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HOUSES IN A LANDSCAPE
MEMORY AND EVERYDAY LIFE IN MESOAMERICA
By Julia A. Hendon DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4704-0
Chapter One
Communities of Practice in Honduras in the Seventh Century through the Eleventh
The seventh century through the eleventh are conventionally referred to as the Late Classic and Terminal Classic (or Early Postclassic) periods by archaeologists working in the region (Chase and Chase 2004; Joyce 2004; Rice et al. 2004). When first coined, these terms conveyed assumptions about cultural evolutionary development that have since been discarded by Mesoamerican scholars. For my purposes, the terms serve as convenient referents for the centuries under discussion when Copan, Cuyumapa, and Cerro Palenque attain their greatest size. They do not follow the same growth trajectory, however. Copan reaches its peak population in the eighth century, during the Late Classic, under the rule of a series of kings who see their centralized political control disintegrate between 800 and 850 CE, although people continue living there for several centuries afterward. The Cuyumapa area maintains a more stable population and organization until a much later decline, after 1000 CE. Cerro Palenque is first settled during the seventh century and remains a small community until the middle of the ninth century. Then it grows quickly to become the largest Terminal Classic settlement in the lower Ulua valley.
GEOGRAPHY AND SETTLEMENT
The three societies are located in diverent areas of modern Honduras. Here I summarize the important features of the geography of the Copan, Ulua, and Cuyumapa valleys and their pre-Hispanic history of occupation as well as introduce the sites that provide the archaeological data used in my study (see table 1).
THE COPAN VALLEY
The Copan river has created a series of small alluvial valleys or pockets as it flows through the mountains of western Honduras near the border with Guatemala. Archaeologists have discovered the remains of settlement in Copan dating back to at least 1400 BCE (W. Fash 2001:63; Hall and Viel 2004). The most densely settled of these pockets is also where the main center is located. The residents of this pocket and the adjoining ones were, by the Late Classic period, organized into a single political entity that included people living along the river and in the surrounding foothills. Settlement in the neighboring valleys was closely linked to Copan culturally and economically and may have been politically subordinate (Nakamura, Aoyama, and Uratsuji 1991). Copan's political influence extended as far west as the smaller polity of Quirigua in Guatemala. The early ninth century saw the kingdom fall apart, in part because of local circumstances such as environmental degradation, population growth, and possibly political factionalism among the ruling elite. Economic and political realignments affecting Mesoamerica as a whole also played a role (Fash, Fash, and Davis-Salazar 2004; Viel 1999; Webster, Freter, and Storey 2004). Although dynastic political control did not survive, the valley was not immediately abandoned and not all forms of social difference disappeared.
The relatively narrow width of the valley floor and the way the walls rise quite steeply, especially at its eastern end, create a feeling of enclosure. The contrast between the flat floodplain and the slope of the hills is noticeable. The river is a constant presence as it winds through the valley. The Main Group, the collection of monuments and massive religious, governmental, and residential buildings built for and used mainly by the rulers of the Copan polity, sits on the valley floor. A large open plaza takes up the northern part of the area, where most of the free-standing monuments are located. The plaza is enclosed by buildings and, on the south, bounded by the rise of the Acropolis. The top of the Acropolis is divided into two enclosed courtyards, the East and West Courts. In the area at the foot of the Acropolis is the main ballcourt and the Hieroglyphic Staircase (see W. Fash 2001; Longyear 1952).
The massive and elaborate nature of the architecture throughout the Main Group tempts one to perceive it as something permanent and immutable. Especially so when we think about the limited technological means at its builders' disposal and the correspondingly large investment of human labor and strength its construction required. What we see now, however, is only a moment in what was a long-term, ongoing process of rebuilding individual structures, relocating monuments, and redesigning whole areas of the complex. We see the moment when this process of movement and change came to a halt as political authority broke down in the eighth century CE. The ballcourt, the Hieroglyphic Staircase, the Acropolis, and the buildings on top of it contain within their walls and underneath their floors superseded structures that go back to a period between 100 and 400 CE, based on radiocarbon dates and the kinds of pottery recovered by archaeological excavations (Sharer, Sedat, Traxler, Miller, and Bell 2005). This period is prior to the founding of royal rule in the fifth century CE (Martin and Grube 2000). Such durable histories and long periods of occupation exist in domestic settings as well, especially in the urban area. The implications of duration for the development and perseverance of memory communities are explored in chapter 3.
