Late Postclassic Zooarchaeology of Lake Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico

One Foot Out the Door: Late Postclassic Zooarchaeology of Lake Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico

CALEB KESTLE B.S., University of Illinois at Chicago, 2004 M.S., University of Illinois at Chicago, 2006

THESIS

Submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Chicago, 2021

Chicago, Illinois

Defense Committee:

John D. Monaghan, Chair and Advisor Vincent M. LaMotta Anna C. Roosevelt Donna J. Nash, University of North Carolina, Greensboro Joel Palka, Arizona State University

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Though starting a dissertation with a series of acknowledgments is a standard practice in academia, it seems a fitting introduction for a dissertation that centers the concept of relational ontology. Things exist because of the relationships that undergird their production, and this dissertation is therefore not a product of my labor alone, but also the physical and emotional labor provided by a network of people whom I have been fortunate to find myself amongst.

There is no real way to hierarchize this list, nor should there be. Nonetheless, below I have adopted the standard order that dissertations generally follow, moving from the most professional to the most personal. And yet, even this order proves difficult because the two have become largely indistinguishable over the course of my journey. A fact for which I am grateful.

I must first acknowledge the members of my committee. My chair, Dr. John Monaghan, who took on this position late. I remain grateful for his doing so, as it is only one of the many ways he has provided necessary material support for me throughout the writing of this dissertation. Moreover, as someone long engaged in Mesoamerican cosmology, he has proved an invaluable resource for my research long before taking on this role. I am also grateful for his capacity to wed a dark sense of humor with a friendly and open demeanor. It is a way of inhabiting this world that I strive to emulate as I too age. My former chair and first outside member, Dr. Joel Palka, also provided critical material support for the advancement of this dissertation. His long-standing engagement with the Lacandon community of Metzabok—the ejido adjacent to Lake Mensabak—made this dissertation possible. And his willingness to allow me to access faunal remains from excavations beyond my own provided the data that makes the bulk of this dissertation. Moreover, Joel was amongst my first contacts with anthropology as an undergraduate. His early engagement and support were critical influences on my decision to

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (continued) pursue a degree in anthropology. In a similar vein, Dr. Anna Roosevelt was also a major figure in kindling my early interest in anthropology. Her decision to let me—an undergraduate clad in a

Hawaiian tee-shirt and ripped up pants—assist in her lab was without a doubt the start of my interest in tropical ecology and society. Dr. Donna Nash continues to be a source of both material and great moral support for me. I still think fondly on her attempts to “poach me for Peruvian archaeology” early in my graduate studies. And, I still look forward to any chance of hearing her impart good-sense judgment in her ruthlessly humorous style. Finally, and there is no good reason for him to be last on this list, I must thank Dr. Vince LaMotta. Vince has been my primary guide in learning the ins and outs of faunal analysis. In helping me on this journey he has given so much of his time, more than I can ever repay. And, on a personal note, he is a man with impeccable taste in music. Though I still don’t understand the band Yes, after our conversations I do see its influence on so much of the music I currently love.

Several granting agencies and sources of income have made this research possible.

Funding for this dissertation was largely from a grant secured by Dr. Joel Palka from the

National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Palka graciously allowed me to direct some of the excavations covered by his grant towards my research interests. My own funding largely came from a combination of the University of Illinois at Chicago Provost Deiss Award for Doctoral

Research, and the University of Illinois at Chicago Chancellor’s Award for Doctoral Research.

In addition to these funding sources for research I am also grateful to the organizations that funded my ability to make a living while pursuing my studies, including: The Department of

Anthropology at UIC for numerous appointments as teaching assistant or course instructor; the

Henry Jackson Foundation for several years as a research assistant; and finally the Lansing

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (continued)

Central School District for providing me flexible employment necessary to complete my research. I would also like to thank the wonderful people of LCSD for providing me a much- needed sense of community for a number of difficult years.

The community of the town Metzabok played an immense role in making this dissertation possible. The entire community has given me nothing but love and support in the time I spent there. And this support was felt at its most on the occasions where I was otherwise a lone researcher in a shed with a pile of animal bones. On many occasions people from the community would not only break up the monotony of such days but also provide me with much needed insight and fresh opinions. In no particular order I would like to give thanks to the following individuals: Enrique Valenzuela Martinez, Mincho Valenzuela, Don Rafa, Jose Angel, the Valenzuela sisters Mari, Tomasina, Cecilia, Amalia and Araceli, as well as Freddy,

Armando, Chankin, Amado, Rosa, Fernando, Umberto, Lazaro, and my little Death Metal buddy

Raul. Thank you all; the time I spent with you means so much to me. Perhaps when the COVID thing is over I can finally visit you all again, this time solo para pasar.

Beyond my committee there are several other professors whom I would like to thank for their support over the years. Dr. Susan deFrance and the late Dr. Christopher Gotz both provided me with help in my studies of zooarchaeology as well as generous access to their type collections—real and digital. The late Dr. Lawrence Keely played an early role in encouraging my interest in archaeology, and still provides an endless set of memorable quotes both humorous and pointed. Dr. Cynthia Robin provided my first opportunity to do archeological fieldwork. Dr.

Andrew Wyatt, who has been both a mentor and a friend over the years. I still have the drawing his daughter and I made of dinosaurs in my office at home. Dr. Laura Junker has helped me

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (continued) make numerous contacts that are part of my new research project. And Dr. Molly Doane, who has been generous in tolerating my presence in her classes over the years.

Numerous colleagues have played an important role in the development of this dissertation. I would like to extend a particular thanks to several people in my original cohort.

Including: Jim Mierhoff, Larisa Smith, Alex Markovic, Matt Schauer, and Jen Starbird. I would also like to thank the old drinking circle—including the teatotalers—who spawned many note covered napkins, and the people whom I would regularly time vampire: Erin Rice, Rebecca

Deeb, Johnny, Billy Ridge, Dave Reid, The Original Katerina, Damian Peoples, Dr. Mama

Nicky, Kathy Rizzo, Melanie Kane, Ryan from Sociology, John Hicks, Rory Denison, Rebekah

Ciribassi, Kevin The Anarchist, Ben Linder, Pamala Whyms, Emily Baca, Aditi Aggarwal, Jozi

Chaet, and Shilpa Menon.

Finally, there are colleagues who have transcended the boundary between friend and kin.

Dipti—mother of our plant babies—who is the first to hear almost any of my hairbrained ideas.

One of the few people I have allowed to see me at my most burned out, and one of the fewer people who has shown nothing but love and support when I am in such a state. Also, the one more likely to murder my entire birth-family in Among Us. Thank you. The Katy, we have been ride-or-die a long time now. I am so grateful that you are technically my cunyada by Bolivian standards. There is no one who has had more of an influence on my reading or thinking than you.

Jim, what is there to say other than “buy the ticket, ride the ride.” I’m lucky you have been around since our first trips to Belize. Eron, you are my brother man, you and your lovely husband Kris have always been there. Eric, I’m glad that we understand one another enough that

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (continued) no matter how much time passes between meetings we never skip a beat. I am a come-and-go kind of raccoon, and you are among the few people who truly understand it.

And finally, I need to thank my biological family, who in my mind is no different than the loved ones in the previous paragraph. I need to thank my dad for instilling a love of nature and travel in me. My mother, for teaching me how to be stoic with a laugh. Josh, for being my oldest friend. And his spouse Jay for being way cooler than him. Aaron, for sharing the weird road of academia. His spouse Cynthia for tolerating his journey but also being a needed anchor for the extended family. Their three children, for reminding me dinosaurs are awesome. And

Steve, for forcing me to explain my research and interests in plain English. And lastly, my late grandfather and grandmother Kestle. The older I get the more I become like the two of them. I love you all.

Finally, as this is a dissertation focused on relational ontology and animals, it only seems fit to also thank several animals who have played a part in my thinking or have provided me with emotional support. Captain Ahab, you were my first friend in this world, I miss you man. Kali, you taught me how to approach others on their terms. Ishmael, you taught me how to accept other’s shade. Woody, you are the cutest cat that has ever lived, and your sister Sophie is the only dog I have ever loved. Ashi, Nook, and Pepper, who I have only just begun to know. Fish-

Sticks, I’m sorry I can only feed you during field seasons. Franky, who I only spent a few days with but found to be a friendly old man. Murky and Lou, who I only met once, but meant a great deal to Jim. The unfortunately named Nugs who used to lick my eyeballs in the middle of the night, and his accomplice Dr. Box, who liked to fight him whilst I slept. The nameless four-eyed opossum that slept in the palapa above me in Metzabok and had the same midnight peeing

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (continued) schedule as myself. The Raccoon on 16th street I used to see when I came home late. And finally, the skunk who lived in the dumpster up the street from my home in Ithaca, who allowed me to get reasonably close on numerous occasions without incident. I thank all of you as well.

