San Lorenzo is a small, rural settlement cluster consisting of seventeen residential groups, a chert quarry, and several other cultural features sitting on a ridge of ancient alluvial terraces overlooking the fertile floodplain of the Mopan River (Figures 14.2 and 14.3). The site’s domestic groups are either isolated structures (n=9) or patio groups (n=7), with the exception of SL34, a group of two structures lacking a patio. XAP began work at San Lorenzo in 1992, when Yaeger (1992; also VandenBosch 1992) mapped the site and Sabrina M. Chase (1992, 1993) began excavating SL22. Yaeger (1994, 1995b, 1996, 2000a) expanded the excavation program in order to evaluate a model of community growth related to the domestic developmental cycle (Haviland 1988; Tourtellot 1988a; Yaeger 1995a; Yaeger and LeCount 1995). The resulting research design stipulated testing every domestic group possible, with extensive excavation of five groups and SL13, a special-function complex located Just beyond the edge of the settlement (see Figure 14.3).
The results of these excavations indicate that San Lorenzo was established perhaps as early as the Early Classic Ak’ab phase (a. d. 300-600) and grew
Rapidly in the Samal phase, reaching its maximum size during the Hats’ Chaak phase, when all seventeen domestic groups were occupied. The settlement then shrank markedly, however, as its inhabitants abandoned two-thirds of the settlement’s domestic groups by the Tsak’ phase, the last period of occupation at the site.
There is a striking parallel between the San Lorenzo and Xunantunich trajectories of Samal-phase growth, Hats’ Chaak expansion, and Tsak’ contraction and abandonment, a parallel that suggests that San Lorenzo was linked relatively tightly to Xunantunich. The Chan Noohol data discussed below show a similar pattern. This should not have surprised us; the founding of the Xunantunich center and the ambitious Hats’ Chaak building program there would have required new levels of corvee labor and tribute from the local population. These changes created a dynamic social milieu that provided residents of rural settlements like San Lorenzo with opportunities to negotiate and redefine their places within local communities and the polity by creating and stressing affiliations with other groups outside their settlements, notably the polity’s ruling elite. For their part, the rulers of Xunantunich had to accommodate their strategies to the social and political structures presented by established settlements like San Lorenzo (LeCount et al. 2002; also Schortman, Urban, and Ausec 1997).
Hats' Chaak-Phase Strategies of Affiliation
Most definitions of community posit that community members share understandings created and recreated in daily pursuits and interactions (e. g., Murdock 1949; Redfield 1955; Watanabe 1992), and Yaeger (2000b) has argued that this was true at ancient San Lorenzo. Another central aspect of the community, however, is an explicit, socially constituted identity created by focusing on shared characteristics and highlighting differences between the community members and outsiders (e. g., Anderson 1987; Cohen 1985). Excavation data presented below show that San Lorenzo was a socially and economically heterogeneous settlement. In the face of these inequalities, feasts forged intra-settlement bonds and made a local identity more explicit, while they simultaneously defined and reinforced the social relationships of inequality that characterized the settlement.
One obvious local inequality was the amount of labor invested in domestic architecture. All of the isolated structures that we tested, save one (SL25), and two of the seven patio groups (SL17, SL28) consisted of low house platforms faced almost entirely with cobblestones and topped by perishable, wattle-and-daub buildings. Two other patio groups (SL15, SL27) were similar in size and construction materials, but included at least one platform faced with limestone blocks. The remaining four groups (SL22, SL23, SL24, SL25) were quite distinct, marked by much larger substructure platforms faced with limestone blocks, many of which supported buildings with masonry walls. The construction of these latter houses required a significant amount of labor and probably required the work of specialized masons in some cases, suggesting that these four households could mobilize extra-household labor (see also Abrams 1994). The products of this significant difference, the houses, remained durable testaments to underlying social inequalities that made this labor appropriation possible (e. g., McGuire and Schiffer 1983).