Spaces like the Main Group are closely connected to the effort on the part of some members of society to centralize and concentrate political authority in the hands of the few. Such authority cannot be separated from the person of the ruler or the royal house, making these spaces a kind of domestic setting writ large. The royal family inhabits the entire complex even though their living quarters occupy only a small portion of the area. The location of early residences lies underneath the Acropolis. By the time of the last ruler (Ruler 16) in the eighth century, the royal family was living behind the Acropolis, in an area much lower in elevation, separated from the large plaza and ballcourt by the bulk of the Acropolis itself (Andrews and Bill 2005; Andrews and Fash 1992; Bill 1997a; Doonan 1996).
The Copan valley floor and sides are dotted with groups of low stone platforms supporting residential structures, many rebuilt more than once. In many cases, Copanecos arranged their houses and other buildings to enclose a rectangular courtyard. Sylvanus Morley, one of the earliest archaeologists to work in the valley, remarked that "every available spot in the valley was intensively occupied [by the Late Classic period]. Wherever one strays from the beaten tracks, one encounters the vestiges of former occupation: fallen buildings, fragments of elaborate sculptural mosaics, pyramids, platforms, terraces, and mounds" (1920:14). Systematic survey of the valley, including all the alluvial pockets, the foothills, and the tributary drainages, has confirmed this impression, with over 4,000 structures mapped (Canuto 2002; W. Fash 1983b; Fash and Long 1983; Freter 1988; Leventhal 1979). While many of the residences consist of a single courtyard and its surrounding buildings, others are aggregates of several such courtyards.
The density of buildings reaches a maximum in an area extending approximately 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) around the Main Group. The remains of about 2,000 buildings have been located and mapped in this area. The largest number of aggregated groupings of courtyards is found here, the tallest supporting platforms, and the most labor-intensive forms of construction, using cut stone blocks, rubble fill, and stucco plaster. Many of these aggregated groups are the result of growth over time. Group 9n-8, one of the largest such compounds, was made up of at least fourteen patios at its largest extent and, as mentioned in the introduction, was built over earlier houses and burials. It is this dense area around the Main Group that is considered by Copan researchers to be occupied by the most elite members of society after the royal family and to represent a more urban settlement (e.g., W. Fash 2001; Sanders 1989; Webster 1999). Significant variation exists within this area in terms of material culture, however, suggesting that social difference was not just a simple division between elites and commoners because not all inner zone residents are alike in terms of wealth or prestige (Gonlin 1985; Hendon 1989, 1991, 1992, 2000b, 2003b). It is not possible either to make a simple urban/rural distinction between large, dense settlement around the Main Group and small, dispersed settlement elsewhere. Large residential compounds with multiple patios may be found in the foothills (W. Fash 1983a; Whittington and Zeleznik 1991). Smaller centers with monumental architecture that developed in some of the eastern pockets and along tributary streams were incorporated into the expanding Copan polity as well (Canuto 2004; Morley 1920; Pahl 1977; Saturno 2000).
The most complete body of information on daily life in the Copan valley comes from horizontally extensive excavations in two different parts of the settlement. One is the eastern part of the urban core, known as the Sepulturas zone. My discussion is based primarily on three residential compounds from this zone. Their excavation in the 1980s provides one of the most complete recoveries of information about the Late Classic occupation. Group 9n-8, as noted, has at least fourteen patios, which have been designated A-M. Patios A and B share a raised artificial platform that puts them at a slightly higher elevation than the adjoining patios. Of these, Patios A-F, H-K, and M have been excavated. Group 9m-22 is a three-patio compound, two of which (Patios A and B) were excavated. Group 9m-24 is a single-patio group (see Diamanti 2000; Gerstle 1988; Gerstle and Webster 1990; Hendon 1987, 1991; Hendon, Agurcia, Fash, and Aguilar P. 1990; Hendon, Fash, and Aguilar P. 1990; Gonlin 1985; Mallory 1981, 1984; Sheehy 1991; Webster, Fash, and Abrams 1986). All three were slated for restoration to expand the tourist park; this made it possible for us to clear off all of the final phase of the buildings and excavate the full depth of the deposits of trash behind them. The restorers needed to dismantle the surviving walls in order to reset them to vertical, giving the excavators a chance to explore the earlier phases of construction and to locate burials and caches. Nancy Gonlin's analysis of the excavation results of eight smaller residential groups in the less densely settled portion of the valley farther away from the Main Group provides a look at daily life among the more rural sector of the population. The foothill sites are all small, no larger than Group 9m-24 (Gonlin 1993, 1994; Webster and Gonlin 1988). They vary in the number of buildings and consequently in how closely they approach the quadrilateral arrangement of structures, but they do share with their larger examples an orientation toward a common patio. These diverse groups are a comparable sample based on similar excavation strategies and methods which exposed the final phase of the buildings, recovering materials inside rooms and in the trash deposits behind the buildings. Excavators also dug trenches for burials.