CN.K

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Chapter 1: Introduction to the Problem ...... 1 1.A: Stated as Directly as Possible ...... 1 1.B: The Problem as Mensabak ...... 2 1.C: The Problem as Political ...... 6 1.D: The Problem as Eco-political ...... 7

Chapter 2: The Animal and Quasi-Person in Maya Ontology ...... 11 2: Abstract ...... 11 2.A: The Why of the Way: “Animism” and “Nature” ...... 12 2.B: Why way?: Interaction, Forest Guardians, and Dreams...... 17 2.C: Hunting and Material Consequences ...... 26

Chapter 3: The Social Relationships and the Constructed Niche ...... 30 3: Abstract ...... 30 3.A: The Niche as Social Relation ...... 30 3.B: Introduction to Niche Construction Theory ...... 33

Chapter 4: Niche Construction and Land Use ...... 39 4: Abstract ...... 39 4.A: Niche Construction and Politics ...... 40 4.B: Zomia and Niche Construction ...... 43 4.C: Niche Construction, Animals, and Political Possibility ...... 46

Chapter 5: Excavation and Data Recording Methodology ...... 50 5: Abstract ...... 50 5.A: Survey Methodology ...... 50 5.B: Excavation Methodology ...... 51 5.C: Results of Archaeological Investigations ...... 54 5.C.1: Survey and Lake ...... 54 5.C.2: Tzibana ...... 56 5.C.3: Ixtabay ...... 59 5.C.4: Kéchem/Los Olores ...... 61 5.C.5: La Punta ...... 64 5.C.6: Rock-Shrines ...... 66 5.D: Cross-Site Comparisons ...... 67

Chapter 6: Analysis and Quantification of Faunal Remains ...... 70 6: Abstract ...... 70 6.A: Analysis...... 70 6.B: Note on the Absence of Shellfish in the Analysis ...... 74 6.C: Major Contributors to the Sample ...... 75 6.C.1: Major Infield Taxon ...... 76

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Table of Contents (continued)

CHAPTER PAGE

6.C.1.a: Mammals ...... 76 5.C.1.b: Fish ...... 77 6.C.1.c: Reptiles ...... 77 6.C.2: Major Outfield Taxon ...... 78 6.C.2.a: Mammals ...... 78 6.C.3: Major Taxon with Ambiguous Skeletal Structure ...... 80 6.C.3.a: Mammals ...... 80 6.C.3.b: Birds ...... 81 6.C.4: Notably Absent or Rare Animals ...... 82 6.D: General Taphonomic Concerns...... 88 6.D.1: Burning ...... 88 6.D.2: Fragmentation ...... 93

Chapter 7: Results by Site ...... 95 7: Abstract ...... 95 7.A: All Fauna Combined ...... 99 7.B: Los Olores/Kéchem ...... 100 7.C: La Punta ...... 103 7.D: Tzibana ...... 106 7.E: Ixtabay ...... 108 7.F: Overall Trends ...... 111

Chapter 8: Niche Fidelity Analysis ...... 116 8: Abstract ...... 116 8.A: Fidelity Analysis ...... 116 8.B: Fidelity Analysis Methodology ...... 120 8.C: Concerns and Biases Inherent in the Method ...... 122 8.D: Results of Fidelity Analysis ...... 123 8.E: Derived Infield/Outfield Analysis ...... 127 8.F: Results of Further Derived Analysis ...... 130

Chapter 9: Mammal Fusion ...... 132 9: Abstract ...... 132 9.A: Methods...... 132 9.B: Results ...... 136 9.C: Discussion ...... 142

Chapter 10: Conclusions ...... 144 10.A: Restating the Problem ...... 144 10.B: Data in the Context of the Framework ...... 146 10.C: The Quasi-person: Modest Theoretical Intervention ...... 147 10.D: Post-scripts on Animism: Lessons for Now...... 157

Table of Contents (continued)

CHAPTER PAGE

CITED LITERATURE ...... 159

APPENDIX ...... 176 APPENDIX A: Note on the Complexity of Infield and Outfield Agriculture ...... 176 APPENDIX B: Faunal Coding Guide Explanation ...... 179 APPENDIX C: Fragmentation ...... 200 APPENDIX D: Fidelity Analysis Metadata ...... 202 APPENDIX E: Additional Statistics ...... 212 APPENDIX F: Photographic Type Collection of Unusual or Modified Bone ...... 214

VITA ...... 237

LIST OF TABLES

TABLE PAGE

TABLE I: FOUR DIMENSIONS OF NICHE CONSTRUCTION ...... 33

TABLE II: CALIBRATED AMS DATES ...... 55

TABLE III: TAXONOMIC REPRESENTATION ALL MENSABAK, 1 OF 3 ...... 84

TABLE IV: TAXONOMIC REPRESENTATION ALL MENSABAK, 2 OF 3 ...... 85

TABLE V: TAXONOMIC REPRESENTATION ALL MENSABAK, 3 OF 3 ...... 87

TABLE VI: BURNED BONE ACCOUNTED FOR BY SITE...... 89

TABLE VII: BURNED BONE ENTIRE ASSEMBLAGE ...... 91

TABLE VIII: FRAGMENTATION RATES ENTIRE ASSEMBLAGE ...... 92

TABLE IX: FRAGMENTATION RATES BY SITE ...... 94

TABLE X: FULL COUNTS ALL SPECIES ALL MENSABAK, 1 OF 3 ...... 96

TABLE XI: FULL COUNTS ALL SPECIES ALL MENSABAK, 2 OF 3 ...... 97

TABLE XII: ALL COUNTS ALL SPECIES ALL MENSABAK, 3 OF 3...... 98

TABLE XIII: ALL COUNTS ALL SPECIES LOS OLORES, 1 OF 2 ...... 101

TABLE XIV: ALL COUNTS ALL SPECIES LOS OLORES, 2 OF 2 ...... 102

TABLE XV: ALL COUNTS ALL SPECIES LA PUNTA, 1 OF 2 ...... 104

TABLE XVI: ALL COUNTS ALL SPECIES LA PUNTA, 2 OF 2...... 105

TABLE XVII: ALL COUNTS ALL SPECIES TZIBANA, 1 OF 1 ...... 107

TABLE XVIII: ALL COUNTS ALL SPECIES IXTABAY, 1 OF 2 ...... 109

LIST OF TABLES (continued)

TABLE PAGE

TABLE XIX: ALL COUNTS ALL SPECIES IXTABAY, 2 OF 2 ...... 110

TABLE XX: NICHE FIDELITY ANALYSIS ABBREVIATIONS...... 119

TABLE XXI: EPIPHYSIS FROM SELECT SPECIES ...... 135

TABLE XXII: FRAGMENTATION ENTIRE ASSEMBLAGE ...... 201

TABLE XXIII: FRAGMENTATION BY SITE ...... 201

TABLE XXIV: ORIGINAL NFI SOURCE DATA, 1 OF 5 ...... 203

TABLE XXV: ORIGINAL NFI SOURCE DATA, 2 OF 5 ...... 204

TABLE XXVI: ORIGINAL NFI SOURCE DATA, 3 OF 5 ...... 205

TABLE XXVII ORIGINAL NFI SOURCE DATA, 4 OF 5...... 206

TABLE XXVIII: ORIGINAL NFI SOURCE DATA, 5 OF 5 ...... 207

TABLE XXIX: NFI CHI-SQUARE DATA ...... 210

TABLE XXX: NFI AS RATIO CHI-SQUARE DATA ...... 210

TABLE XXXI: NIF CHI-SQUARE, NO OCN ...... 211

TABLE XXXII: P-VALUES OF CHI-SQUARE COMPARISONS EACH SPECIES BY SITE ...... 213

TABLE XXXIII: INTRA-SITE VARIATION BETWEEN SPECIES ...... 213

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LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE PAGE

Figure 1: Location of Ejido Metzabok in Mexico, and location of sites around Lake Mensabak .. 5

Figure 2: Map of Tzibana modified from Good 2013 ...... 58

Figure 3: Map of Ixtabay, modified from Núñez Ocampo and Good 2013 ...... 60

Figure 4: Map of Los Olores, modified from Kestle 2013 ...... 63

Figure 5: Map of La Punta, modified from Palka 2013 ...... 65

Figure 6: Modeled Feilid Ulna from the Sak Tat burial ...... 67

Figure 7: Logarithmic relationship between sample size and diversity, all sites included. La Punta is the fourth data point in this chart...... 114