It is notable that the only three households with evidence of feasting were among those that built the most labor-intensive homes. Excavations at most domestic groups at San Lorenzo yielded little faunal material, but we found significant quantities of animal bones only in association with three of the largest patio groups (SL22, SL23, SL24). This might seem to indicate that few San Lorenzo residents consumed meat, but bone chemistry studies show that all people at nearby Barton Ramie ate roughly similar amounts of meat in the Late Classic period (Gerry 1993). If this were true at ancient San Lorenzo, then the restricted distribution of faunal remains plausibly reflects where meat was consumed, and higher frequencies of ceremonial items like incensahos and serving vessels in these groups suggest that ritual feasts provided one context for meat consumption (see also Houston, Stuart, and Taube 1989; LeCount 1996; McAnany 1995). Spatial and ceramic analyses suggest that San Lorenzo feasts in Hats’ Chaak times were inclusive in LeCount’s (1996) terms, except perhaps at SL13 (see below).
Why did only three households host feasts, and why were those same households able to requisition the labor of others to help build their homes? Patricia McAnany (1995: 96-97) has argued that the initial settlers at Maya sites often controlled the best local resources through the “principle of first occupancy.” Given that two of the hosting groups (SL22, SL23) were also among the first to have been established at San Lorenzo, it seems possible that precedence of occupation gave the Hats’ Chaak-phase members of these households privileged claims to land and other resources through their ancestors, whose veneration was perhaps a focus of some Hats’ Chaak rituals and feasts (McAnany 1995; Tozzer 1941: 92). We would argue that through feasting, the San Lorenzo residents came together to celebrate important occasions and share food and gifts, thus cementing their bonds of commonality. But in doing so, they also acknowledged that the economic and political resources needed to host these feasts—whether access to meat or access to the oldest and/or most powerful ancestors—were not evenly distributed throughout the community.
These kinds of local social differences presumably always existed at San Lorenzo and similar settlements, but the rapid growth of Xunantunich and its rulers’ polity-building strategies provided new symbolic and material resources for strategies by which San Lorenzo residents sought to reinforce local inequalities, such as the use of material symbols connected to the polity elite. For example, not everyone in Hats’ Chaak San Lorenzo wore ornaments of exotic materials, like marine shell pendants, and only those families living in the largest houses possessed greenstone beads. Many scholars have argued that ancient Mesoamerican elites gave exotic items as gifts in order to maintain their political positions (Hirth 1992; Rice 1987b). Assuming this was true at Xunantunich, San Lorenzo residents who wore exotic items did so most likely because of the cosmological significance of the raw material and because possession of these goods demonstrated a social connection to the rulers of the polity. Similarly, in designing their homes, a few families—the same ones who wore greenstone beads, lived in the largest houses, and hosted feasts—chose to use basal moldings and high interior benches that mimicked elite architecture of the region, the nearest examples of which were at Xunantunich. By using these features, limestone block masonry, and finished plaster patio surfaces in their homes, these households created domestic settings that were visually more akin to ceremonial plazas and elite residential compounds at Xunantunich than to the wattle-and-daub huts of their neighbors.
Another venue for creating and reinforcing extra-community affiliations was SL13, located just west of San Lorenzo (see Figure 14.3). This complex was built early in the Hats’ Chaak phase, and this timing, the group’s location between distinct settlements, and the amount of labor required to build it suggest that the lords of Xunantunich coordinated its construction. Unique architecture; high frequencies of incensarios, serving vessels, and ornaments; the quantity of faunal remains; and a bone flute all suggest that SL13 was a venue for ritual celebrations (Yaeger 2000a). Although the data do not allow us to discriminate the many ritual activities that presumably took place in SL13, the spatial distinction between an exterior plastered space and an interior patio area suggests that many rituals divided participants into those who could enter the patio and those who could not (e. g., Rapaport 1990), using criteria that probably varied contextually. It is likely that some rituals brought people from several settlements together, and that in some of these, intra-settlement status differences determined access to the inner patio. In such cases, the ritual practices reflected and reproduced vertical social distinctions internal to the settlements, while creating horizontal affiliations among those people included and among those excluded from the inner sanctum, forming identities that crosscut local settlements and potentially competed with local loyalties.
