DISCUSSION

It is important to note that XAP and XSS data analyses remain ongoing, and other lines of inquiry relevant to local social and demographic collapse are still in progress, by ourselves and several project colleagues. Among these is critical study of agricultural productivity that will help link the subsistence and larger economies in which local commoners participated (e. g., Neff 1999). Nevertheless, we offer the following provisional thoughts on developments at San Lorenzo and Chan Noohol and on the collapse of local society before the end of the Tsak’ phase.

Both San Lorenzo and Chan Noohol exemplify aspects of larger patterns plausibly widespread in the Xunantunich area, but the detailed information from extensive excavations in these two settlements allows finer discrimination of strategies for integration and survival. The data evince variation between agrarian settlements and among the farmers resident there. We reiterate that “commoners” certainly did not have all social or other characteristics “in common” with one another, and that we gain in understanding the complexity of this class—and their contemporaries—by identifying more fully the varied ways in which all people lived through the events of this period.

In both San Lorenzo and Chan Noohol, domestic architecture and ritual performance helped bind social groups together, even as they often distinguished neighbor from neighbor. Sheer proximity, shared labor in construction, shared expressive styles, and shared ritual reinforced community identity (e. g., Blanton 1994). Differentially elaborate (or simple) material display and differential relations with prestigious outsiders created distinctions among households and, perhaps in some cases, tensions in the social order. The more established, arguably more advantageously situated San Lorenzo also survived longer than did the smaller, and perhaps more marginally grounded settlement we call Chan Noohol. But both invoked similar strategies for social differentiation and integration, if with variable levels of investment.

Although differences in environmental resources were doubtless important in underwriting localized prosperity, growth, and social cohesion, we would not ascribe all inter-settlement contrasts reductively to environmental variability. We believe the data highlight as well the effects of differential social embeddedness and interdependence, established within individual household, lineage, and community histories, by means of the economic and ritual practices cited earlier. The strategies used across these settlements were broadly the same and evidently quite effective for a time. But in both cases, they ultimately failed. What happened? And to what degree and for whom is “failure” the appropriate term?

Lacking clear evidence for environmental degradation, significantly expanded violence, or heightened disease in this period, we offer, briefly, one possible social and economic scenario for the demise of a populace that otherwise, on aforementioned theoretical grounds, should not have disappeared when it did. It prospectively accounts not only for collapse here, but also for the antecedent

Hats’ Chaak-phase boom. And although necessarily remaining somewhat speculative, this scenario provides a broader context for potentially situating events documented at the two commoner settlements examined here.

If, indeed, the enhanced productivity of the area’s terraced fields proves to have been as effective as we posit, we suggest that economic and demographic growth and then collapse in this part of the Belize River Valley may relate to escalating and ultimately catastrophic economic and demographic stress farther west. More specifically, we recall Culbert’s (1988; 92ff) model of potential subsistence catchments of 50- or 100-kilometer radius for Late Classic Tikal—radii embracing the Xunantunich area—and the text-based political models of alliances and war involving Naranjo (e. g., Martin and Grube 2000; Reents-Budet 1994; Scheie and Freidel 1990). We suggest that, as militarism among the larger polities grew during the Late Classic, and as demand increased for foodstuffs to feed their beleaguered populations, the natural attractions of this part of the Belize River Valley area likewise rose. Within what had always been an important corridor and, in some stretches, a breadbasket (e. g., Fedick and Ford 1990; Willey et al. 1965), control of the area’s productive resources was increasingly coveted. Terraces were built to expand productivity for subsistence and surplus demands, toward enhancing both staple and wealth finance (D’Altroy and Earle 1985). In this light, Naranjo’s oft-cited seventh-century alliance with (or patronage of) Buenavista del Cayo may be plausibly interpreted, in part, as a move to bolster the latter’s claim against upstart Xunantunich for control of local produce and populace. The lords at Xunantunich ultimately prevailed in this competition, and both the kind of demographic expansion seen at Chan Noohol and the apparently relatively close involvement of Xunantunich lords in affairs at San Lorenzo may reflect different responses to heightened economic opportunity associated with the rising polity, its capital, and rulers.

But the center, and the commoners attached to it, could not hold. As polities in the Peten heartland collapsed, from the late eighth century on, Xunantunich’s external links declined along with the sources of demand that had underwritten its prosperity. Before the end of the ninth century, within the span of the Tsak’ ceramic phase, both local people and foreign visitors were emphatically excluded from previously open central precincts and the rituals held there (LeCount 1999; LeCount et al. 2002; Leventhal and LeCount 1997). As a consequence of changes for the ruling class, the earlier economic and political opportunities and inducements to farmers to settle locally dissolved as well, and weakened rulers in the center could no longer induce or entice people to stay. There is no evidence of mass death; people probably simply moved on, perhaps to join distant kin or follow more potent leaders elsewhere (compare D. Rice [1986] and Culbert [1988: 75] concerning possibly analogous demographic shifts in Peten). Longer-established, arguably more prosperous families stayed on longer, albeit in reduced circumstances, as at San Lorenzo, while farmers on the newer fringes of old settlements disappeared earliest, and seemingly most abruptly. Collective abandonment of farmsteads and communities was likely gradual, however, despite boom-bust appearances partly induced, as noted earlier, by imprecision inherent in ceramic dating. Defection of farming families to other polities would have exacerbated the decline at Xunantunich by reducing production. Farther downstream. Baking Pot-Barton Ramie survived, as did settlements in the uplands north of the valley, both areas presumably able to draw more effectively on growing political and economic networks linked to the Caribbean coast. Xunantunich may have been on the periphery, but it was still too close to and too closely involved with the Peten core to be buffered from collapse.

Although we certainly cannot consider commoners’ actions in the Xunantunich area as wholly independent of elite behavior, the richly textured evidence of strategies for social differentiation and integration at San Lorenzo and Chan Noohol argues eloquently for varied individual-, household-, and settlement-level decision making. In both the Hats’ Chaak-phase florescence and subsequent Tsak’-phase collapse, commoners’ practices fomented community solidarity, structured social order, and left material legacies of complex and varied lives.