Figure 8: Logarithmic relationship between sample size and diversity, without La Punta ...... 115

Figure 9: Results of Fidelity Analysis ...... 126

Figure 10: Fidelity Analysis without RIV ...... 126

Figure 11: Results of Infield vs Outfield Model ...... 131

Figure 12: Cuniculus paca, Paca Results ...... 139

Figure 13: Dasyprocta punctata Central American Agouti Results ...... 139

Figure 14: Dasypus novemcinctus, Nine-Banded Armadillo Results ...... 140

Figure 15: Tyassudae, Both Collared Peccary and White-Lipped Peccary Results ...... 141

Figure 16: Odocoileus virginianus, White-Tailed Deer Results ...... 141

Figure 17: Cichlidae LO.2.A.5.3 ...... 214

Figure 18: Non-Archaeological example of Pseudothelphusidae...... 215

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LIST OF FIGURES (continued)

FIGURE PAGE

Figure 19: Cairina moschata, IX.2.A.1.3 Coracoid, Right, Cut ...... 217

Figure 20: Meleagris ocellate LP.1.B.1.2 Tibiotarsus, Right, Cut...... 217

Figure 21: Ortalis vetula LP.2.A.1.3 Ulna Left (top), Tibiotarsus Right (Bottom left), Tibiotarsus Left (bottom right) ...... 218

Figure 22: Meleagris gallopavo LP.1.C.1.4 Tarsometatarsus, Left ...... 218

Figure 23: Meleagris ocellata LP.1.B.1.2 Ulna, left, Drilled ...... 219

Figure 24: Anhinga anhinga LP.1.D.1.4 Ulna, Right, Drilled ...... 219

Figure 25: Cairina moschata IX.2.A.1.4 Tibiotarsus, Left ...... 220

Figure 27: Mazama americana IX.2.A.1.2 Naviculo Cuboid, Right, Drilled ...... 221

Figure 26: Mazama americana (Right) compared to Odocoileus virginianus (Left two) LP.2.B.1.3 Comparing Proximal Phalanges...... 222

Figure 27: Mazama americana IX.2.A.1.2 Naviculo Cuboid, Right, Drilled ...... 222

Figure 28: Mazama americana IX.2.A.1.3 Axis V2, Cut on ventral surface...... 223

Figure 29: Odocoileus virginianus IX..2.A.1.3 Medipodial sawed and Drilled ...... 223

Figure 30: Pecari tajacu Archaeological (left), non-archaeological (right) IX.2.A.1.3 Cranium...... 224

Figure 31: Pecari tajacu IX.2.B.1.4 Maxilla ...... 224

Figure 32: Puma concolor LP.1.B.1.2 Medial Phalange 3, Right...... 225

Figure 33: Nasua narica LO.1.C.1.2 Canine, Drilled ...... 225

Figure 34: Puma concolor Tzibana Rock-Shrine, Ulna, Left, Drilled and Polished...... 226

Figure 35: Puma concolor IX.2.B.1.5 Humorus, Left (left), Metacarpal 3, Right (right)...... 226

Figure 36: Dasypus novemcinctus LP.1.B.1.2 Ulna, Left, Cut...... 227

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LIST OF FIGURES (continued)

FIGURE PAGE

Figure 37: Dasypus novemcinctus IX.2.A.1.2 unfused...... 227

Figure 38: Philander opossum LO.2.A.5.5 Mandible, Left...... 228

Figure 39: Marmosa alstoni LO.2.A.5.3 Maxilla, Right...... 228

Figure 40: Tapirus bairdii LO.2.A.5.4 Metatarsals, Unknown (left), Metatarsal 2, Right (Right) ...... 229

Figure 41: Tapirus bairdii IX.2.B.1.3 Ulna, Left, Cut ...... 229

Figure 42: Cuniculus paca (Left) Vs Dasyprocta punctata (Right) LP.2.B.1.3 Calcaneus size comparison...... 230

Figure 43: Cuniculus paca (Left) Vs Dasyprocta punctata (Right) IX.2.A.1.2 Humorus size comparison...... 230

Figure 44: Primate LO.2.A.5.2 Tibia, Right ...... 231

Figure 45: Crocodylus spp. TZ.1.G.1.1 Tooth ...... 233

Figure 46: Crocodylus spp. LP.2.B.1.5 Tooth (Left) Long Bones (right 3) ...... 233

Figure 47: Crocodylus spp. LO.2.A.5.3 Lumbar Vertebrate (top) Mandible, Left (bottom). .... 234

Figure 48: Boa constrictor (left) LO.2.A.5.2, Colubridae (right) IX.2.A.1.1 ...... 234

Figure 49: Kinosternon spp. LP.2.B.1.5 Hippoplastron, left, perpetrated ...... 235

Figure 50: Trachemyss spp LP.1.B.1.1 Carapace ...... 235

Figure 51: Trachemyss spp LP.1.A.1.3 Peripheral, Drilled ...... 236

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AGR Agricultural (in Niche Fidelity Analysis)

IN Infield Fidelity

MF Mature Forest (in Niche Fidelity Analysis)

MNI Minimum Number of Individuals

NCT Niche Construction Theory

NFI Niche Fidelity Index

NISP Number of Individual Specimens Present

NPC Niche Proportion Contribution

NSP Number of Specimens Present

OCN Ocean (in Niche Fidelity Analysis)

OUT Outfield Fidelity

RES Residential (in Niche Fidelity Analysis)

RIV Rivers, Lakes, Swamps (in Niche Fidelity Analysis)

SEC Secondary Growth (in Niche Fidelity Analysis)

WET Seasonally Inundated Wetlands (in Niche Fidelity Analysis)

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SUMMARY

This dissertation aims to demonstrate that subsistence, animals, and human social organization through mutual correspondence construct niches that are ecological and political.

The following pages examine how animals are embedded in Late Postclassic Maya cosmology and subsistence so that Maya people maintained maximum political and ecological flexibility.

Here I investigate the Late Postclassic Maya people during the 15th and 16th centuries living around the Lake Mensabak system, Chiapas, Mexico. The archaeological inhabitants of Lake

Mensabak are generally believed to be the ancestors of the modern Lacandon Maya group currently living around the lake. Until about a generation ago, the modern Lacandon practiced semi-mobile subsistence that made them resistant to external attempts at political integration. In this regard, the Lacandon demonstrate that the Late Postclassic political/ecological assemblage's flexibility contained a possible mode of resistance.

This dissertation frames flexibility and political integration by uniting Niche Construction

Theory—a theory commonly used in political ecology—with an analysis of Maya cosmology and Maya relational-ontology. Some anthropologists interested in cultural ecology have turned to

Niche Construction Theory because it recenters the role of mutualist behaviors in ecology— moving away from deterministic notions of separable species or environments. This theory has led to a reexamination of early migrations and agriculture as behaviors humans, plants, and animals essentially work together to produce. More interestingly, authors like James Scott have taken up this approach in understanding institutions like "the state" as also co-produced through reinforcing niche constructing behaviors of assemblages of plants, animals, and human political organization. This research demonstrates that centralized political power is dependent on the reproduction of ecological niches in which species are "legible"—prone to visibility, fixed in space, and measurability. xvii

SUMMARY (continued)

These inquiries also demonstrate that resistance to political integration is also set into its niche constructing relationships. Would-be avoiders of centralized authority prefer niches that are more mobile, less visible, and easier to hide. Postclassic Maya agriculture, however, is a kind of hybrid system. Traditional Maya agriculture is characterized by a combination of infields— which are generally more legible—and outfields—mobile slash and burn plots. In cases like

Lacandon resistance to the colonial state, the outfields become the primary subsistence mode, and villages become highly mobile, loosely affiliated family compounds. In this regard, the Late

Postclassic Mensabak Maya's flexibility is also a political strategy, and therefore must be understood as both ideological and material.

This dissertation will flesh out the Niche Construction Theory framework by further examining animals' role in Maya cosmology and how Maya cosmology was put into ideological practice. Maya cosmology revolves around a relational-ontology, in which personhood is not the sole privilege of biological humans. Instead, continuous interaction within a community of people and non-people produces personhood. Categories like "animal" were flexible in their relations to social relations of power and politics. Therefore, in Maya cosmology, differential treatment of species and differential treatment of species between sites is a material manifestation of ideological practices favoring flexibility.