CERRO PALENQUE AND THE LOWER ULUA VALLEY
The lower Ulua valley (sometimes called the Sula valley) is both broad and long, formed by the Ulua and Chamelecon rivers as they flow north into the Caribbean Sea. One of the major rivers in the country, the Ulua has a large, fertile floodplain with high agricultural productivity. As in the Copan valley, occupation of the lower Ulua valley has a long history, dating to at least 1600 BCE (Joyce and Henderson 2001). The area was heavily occupied during the Late and Terminal Classic periods. Several major centers, including Travesia, La Guacamaya, and Cerro Palenque, developed here but none exercised the kind of centralized political control over the residents of the valley that existed in the Copan valley. In fact, lower Ulua occupation is better understood not as a single, politically unified society with a well-defined social hierarchy, but as a set of more and less bounded settlements held together by multiple coordinate economic, social, and political networks that created heterarchical relations based on shared practices (see Henderson and Joyce 2005).
Many people lived on the relatively flat, fertile (but also often flooded) valley bottom, but the residents of Cerro Palenque chose to live in the foothills at the southern end of the valley. They built first on the highest peak. This sector consists of five architectural groups which include domestic and religious buildings as well as a reservoir. The architecture here exhibits the same sort of features used to argue for elevated social status at Copan and other parts of southeastern Mesoamerica, including an overall massiveness of construction, the use of worked stone and lime plaster, and the presence of architectural sculpture. The relatively small group of people living here (compared to the later occupation) had access to such imported materials as jade and the spectacular marine shell Spondylus (spiny oyster). They used these materials in socially meaningful rituals, including the creation of caches in domestic and ritual contexts (Joyce 1985, 1991).
After 850 CE, settlement moved to the ridge tops of the lower hills, leaving the earlier buildings still visible. Over 500 structures have been mapped at Cerro Palenque, making it the largest settlement in its valley during the Terminal Classic but considerably smaller than Copan at its peak (Joyce 1982, 1985). Even if comparison is limited to the dense area around the Main Group, Cerro Palenque is only about one-fourth the size of Copan.
Three concentrations of Terminal Classic construction have been identified (Joyce 1991). The largest, CR-157, includes domestic spaces with houses, shrines, and kitchens to the east and west of a new concentration of monumental architecture. This Great Plaza was the architectural and spatial focus of the ancient community during its Terminal Classic occupation. Although functionally similar to Copan's Main Group and conventionally monumental in scale, the Great Plaza does not contain carved stone monuments or inscriptions. In the Main Group, buildings subdivide the open area into separate plazas of unequal size and different elevation. The placement of stelae and other sculpture further breaks up the space. At Cerro Palenque, aside from a low platform used for religious offerings, nothing intruded into the open space of the plaza. Two raised walkways that lead from the northern end of the plaza to a tall building further enhance the expansive sense of space. A ballcourt is located at the southern end along with an adjoining group of residential structures.
A second locus of residences, CR-171, is located northeast, and the third, CR-170, to the east of the earlier occupation. Each of these areas is built on top of a ridge that slopes down from the Late Classic hilltop. Each has a single plaza with monumental architecture that is a smaller version of the Great Plaza. Occupation on the same ridge is thus separated by differences in elevation, while the ridges themselves constitute discrete segments of the ancient settlement pattern. Residential groups in CR-157, CR-170, and CR-171 are made up of small, low cobble mounds arranged in formally oriented, rectilinear groups or in less formal, looser groups around small courtyards. The important spatial pattern is that the orientation of the buildings is toward the courtyard.
The ridges create a strongly marked north-south orientation for the Terminal Classic settlement, enhanced by the layout of the Great Plaza. Interaction with people living on the same ridge would have been easy, although movement across ridges must also have taken place given the integration of the site in terms of material culture and the presence of the ballcourt in the Great Plaza. The decoration of jars suitable for carrying liquids such as water or chicha (fermented corn beer), for example, is distinctive of Terminal Classic Cerro Palenque as a whole when compared to other sites in the lower Ulua valley (Joyce 1987a), reinforcing a sense of community identification spanning the three clusters of settlement.
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