NOTES

1. The tallies presented here come from our analyses of ceramics recovered through the 1989 field season. They do not include materials from our 1993 and 1994 excavations. In our original examination (Dominguez Carrasco 1994a) we assigned Traino

Brown: Traino variety and Encanto Striated: Encanto variety to the Terminal Classic Halibe phase because they both were found in lots containing typical Terminal Classic diagnostics. In contrast, Boucher and Dzul (1998) place both in the Late Classic Ku phase. This difference in interpretation is particularly significant for Encanto Striated: Encanto variety, the predominant utilitarian ceramic used at Calakmul, accounting for 18.7 percent of our total collection and 11.6 percent of Boucher and Dzul’s (1998). We now strongly suspect that both varieties straddle the arbitrary boundary between the Ku and Halibe phases. In fact, neither our own collections nor those of Boucher and Dzul (1998) contain varieties that we have assigned to more than one ceramic phase. Although we recognize that both Encanto Striated: Encanto and Traino Brown: Traino probably were used during both phases, we nonetheless have opted to assign these two ceramic taxa to the Ku phase, enabling easier comparison with Boucher and Dzul (1998).

2.  Marc Zender (personal communication 2000) points out that this title or name, which means ‘He the ninth noble, he of Sa,’ suggests a connection with Naranjo. The toponym Sa is found commonly in inscriptions related to that site.

3.  While writing this chapter, we conducted a demographic analysis of the northern twenty-five kilometers of the survey transect running from Conhuas to Calakmul. Although a substantial portion of this ten-square-kilometer area is bajo, a total of 559 structures were recorded. Applying the same adjustments as Robichaux (1995), this is equivalent to a Late Classic population density of 340 inhabitants per square kilometer for land outside the bajo. Using this result for the entire Calakmul kingdom, a total rural population of three million people is calculated. Caution should be used in extrapolating from such a small sample, but this result, the only population estimate for the Calakmul rural area generated from data gathered in the field, should not be ignored.

4.  We use the general term “activity area” because the location of production debris reflects discard patterns and does not necessarily indicate the actual locus of production. Moreover, we avoid the word “workshop” because we are uncertain of the scale and organization of craft production associated with Structure II.

5.  The prismatic blades are on permanent display in the Baluarte San Miguel in Campeche and were not available for detailed study.

6.  The only data that have been mustered to support a demographic decline after A. D. 800 are a series of highly suspect obsidian hydration dates (e. g., Webster et al.. Chapter 11, this volume). These dates have been rejected by most Copan researchers for a wide variety of reasons. First, they were generated from external rinds. External surfaces of obsidian artifacts at Copan have been proven to be significantly eroded (Braswell 1997c). That is, if the correct values are used for hydration rate constants and environmental variables, external rinds always will yield late dates. Second, the hydration rate constants used to generate these dates were determined by a process demonstrated to cause surface erosion (Stevenson et al. 1989; Tremaine and Frederickson 1988), and in fact yield rates that are off by a factor of two (Braswell et al. 1996b). Third, effective hydration temperatures were estimated using air-temperature data from two distant meteorological stations and integrated using the most inaccurate method known (Jones et al. 1996). A later thermal cell program demonstrates that these estimates are seriously in error, as is the assumption that all archaeological soils in the Copan pocket have a relative humidity of 100 percent (Braswell 1997c). Fourth, the hydration dates were not treated as a statistical data set, and the probability of having outliers in a very large sample was underestimated (Braswell 1992; Cowgill and Kintigh 1997). Fifth, ceramic types recently recovered from Early Postclassic structures were not reported for contexts that yielded Postclassic hydration dates, that is, there is no ceramic evidence supporting the late dates (e. g.. Fash et al.. Chapter 12, this volume; Manahan 1996). Sixth, although some of the more than seventy radiocarbon dates from Copan concur with some of the hydration dates, there are only a small number of radiocarbon dates later than a. d. 900. These come from samples collected from contexts that contain typical Early Postclassic Ejar ceramics (Kan ware, Tohil Plumbate, and Las Vegas Polychrome), and not from Coner-phase contexts (Fash et al.. Chapter 12, this volume; Manahan 1996). Seventh, ceramics collected from recently re-examined sites—which, according to obsidian hydration dates, were first occupied during the Postclassic period—are types assigned not only to the Coner phase, but also to the earlier Acbi and Bijac phases (Canute 1997, 1998).

Given the unreliable nature of these obsidian hydration dates and the now discredited method used to generate them, we concur with Andrews and Bill (in press). Fash et al. (Chapter 12, this volume), and Manahan (1996) in their dismissal of a prolonged demographic collapse at Copan. All credible evidence suggests that the Copan region was abandoned sometime before a. d. 900, and perhaps as early as a. d. 822. A brief reoccupation, conceivably by Lenca peoples native to Honduras, dates to the Early Postclassic Ejar phase (a. d. 950-1050).