This dissertation uses the zooarchaeological analysis of four contemporaneous habitation sites to examine the relationship between Late Postclassic Maya niche construction and relational-ontology. Faunal remains provide lists and proportions of species in an assemblage and can be used to glean information about environmental use and local treatment of animals.

This dissertation will demonstrate that some species are ubiquitous between all four sites, while other species had unique site-specific representation. Next, this dissertation will use Niche xviii

SUMMARY (continued)

Fidelity Analysis to reconstruct the ecological niches each site used. This data will demonstrate that, though there are differences between sites in species representation, all sites pursued a similar Niche Construction strategy that maximized flexibility. Finally, animal treatment here refers to how animals passed through a cultural system both before and after death, including specialized burial treatment, disproportionate representation by context, or even the preferred age of an animal at the time of slaughter. These treatments have their roots in both the technical system of animal exploitation and the ideological system that undergirds how people related to animals. Together all three kinds of zooarchaeological analyses will demonstrate that people at

Mensabak widely preferred flexible and diverse sets of ecological niches. But, each site achieved this diversity through varied site-specific practices.

Together, these two observations relate to the dissertation's modest theoretical intervention into Niche Construction Theory. Cultural-ecologically minded application of Niche

Construction Theory has generally focused on species rather than relationships, but the innovation of Niche Construction Theory is its capacity to shift focus onto the latter. Mensabak is interesting because it demonstrates the importance of relationships over species. Maya relational-ontology means that some sites had differences in how they related to specific species.

Despite these differences, all sites generally favored the same flexible relationships and diverse niche preferences. In the context of Niche Construction Theory—most of all the "the-state-as- niche" approach—this observation demonstrates that it is not the particular plants or animals that are important to a political project, but the modes of relating between the plants, animals, and humans. Niche Construction Theory's intervention into cultural ecology should be the refocusing from species to relationships, and the Mensabak assemblage demonstrates the need to do so.

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Chapter 1: Introduction to the Problem

1.A: Stated as Directly as Possible

The purpose of this dissertation is to answer a deceptively simple question: at Lake

Mensabak during the Late Postclassic, what kinds of intrasite variabilities existed in Maya use of forest animals, what are the social/political implications of these uses, and how might these variabilities have allowed people to buffer themselves against conflict and uncertainty? In this dissertation I will argue that, though there was variability in preferred species between the sites at Mensabak, Maya peoples generally favored diversified subsistence strategies that could easily be mobilized in times of political resistance. Furthermore, due to the region's unstable political history—both pre- and post-Spanish conquest—this strategy provided people with flexibility in how they related to consolidated power, both external and internal. From these observations, I will argue that Maya subsistence was flexible because both highly mobile and/or sedentary practices could sustain large populations, meaning they could reorganize their subsistence to favor one or the other depending on the prevailing political situation. I will also argue that cosmological features of Maya experienced life were part of a set of niche constructing behaviors that continually recreated the conditions for this flexibility. Flexibility was there not only as a political strategy, but a self-reinforcing lived experience of the natural world.

To explain the armature of this argument, I will return to the original question. The means of answering the first part of this compound question is relatively simple; it is a matter of using the residues of human subsistence, the remains of animals in the case of this dissertation, to estimate which forest environs were necessary to create the zooarchaeological assemblages of

Mensabak’s primary sites. The second question involves delving into the variations between the sites of Mensabak to demonstrate that each site had its own site-specific pattern of animals.

Furthermore, these different patterns are the manifestation of locally variable social relationships between humans and animals. Clearly, this second question is more complicated than the first, because to talk about the realm of the social/political means to talk about relationships. This is because what we refer to as political institutions are phenomena that emerge from not just assemblages of things, but also particular configurations of relationships between things— humans, animals, technologies, etc. To do so without the use of reified totalities means thinking of relationships as actors “in their own right” and, therefore, as parts of a larger ecology. I say this last word, ecology, in both a metaphorical sense as well as a real sense, as I will explain in the following chapters. As I hope to demonstrate in this dissertation, ecological and political relationships are hopelessly imbricated in one another, to such an extent that any study of one is necessarily the study of the other. The separation between the two was part of a larger

Enlightenment era project of cutting the Christian “Man” from an exploitable nature. In this regard, the separation was part of a political project that needs challenging not only because it leads to bad politics, but because it also leads to inaccurate science. But that argument is the subject of later chapters. For now, the question I wish to leave the reader with is simple: are political relationships part of an ecology? Not determined by or determinate of, but a real relating and sustained piece of it. Are political arrangements niche constructors? And, in a similar vein, are cosmological constructions such as the Maya concept of way also possible niche constructors when deployed as part of an ideological praxis?

1.B: The Problem at Mensabak

Mensabak is a system of several lakes, ponds, and aguadas located in the Selva

Lacandona Parque Nacional in Chiapas, Mexico (Figure 1). This lake system is host to the modern ejido, Mensabak, which is home to a few hundred Lacandon Maya. Palka initiated the

Mensabak Archaeological Project with Fabiola Sánchez to investigate Maya culture change and ritual landscapes dating to around the time of the Spanish conquest (Palka, 2014; 2020; Palka and Sánchez, 2013). Around the Lake system, there are four excavated habitation sites, three excavated rock-shrines, and a host of landscape features considered sacred to the Lacandon (see

Chapter 5). The population at Mensabak in the Late Postclassic was high relative to today. Maya constructed many habitation sites around the lake, including La Punta, which has at least 50 houses, and Los Olores, with about 20. Therefore, a few thousand Maya people lived here and likely created milpas near and away from the lake. The lakes in the region likewise contained

Maya populations, but the areas in between these settlements were likely heavily forested.

Hence, Maya could have chosen to mix their subsistence between gardens, milpa infields, and forest outfield areas.

Though the sites on Lake Mensabak experienced growths and declines throughout the

Postclassic period, the latest evidence of occupation comes from a few possible early seventeenth century radiocarbon dates. These dates may not be enough to demonstrate conclusive seventeenth century occupation, but they do suggest possible sporadic or reduced occupation by this period. However, there is clear evidence of ritual reuse of the rock-shrines in this later period. During this time, a series of Spanish military excursions (entradas) conquered the indigenous Chol-Lacandon kingdom on nearby Lake Miramar (De Vos, 1988; Jones, 1998; Rice and Rice, 2005; Thompson, 1977). After this conquest, a series of reducciones (forced resettlements) moved much of the lowland Chiapas Maya population to the highlands to live in mission towns (De Vos, 1988; Farriss, 1984; Jones, 1998; Wasserstorm, 1983). This movement made the lowland forests of Chiapas into something of a shatter zone, an internal frontier of low to nil state control, which refugees often fled to (Scott, 2009). And there is compelling historical

4 evidence that the neighboring Petén forest and the Selva Lacandona both served as such regions through to the early twentieth century (Farriss, 1984; Palka, 1998; 2005).

Though the region surrounding the Lake Mensabak system experienced violent upheavals, what happened at Lake Mensabak is less clear. However, it certainly is clear that violence or the threat of violence was a consideration in the settlement patterns of people living on the lake at this time (Hernandez, 2017). Ceramic seriation at Mensabak has difficulty distinguishing between the terminal Postclassic (fifteenth century) and the Protohistoric/Early

Historic period (sixteenth – seventeenth century). The carbon dating of the sites is also ambiguous but seems to show most sites' latest dates of occupation were in the fifteenth century.

There is some reduced occupation beyond the fifteenth century; some sites have potential sixteenth century dates, and rock-shrine burials around the lake continued to be used from as late as the seventeenth century up until the mid-twentieth century. This occupation history is still only partly understood, but what is essential for this dissertation is that the end of occupation on the lake appears to have varied between settlements. This piecemeal continued use suggests that the abandonment of Mensabak was not the corybantic holocaust experienced by the peoples of

Miramar, but rather a long, slow, dying ember, and one that likely started its decline before the

Spanish Entradas. In this context, we must return to a permutation of the previous rhetorical questions to ask: if the people of Mensabak were experiencing political instability, then did they all have access to sufficiently flexible subsistence strategies that were best suited for preservation of their lives and autonomy?

Figure 1: Location of Ejido Metzabok in Mexico, and location of sites around Lake Mensabak

1.C: The Problem as Political

The previous question is part of another: How does a village/settlement system fall apart?

