, and the skeletal material accessible to the desecrating ritualists (from the pelvis up [Figure 20.13]) had been scrambled (Ambrosino 1997). Examination of the pelvis indicated a female occupant and the few artifacts from the disturbed deposit included mosaic jade elements and the backing for a mirror. The presence of a royal female in a lineage house suggests that the occupying Puuc forces used females as a means of cementing relationships between the new rulers and any extant leaders of the previous regime at Yaxuna. This type of behavior is known from other Maya sites and time periods. Consider the case at Naranjo in the late seventh century when a daughter of the Calakmul king was sent to the site to rehabilitate a disgraced and punished dynasty (Scheie and Freidel 1990).
After the Burial 25 desecration, intense fires were burned in both the crypt and the room. The doorway to this room was filled with a fifty-centimeter-high deposit of white marl interspersed with horizontally bedded sherd layers. In front of the room we found a stone stool, painted in red and black, and several smashed but whole ceramic vessels, some in early western Cehpech style. We believe several of these vessels may have originally come from Burial 25. Additional material in front of the building included fragments of manos, metates, projectile points, jade implements, shell, human bone, animal bone, and so forth. Finally, the jambs and lintels were pulled and the entire building was collapsed into itself and to the south, where it covered and preserved the stratigraphic record of termination.
World History