The data from San Lorenzo suggest that the settlement’s Hats’ Chaak residents shared a community identity that was made explicit in practices like ritual feasts. But these feasts and other common events like house construction both required and reproduced inequalities within the community. It seems likely that the hosting families sought to maintain or increase their privileged status through these practices and by representing connections, whether real or not, to the elite of Xunantunich (see also Schortman and Nakamura 1991). For their part, the residents of the simpler houses at San Lorenzo must have had their own reasons for participating in these practices that legitimated local inequalities, whether it was to ensure access to land or chert resources, to improve the community’s connections to the polity elite, or to satisfy familial obligations. These diverse strategies generated new patterns of local social organization that we suggest necessarily involved a tension between local affiliations and extra-settlement affiliations (Yaeger 2000b; also McAnany 1993; Schortman, Urban, and Ausec 1997). The resulting organization, however, apparently could not endure the weakening and eventual dissolution of regional political authority in subsequent times, and indeed may have contributed to this process.
Tsak'-Phase Changes
Only five domestic groups (SL21, SL22, SL23, SL24, SL31) at San Lorenzo show strong evidence of Tsak’-phase occupation, as does SL13. It was primarily the once-powerful families who remained at San Lorenzo, but the social and political context in which they lived was very different from that of the preceding phase, and their social strategies had changed concomitantly. Xunantunich underwent a significant transformation beginning in the early part of the Tsak’ phase. While the polity’s rulers commissioned their most explicit statements of political authority on three carved stelae, large and important sections of their capital were abandoned (LeCount 1999; LeCount et al. 2002; Leventhal and LeCount 1997), and the polity as a whole suffered a marked population decline (Ehret 1995; Neff 1998; Neff et al. 1995).
There were some continuities in practice at San Lorenzo. For example, rituals involving the creation of ancestors by burying deceased relatives continued, and an empty Tsak’-phase burial chamber in SL22 Str. 3 suggests that at least one once-powerful family took one of its ancestors when leaving San Lorenzo. But those Tsak’-phase practices that we can identify in San Lorenzo clearly lack the differentiating quality of the Hats’ Chaak-phase practices from which they evolved. Building practices clearly demonstrate these changing strategies. San Lorenzo residents built no new houses in the Tsak’ phase, restricting their efforts to minor additions and modifications to existing structures. Moreover, they faced these constructions with pieces of limestone whose rough shaping required minimal labor, suggesting that house building had become a family affair that no longer drew on whatever intra-community inequalities remained. Furthermore, these modifications did not mimic elite architecture: no Tsak’ construction employed basal moldings or benches, and remodeling in one building (SL22 Str. 3) actually eliminated an existing interior bench. The families in the larger house groups no longer tried to differentiate themselves through their architecture, perhaps in part because the Xunantunich elite were no longer a source of legitimating symbols or perhaps because the smaller Tsak’-phase community lacked enough residents from whom they wanted to distinguish themselves or whose labor they wanted or had rights to claim. The disappearance of polychrome vessels from the regional ceramic assemblage at this time suggests that this de-emphasis of differentiating displays was widespread (Yaeger and LeCount 1995; also see LeCount 1996, 1999 for a broader discussion).
At the same time that San Lorenzo residents no longer referred to Xunantunich in their buildings, the strategies by which the polity’s rulers maintained their ties to their hinterland changed. Within Tsak’ times, the SL13 complex ceased to function as a ritual complex. The collapse of buildings facing the internal patio and the exterior plastered area early in the Tsak’ phase scattered construction materials and other debris over the two main venues for celebrations that had helped reproduce and strengthen differences within San Lorenzo and had likely fostered affiliations with the polity’s rulers. Despite later use of the complex, this debris was never removed, and portions of these once-important activity areas remained unused. The timing of this shift parallels increasingly exclusionist practices within the Xunantunich core (LeCount 1999; LeCount et al. 2002).
Eventually both San Lorenzo and Xunantunich were abandoned, probably by the early eleventh century. One key to understanding the processes of abandonment lies, in Yaeger’s view, in the changing social and political relationships created and maintained through local practices. It seems plausible that demographic decline was facilitated by a weakening of community identity, caused perhaps in part by Hats’ Chaak-phase practices that created an ever-widening rift between local leaders and the rest of the community’s residents, an identity that was never successfully replaced by a polity-level identity.
World History