Is it as simple as a population decline or savage attack from external forces? Or, is it by choice, one by one, as people decide that the living arrangements available to them have become intolerable, or as new ways of life become open to them? Though these rhetorical questions are ones implicitly, or in some cases explicitly, sought by any student of history or archaeology working in periods of “collapse,” so often what we miss in these ponderings are the equally vital questions of: how did people think? And, how did they relate to one another? At first glance, these latter questions seem well outside the purview of archaeology, or at least the ironically named New Archaeology. As the late Lawrence Keeley once quipped: “I have never seen a kinship pattern come out of the ground.” Nevertheless the material residues of collective decisions—like kinship—can be recovered, and if we want to understand collapse not solely as an external force but also as an internal set of relations, then we must look for not only the residues of human activities but also the residues of the relationships that structure (forgive the charged word) those same activities.

The problem is, therefore, not one of “collapse” (a problematic term in the first place), but rather one of power relations and lines-of-flight. Borrowing the term lines-of-flight from

Deluze and Guattari (1980), I mean the prefigured options available to people to make choices based on previous decisions made by others in their social and natural environment. Moreover, the term is intended to imply that these choices are reinforcing. In some cases, the more people remake a decision, the more available the same choice becomes to others. Just as a small trickle can prefigure a stream or river—or not as the case may be—how people think about their relationships with one another and their landscape open avenues for political actions and

7 reinforce said actions. James Scott (1985) has noted that small acts of resistance tend to have cascading effects and are often the things that eventually lead to dissolutions of seemingly monolithic states. But more importantly, these small decisions operate also in the avenues open to people by particular environments (Scott, 1985; 2009; 2018). This is not to say that an environment determines political arrangements, but instead, political arrangements are imbricated in ecology. Political arrangements are niche construction behaviors that recreate particular environments and select specific species in a way that can be self-reinforcing.

As Ingold noted amongst the arctic Sami people, whether reindeer are treated as a part of the community or as a capitalist resource dramatically changes their herd composition, and this, in turn, changes how they—the animals—use the plant resources around them (Ingold, 1980;

2002). In a similar vein, James Scott has recently put forth an argument that the state—as a relationship between people—also requires a set of relationships between particular plants and animals (Scott, 2018). Following these observations, I propose that political relations possess a

“Real Virtuality” (see DeLanda, 2006); they are a “Body Without Organs,” a thing that exists in the world, responds to the world, and is recreated in the world but has no proper physicality.

From this perspective, the question cited above gets reshaped one more time. How is de- nucleation, as a political option, embedded into the ecology of Mensabak?

1.D: The Problem as Eco-political

This last question brings us to ask, what does one mean by Ecology? Rather than viewing it in the narrow confines of “how an organism interacts with the environment,” I wish to engage with a somewhat emergent paradigm in Ecology as a discipline: Niche Construction Theory.

Niche Construction is defined as:

“The process whereby organisms, through their metabolism, their activities and their choices, modify their own and/or each other's niches.”

-Odling-Smee et al. 2003 pg.419, emphasis added.

From this perspective, an organism is neither subject nor object. An organism is not merely a thing that acts on an environment or a thing acted on by it, but rather a dense node of interaction within a set of possible affordances. Niche Construction Theory’s focus on interactions—that is to say behaviors—is an important one because it allows us to reorient human behaviors— including political arrangements—as part of an environment (rather than simply a reaction to it).

The focus on behaviors as ecological agents in their own right is key to this inquiry because it allows us to move past the positioning of “human” as agent or subject in explaining the integration social relations in an ecological system. This is an important step because in many instances our conceptions of how humans interact with nature contain the baggage of our own ideology. A prominent example of this is the universal homo economicus man (critiqued by

Ingold, 1980; 1999), which assumes that “man”—as subject or object—is always acting to maximize return, like a good little capitalist for which the world is a mere externality.

Niche Construction Theory (NCT) offers a way out. Rather than focusing directly on humans as a niche constructor, we can focus on particular behaviors. These can be behaviors as small as how the Maya of Mensabak oriented their hunting patterns to avoid political integration, to ones as large as how petrol-fueled industrial capitalism has raised the earth’s atmospheric carbon. Humankind, whatever their nature or scale, is no longer the focus of ecological studies under NCT; rather than their behaviors themselves become selected for or against as they continue to reproduce their necessary conditions or continue to find their necessary conditions through mobility. From this perspective, political arrangements, economic activities, and social

9 institutions become Eco-political; activities integrated into an ecology that can only sustain them under determinate conditions. With this last observation in mind, this dissertation’s central question undergoes one final metamorphosis. I ask: what ecological relationships did Maya people at Mensabak foster? And, did a pre-contact trajectory of disaggregation and uncertainty lead to more flexible eco-political subsistence choices conducive to political resistance? And were these strategies homogeneous across Mensabak’s sites?

To examine these questions, this dissertation will present two kinds of analysis, both of which are complemented by a different body of theory. First, I will make the case that each of the four sites at Lake Mensabak were deploying Maya cosmology in unique and site-specific ways. Following my arguments about Maya relational-ontology (Chapter 2), I will use basic zooarchaeological quantification methods (Chapters 6, Chapter 7) and an examination of epiphyseal fusion (Chapter 9) to argue that each site related to animals in a unique and site- specific way. Secondly, I will argue that despite the site-specific ways of relating to animals all sites at Mensabak pursued a similar strategy of maximizing ecological flexibility (Chapter 3,

Chapter 4). To make this point I will use Niche Fidelity Analysis (Chapter 8) to examine the importance of various ecological niches around Lake Mensabak, and demonstrate a general similarity between all sites with regards to Niche diversity. Combining these two methods, I will argue the diversity between sites demonstrates a fluidity in cosmological deployments around

Mensabak that nonetheless had a similar eco-political praxis. Furthermore, this fluidity provided a framework for local resistance to centralized authority through flight, disaggregation, and avoidance. Finally, I will use these findings from Mensabak to argue two broader points. First, that understanding the eco-social nature of Maya resistance—not only to the Spanish but also to other indigenous groups—is important for understanding how conceptions of nature are

10 deployed as a means of resisting authoritarian projects. And secondly, the example of flexible

Maya subsistence—in which relationships between animals and humans is more important than the assemblage itself—provides a framework for a modest intervention in the discourse of New

Materialisms, which tends to see social formations as emergent from assemblages of things rather than the relationships between things in an assemblage.

Chapter 2: The Animal and Quasi-Person in Maya Ontology

2: Abstract

In this chapter, I will introduce Maya philosophy and cosmology with an eye towards their conceptions of partible dividuality, nature, and personhood. The discussion of these topics is intended to set up the next chapter by arguing that these philosophical commitments have material consequences that interface the ecological and political. The entry point for this discussion will be the concept way, a co-essence (often an animal) with which a person shares a

“soul” and a person experiences through dreams, as well as related concepts that illustrate the diffuse concept of personage in Maya ontology. From this starting point, I will introduce other

Maya cosmological concepts both ancient and historic—such as onen and pixan—to demonstrate that Maya peoples have a long history of practicing relational ontology—a theory of being in which personhood arises through interaction rather than essential essences. This chapter is intended to set the stage for the next chapter on the politics of ecological relations, by focusing on how beings are defined by relationships rather than parts.

This chapter’s focus on relationships is important not only because it is the ontological underpinnings of Maya cosmology, but also because Niche Construction—the subject of chapter

3—frames behaviors and relationships—rather than organisms—as embedded in feedbacks with the ecological relationships that they sustain or deplete. Using this framing, the subsequent chapters will argue that Infield and Outfield agriculture imply both different relationships with plants and animals—ones coached in Maya cosmology—as well as different relations to centralized authority—such as flight, disaggregation, and resistance. And, that the residues of relationships are what archaeologists encounter when they attempt to reconstruct the use of archeofaunas.

2.A: The Why of the Way: “Animism” and “Nature”

“Green and yellow ghost, who art wandering, as if lost, over mountains and plains, I seek thee, I desire thee; return to him whom thou hast abandoned. Thou, the nine times beaten, the nine times smitten, see that thou fail me not. Come hither, mother mine, whose robe is of precious gems; one water, two waters; one rabbit, two rabbits; one deer, two deer; one alligator, two alligators.” - From “Invocation for the Restitution of the Tonal.” Transcribed by Brinton 1894.

“Uay: In Mayan languages, the term uay commonly refers to sorcerers and form changers … … in certain Mayan languages the term signifies a soul like spirit companion similar to the Mexican tonal.” - Miller and Tube 1993 :176.

“Way: ‘ver visiones como entre suenos; transfigurar por encantamiento; hechizar; (ah) way ‘brujo, nigromántico, encantador’ Way: ‘to see visions in dreams, to transform via enchantment, to hex’; (ah)way ‘Witch, Necromancer, Enchanter’” - Barrera Vásques et al. 1980:916

“The Lacandon believe that all human beings have onen, including foreigners. If we do not know our onen affiliation, this is merely a sign we have forgotten our traditions.” - McGee 1990:31

It is a fascinating linguistic coincidence that the ancient Maya word way, which signifies an intimate relationship of co-constitution between humans, animals, and other natural beings, is a false cognate of—pronounced exactly like—English's most infantile of rhetorical questions: the incessant why? The way is a part of a person that could be an animal, a god, or other natural phenomenon, but a part with its own volition that a person must listen to and understand. Indeed, the very word way has been demonstrated to exhibit the linguistic principle of intimate possession, meaning that one’s way is like a body part rather than a material possession (Zender,

2004). But the way is not only a body part, it is also an embedded part of a person and experienced nightly as dreams (Monaghan, 1998; Pellizzi, 1996), and continually cycled through life and death (Taube, 2004). In this way, the way concept is just one cosmological example of an ontology of embodied relatedness (Glaskin, 2012). Way is not the only concept amongst

13 modern Maya peoples that demonstrates the relational nature of life. Amongst the Tzeltal, winkilel “presence-body” is the uniquely human body that is not visible but arises from intersubjective relations between other human bodies (Pitarch, 2012). In either case, personhood is constructed as dividual, a constitutive being made not only of ego but also ego’s relationships to kin, the land, animals, plants, and broader concepts such as “the divine” or “global capitalism”

(Strathern, 1988). But, to the Maya, personhood also cohabitates in a person with an animal body

(Pitarch, 2012).

In anthropology, the dividual person was originally employed as an analytical concept by

Strathern (1988)—after Dumont (1966)— to illustrate how a subject can be rendered partible— divided into multiple parts—and exchanged through kinship systems. In her analysis, Strathern made a distinct division between the aforementioned dividualist ontologies of Melanesia and what she considered to be the more individualist ontologies embodied by Christian influenced western philosophy. The explanatory power of this post-structural model of personhood is attested to by its rapid application beyond Melanesia, including India (Bird-David, 1999),

Australia (Glaskin, 2012; Poirier, 2005), Amazonia (Vilaca, 2011), and more recently both ancient and modern Maya (e.g. Balsanelli, 2018; 2019; Duncan and Schwarz, 2013). Though the mechanism, uses, relationships, and modes of exchange vary between the myriad cosmologies described in these studies, they share a common vein in viewing personhood as seated in ever- shifting relationships, rather than embedded in the brain-side of the Cartesian mind-body divide.

Within the shifting relationships that can make up a dividual, the “why of way” takes us past the anthropocentric relationships—exchange, marriage, and kinship—deployed by

Strathern, and demonstrates that personhood is not strictly limited to people. The way is a part of a human person, but it is also a co-constitution of a human and an animal or natural

14 phenomenon. Moreover, in modern Lacandon cosmologies, animals have souls in their own right

(Balsanelli, 2018:117-118), souls that, like humans, have an underworld double life (Boremanse,

2006). In this regard way is a vision of personhood similar to that advocated by Ingold (2015), a co-constitutive “going on” constantly remade through action, not an assemblage in the classical sense—(see DeLanda, 2006; Latour, 2005)—but series of relationships that redefine their interacting parts. In this sense, the why of “way” is a cyborg—vis a vis Haraway (1991)—that is a person produced through the social and technological relationships that expand or contract their capacities.

A theory of being in which persons are emergent from their social/technical/natural connections has an old and somewhat sullied name in anthropology: animism. Animism, in its original Tylorian sense, was posited to be a proto-religion, a kind of spiritual misunderstanding in which primitive man—the gendered term being intentional in this case—imbued the world with spirits so as to manipulate it through exchange or cajoling (1899). Tylor’s linear progression was not universally accepted in his own time. Interestingly enough, Tylor’s contemporary

Brinton (1894) published an exhaustive study of Nagual, Tonal, and Way in which he came to the now seemingly strange conclusion that these animistic terms were related to a secret society dedicated to the expulsion of Europeans and Christianity from middle America. Though his conclusion is dubious, it is notable that in the same data used by Tylor, Brinton saw historical particularity rather than generalized evolution.

Conspiracies against the European colonizers aside, though the term animism has fallen to the wayside, it still occasionally haunts the discipline. One explicitly epistemological analysis of animism was Bird-David’s (1999) controversial essay that posited animism as the product of an “epistemology of relatedness.” That is to say, a theory of knowing in which personhood is

15 constantly reaffirmed through interaction. Bird-David observed numerous conversations with informants who attributed personhood to animals and objects with which they were in direct interaction. Yet, the very same agents would lose the quality of personhood when no longer interacting with humans.

Bird-David’s epistemology of relatedness was, in part, a critique of Guthrie (1993) who views animism as derived from misperception and risk avoidance. Guthrie, borrowing from

Piaget, posits that the roots of animistic thinking are in a “Pascal’s Wager.” He states that for an organism more is to be lost from not assuming an inanimate object’s personhood than could be lost in being wrong (1993:4). In short, if a rodent believes a rock to be a potential volitional self and the rodent is wrong, it loses little. But, if the rodent does not make this assumption and the stone turns out to be a snake, it loses everything.

Though it is amusing to imagine a snake as a rodent god, the theory-of-mind hypothesis of animism fails on two major accounts. Firstly, most ethnographically attested accounts of animism involve repeated interaction with the same non-human other, not others whose possible minds are ambiguous (Bird-David, 1999). Secondly, this epistemology ethnocentrically casts the rodents—who eventually distinguish between rocks and snakes—as smarter than the humans who do not (Ingold, 1999). Piaget (1933) directly argues that animistic thinking is natural to all children but lost in western adults, which is literally equating adults who subscribe to non- western ontologies to the same status as western children, a point that Guthrie inadvertently attempted to rescue Piaget from (1993:41-53). Ultimately these epistemologically-focused attempts to explain animism generally struggle against the critique that they reproduce western- ontology and then explain away differences on their own terms (Viveros de Castro, 2015). The tendency for epistemological analysis of animism to produce arguments that resonate with late

16 nineteenth century evolutionary anthropology has led other anthropologists to focus on ontology instead (Viveros de Castro, 2015).

To circumvent epistemology, Viveros de Castro posits that personhood in Amerindian ontologies is perspectival; personhood is in the internal perceptions of the subject. In this relational ontology, animals see themselves as humans while they see humans as something else; at its core, humanness is the base state of being for any subject, including humans (1998). For example, jaguars see humans as tapirs or peccaries because they, like us, eat tapir and peccary; likewise, peccaries see garbage as roasted yams. Directly citing Viveros de Castro, Balsanelli

(2018; 2019) has argued that the modern Lacandon share this ontology of personhood through the concept of pixan. The Lacandon view the interiorities of humans, animals, and gods as essentially the same; it is the accumulated bodily experiences that make them into their respective categories of being (2019). Thus, in these perspectival ontologies, there is in effect one culture but many natures, all determined by the particular body of the subject (Vivero de

Castros, 1998) and/or the subjects' life history (Balsanelli, 2018; 2019).

Armed with the notion that these modes of perception are the terrain of relational ontology (i.e., animism), Descola (2013) has posited a typology based on the human subjects’ perception of a non-human object’s physicality and interiority. To Descola, animistic ontologies perceive physicalities as different but interiorities as the same. Animism is opposite to the naturalism of western science, which posits all things are made up of the same physicality but possess radically different interiorities. But Maya relational ontology asks us: why the focus on interiorities? If a person is both their own body and an extrasomatic embodied being—like a forest animal, god, or natural force—then does that person not have as many perspectives as bodies, and how can a multiplicity have an interiority in Descola’s sense of the word?

2.B: Why way?: Interaction, Forest Guardians, and Dreams

Maya archaeology—as an extension of Mesoamerican anthropology—has long had an implicit relationship with cosmology. One of the significant problems with understanding

Mesoamerican cosmology—here defined as the philosophy of how people relate to the material and non-material world—is that it is often conflated with Ideology—the philosophical and political relationships between people, their institutions and cultural values. Astor-Aguilera points out that the conflation of these two concepts obscures an important distinction. It is not the cosmology that justifies or legitimizes the existing social order; it is the ideological interpretation of a cosmology (2010:24). In Maya archaeology, this distinction is particularly important because much of what we know of Maya cosmology comes from ancient writing, which is by its very nature ideological (Joyce, 1996). This distinction is where the rubber hits the road for an archaeologist. When an archaeologist digs up materials—be they zooarchaeological remains or glyphic texts—they are digging up the deployment of a cosmology. So changes or differences between assemblages are in effect changes in political deployments of shared ontological understandings. This is a point that will be returned to in the following chapters.

In probing the ontological suppositions that underline ancient and modern Maya cosmologies, I will be focusing on five general concepts given here in the original Maya: k’u, ik, baah, and way, as well as the concept Pixan amongst the modern Lacandon. I will generally be using the translated Proto-Choltian Maya names for the first four concepts for two major reasons.

First—the direct English translations of these words (soul-like-spirit, image, and co-essence, respectively) are all attempts to frame these concepts in an Abrahamic cosmology. Many of the earliest translations of these concepts were attempts by priests who were not trying to translate indigenous concepts into western languages, so much as translate Judeo-Christian concepts into

18 indigenous ones (Astor-Aguilera, 2010:115). Secondly, there exist today a plethora of similar words from several extant Mesoamerican languages; for clarity, I only use these modern indigenous terms when referring to the concept as deployed by a specific people and the glyphic—Proto-Choltian—word when referring to the general concept. Ultimately these terms— k’u, ik, baah, Pixan, and way— are critical to understanding how Maya cosmology rested on a relational ontology, in which interactions lend beings their characteristics (Duncan and Schwarz,

2013; Fowler, 2008; McLeod, 2018). Understanding this relational model of being is important for understanding how the Maya viewed nature, and consequently how they redeployed their cosmology in the natural world as part of any political rearrangement.

In ancient Maya writing, one enigmatic concept related to diffuse personhood is baah

(also written occasionally as bah, or b’a). Early on, the word was translated as “to do” based on a modern Tzeltal word (Schele and Grub, 1995:62-63). However, when we consider a broader range of Maya dialects together, the translation of “to do” appears to be unique to Tzeltal

(Houston and Stuart, 1998). Building on this observation, Houston and Stuart note baah can both be used to indicate oneself reflexively and can also be used to reference a specific image (1998).

In a sense, Maya script intertwines—linguistically—oneself and one’s image. Houston and

Stuart go on to argue that the stelae and other images of rulers were not only statecraft

(ideological) but also communicated a cosmology where an individual was made of multiple parts and could imbue these parts into objects bearing their image. Or, put in the context of this dissertation, relational ontology in Maya cosmology was deployed in the elite ideology of rulers through the production of statues that were part of the ruler. Ideology is the site at which Maya ontology became material.

According to Houston, more recent translations of baah have glossed it as “image” or

“face” or “head” (Houston et al., 2006). Part of the confusion over the translation of baah is that it can also operate as a suffix, indicating the first or primary in an organization (Houston et al.,

2006:62). In either case, it seems to be highly transferable. As head, it seems one could capture baah through mutilation of victim’s faces, skulls, and bones (Duncan and Schwarz, 2013;

Houston et al., 2006). Baah seems not only to be something one can capture, but also imparted.

In Postclassic Maya contexts, bones and skulls have been related to animating buildings

(Duncan, 2011). Also, the quality of baah seems to have been transferable from deities to rulers through dancing and imitation (Grub, 1992; Houston et al., 2006:65).

Recent reevaluation of the grammar surrounding baah has called some of Houston and

Stuart’s assertions into question. Zender (2004) has noted that the morphology of a possessed noun changes depending on whether an object is culturally loaded personal property or an intimate body part. As he notes, baah is not in the bodily camp—though interestingly enough way is. He argues, therefore, that baah should be viewed as a personal possession of the ruler rather than an embodied object (Zender, 2004). Though this linguistic conundrum removes some weight from Houston and Stuart's argument, it does not alter the partibility of baah. And, from the standpoint of perspectivism, it is this partibility that is important because it means that baah’s operation is ontologically consistent with the natural world that is constantly being reconstructed.

Perspectival ontology, in its most simple phrasing, is theory of personhood in which even non-human subjects experience the world as human. Or, put another way, human personhood is universal, though the bodies it inhabits are not (Viveiros de Castro, 1998). Given that linguistically the image has a self-referential perspective, a perspectival ontology seems to be in play in the baah concept, much as it is for the Lacandon soul—Pixan—in Balsanelli’s work

(Balsanelli, 2018; 2019). In this sense, in Maya writing—and most modern Maya languages—an image has a perspective and this perspective—I would argue—turns out to be human-like.

Moreover, the perspective that an image possessed is related to its capacity to act as a communicating object, as was described by Astor-Aguilera (2010).

In Astor-Aguilera’s treatment of pre-Hispanic stelae, ethnohistoric objects, and modern

Maya cosmologies, he notes that the personhood of ritual objects emerges from their relationships with other selves (2010). Crosses, stelae, and bundles containing ancestral bones are all imbued with partible energy that can be moved or reassigned to other objects. Moreover, these objects have perspectives. For example, taboos surrounding their curators’ sexual activity are to avoid making the objects jealous (Astor-Aguilera, 2010:162-163). Also, these objects require kinds of sustenance and offerings like candles and incense, tortillas, blood, meat, or other foodstuffs are made (Astor-Aguilera, 2010; Taube, 2004). In both cases, objects have perspectives on their social relationships and their consumptive habits. And with these perspectives comes their ability to communicate. As Astor-Aguilera argues, these objects are

“kinds of persons” to which I would like to add that they are kinds of persons that possess an essentially human perspective. But, more importantly to our discussion of ecology and politics, the communicating object is a thing constantly in construction, and therefore highly mutable.

Early examinations of Maya vases and mythology—vis a vis the Popol-Vuh—tended to stress the existence of a Maya afterlife in which the soul journeyed to Xibalba—the land of the dead—and through trial could reemerge reborn in the heavens (Coe, 1981). The very concept of soul in these early interpretations is couched in Judeo-Christian terminology and rests upon a

Cartesian mind-body dualism. Nonetheless, this understanding served as a suitable starting point—even though Maya cosmologies actually rely on a social/soul and animal/body dualism.

But even this early research acknowledged that the manner of death could affect the journey for the supposed soul. Thus, the relational nature of Maya personhood remained recalcitrant and hidden beneath this research.

More recent scholarship presents a muddled—and perhaps more emic—picture of the

Maya afterlife. Though Taube does not explicitly state the dividual nature of the Maya dead, it is implicit in his analysis of flower mountain, a place where, as air, part of the deceased’s wind or breath goes to consume aromas instead of matter (2004). What’s most interesting in Taube’s analysis is not that flower mountain sounds much more pleasant than the watery underworld of

Xibalba, but that the deceased’s essence is divided between Xibalba, flower-mountain, and the forest, each taking on different parts (Taube, 2004). Interestingly enough, Taube’s analysis did not focus on any essential essence in the western philosophical sense, but on another Maya term, k’u—and a related term ik—which occurs in various forms in modern ethnography as well as in the ancient hieroglyphs k’u or k’uhl. But Taube’s work does underline that dualism in Maya ontology is not Cartesian, but its own unique ordering of the world.

K’u—or ch’uel, Kh’ul, K’ul, depending on time and dialect, was historically translated as

“god” by Spanish friars, but is in fact less fixed and far more diffuse than the Christian notion of divinity (Astor-Aguilera, 2010:115). K’u is interesting because of its relational nature and because of its partibility. As Astor-Aguilera notes, k’u is a thing that passes between individuals and is, therefore, partible (2010:21). Or, as McLeod notes, k’u is a thing always in construction

(2017), which may explain why different individuals may have varying amounts of it. Objects, like communicating bundles, acquired this essence through both rites and relational use.

Moreover, this essence could be removed from one object and fixed on to another. Furthermore, archaeologically this phenomenon has also been observed in the dedication (or ensouling) of

22 buildings (Duncan, 2011; Stuart, 1998). The point that matters is that K’u operated like the modern concept of winkilel, which arises from intersubjective relations with humans (Pitarch,

2012). Interestingly the need to imbue buildings and ritual objects with personalizing essences is not limited to the world of the inanimate.

Many Maya ethnographies note rites that tethered personhood to children or note that children are not fully human at birth (see Astor-Aguilera, 2010). In some cases, infanticide is not explicitly considered murder because the baby is not yet human (Bruce, 1979; McGee, 2002). In the latter case, amongst the Lacandon Maya, the child is not named and considered fully human in its early life because it only possesses Pixan—roughly translated as soul and not exactly a modern equivalent to k’u. To become a human, a child must first consume human food, live with humans, and then be recognized as human (Balsanelli, 2019). Thus, personhood and the possession of k’u comes about through interaction similar to Bird-David's (1999) epistemology of relatedness. But what is at stake isn’t epistemological, but rather ontological. That is to say, k’u is not revealed through a theory of knowing, but affixed through a capacity to relate. The soul is unstable, so to speak, and can in a real sense change as the material conditions surrounding an individual change.

The partible Maya person was not limited to living Maya, their physical remains, or their images; it also inhabited the forests around them. Way is another essence—for lack of a better word—like k’u or baah, which was a partible part of a Maya person. But, more excitingly—to the zooarchaeologist at least—this was a part of a Maya person that entangled one with their surrounding ecology. Our academic understanding of way has its first roots in the last sixty years of ethnography and ethnohistory amongst Maya and their Mesoamerican neighbors from all manner of regions, nations, and dialect groups. Early ethnographies noted that in many areas,

Maya people believed in animal spirits. And in some cases, these spirits were thought to be part of a person’s soul (Foster, 1944; Monaghan, 1998; Villa Rojas, 1947). In other cases, people believed these animal spirits to be witches or powerful individuals who transformed into animals and prowled the forests (Brinton, 1894; Foster, 1944; Nutini and Roberts, 1993). In most cases, these animal spirits were part of the individual and were active when one slept, and people thought that one’s dreams were the nightly activities of one’s animal co-essence. What this spirit did was of great consequence, as it could help the dreamer discern possible future events (Bruce,

1979; Tedlock, 1987). Moreover, what happened to this co-essence mattered because if it died, so too did its human counterpart (Thompson, 1958:273-277). Finally, in some cases, it was believed that particularly powerful individuals could have multiple spirits (Foster, 1944:87).

Even among modern Maya, like the Lacandon, where a concept that exactly translates to way is absent, the essential ontological elements that underpin way remain. As Basanelli notes,

Pixan—a concept like a soul—travels as one sleeps, wandering the forest (2018:117-119), though not as an animal. And although the Lacandon do not have animal doubles that share their

Pixan, one’s Pixan is no different than that of a plant, animal, or pot, and only becomes human though interaction with humans as humans (Basanelli, 2018). This interaction-dependent humanness is extended to animals that share human sociality. Dogs, for example, are considered human enough to follow human food taboos and burial practices (Basanelli, 2019). Finally, like way, the Lacandon Pixan has a double life, a mirror that lives with the god Kisin in the underworld and experiences pain that the living person also feels (Boremanse, 2006:75). Thus, even a Maya group that does not explicitly have way as part of its cosmology maintains all the essential elements of a co-essence concept. What is at stake is not way, but a common relational ontology in which the social self is built upon a natural self.

References to animal co-essences are far-flung in space and time throughout the Maya region’s recent past. Moreover, many of the Maya words surrounding this cosmology are of

Nahuatl origin (Andrews, 1975), suggesting that they are rooted in a larger pan-Mesoamerican cosmological world system (Smith, 2003). In examining this body of ethnographic data, Houston and Stuart proposed the translation of a Maya glyph that reads way as the Classic Maya word for this concept (1989). They demonstrated that way is a possessed noun—often animal or god— with the same root as the words for dream, sleep, or sleeping place. Additionally, they demonstrate multiple instances in which gods will have their way as conflated body parts. This observation has been corroborated by Zender (2004), who demonstrated way to have the same linguistic characteristics as human body parts (2004). Ultimately way revolves around two themes prevalent throughout the ethnographic and ethnohistoric data. First, the co-essence is related to dreams, and second, the co-essence is part of a person corporeally.

The corporal aspect of the way gives it a lived property, that is to say, it is an embodied experience of daily life. One’s way was something one is born with, no different than being born with good or bad eyes or a pretty or ugly face. Tedlock has noted that amongst the Quiché animal co-essences are related to one’s birthday and have implications for one’s potential community and occupational status (1987). Although the Lacandon concept of way is a kind of dream-roaming and not an animal companion, families do share an animal onen (Bruce, 1979;

McGee, 1989; 2002). Onen are not totems in either the Tylorain sense or the sense of Descola

(2013); they are not simple representations or group hybridizations. Instead, each member of this lineage shares a link with a particular kind of animal. As Basanelli notes, these animal links are also part of how the Lacandon explain alterity between different groups (2018:125-133). She argues that, because actions and interactions make humanness, the variations in activities

25 between groups with different onen make them also more akin to the animals that supposedly represent them. In this regard, onen is similar to way because animal bodies are linked to status and positions. But onen more explicitly references the relational nature of being, because onen arises from actions.

Social status can also be referenced by way. Particularly spiritually potent individuals might have deities or saints as co-essence; and in some cases, powerful ceremonial specialists might have more than one co-essence (Foster 1944). And, finally, much like losing a body part can result in death, losing one’s co-essence could have the same result (Thompson, 1958:273-

277). Or, in the case of Pixan, separation from this part of the person would lead to sickness and eventual death (Basanelli, 2018:117). This last point is important because it shows that Pixan and way are parts of a living body, unlike onen, which appears to emerge from relationships and actions.

In addition to being perceived as part of a living body, the co-essence was also experienced by its possessor in the form of dreams. Dreaming for many Maya groups involves direct communication with the divine—for lack of a better word—beings. Amongst the Quiché dreams allow for both the communication of future events and potential calls to communal office

(Tedlock, 1987). Brown also notes that amongst Kaqchikel, hunter’s dreams tell them where and how to communicate with the forest guardian and are part of maintaining a relationship with the forest (Brown, 2009; Brown and Emery, 2008). Furthermore, many other groups associated dreams with the activities of their animal co-essences (Houston and Stuart, 1989). Amongst the

Lacandon, dreaming of a person or an animal can substitute for one another (Bruce, 1979). For example, dreaming of a friend from a deer onen might be an omen one will encounter a deer, or dreaming about the death of a deer could portent the imminent death of the same friend.

Dreaming also had connections with death (Houston and Stuart, 1989; Taub, 2004). In epigraphy, dreaming, death, and co-essences are tightly bound together. Foremost, as noted above, the translation of way shares a root with wayib (Dream) and waybil (Sleeping place), suggesting a deep and long-standing connection between co-essences, sleep, and death (Houston and Stuart, 1989; Houston et al., 2006). And, amongst the modern Lacandon the word way has come to exclusively mean dream, leaving the elements of way as discussed here to other concepts like Pixan and onen. On some occasions, the co-essences are even noted to be active in sleeping places (Houston and Stuart, 1989). Ultimately this glyphic evidence supports that the corporeal nature of the co-essence has a history extending back to the Classic Maya.

2.C: Hunting and Material Consequences

As Levi-Strauss once noted, “Just as some animals are good to eat, some are good to think with” (1962:89). The dual nature of the animal as both potential social beings and/or food was not lost on the ancient Maya. This perspective-bending is also present in Maya texts.

Notably, large game—generally deer or peccary—are often conflated with people through iconographic treatment similar to warfare, captive taking, and most notably sacrifice (Pohl

1985). Furthermore, the sanctioned hunting and trapping of these animals was also situated in sacred time (Vail, 1997; Von Nagy, 1997). Thus, it appears that the—at least literate—Maya were aware of this irony and took measures to mitigate it.

The cosmological situating of hunting and trapping is related to the relational-ontology inherent in the human-animal relationship. As Astor-Aguilera noted, the capacity for communication was a significant factor in creating Maya non-living human persons (2010). And, a similar relational ontology plays out in modern relationships between Maya hunters, their prey and the forest as an animate actor. Brown has used an Actor-Network Theory (see Latour, 2005)

27 approach to chart human negotiations with the forest (Brown, 2009; Brown and Emery, 2008). In this analysis, she has noted the several actors involved in hunting, including human hunters, their kin, the forest guardian, dogs, hunter’s weapons, and the forest animals themselves. All these actors are, in effect, engaged in constant communication with one another. Humans communicate with the forest spirit via dreams and through shrine ceremonies, which, in a sense, are communicating objects like the ones studied by Astor-Aguilera (2010). Animals communicate with humans by willingly giving themselves up, presumably under the volition of the forest guardian. Even objects involved in the hunt are communicative; humans communicate with their guns by praising them and performing rituals for them. Finally, dogs are expected to participate in the rites and show proper respect to animal remains, and thus communicate their appreciation to the forest spirit just as humans do.

These relationships are not only in the heads and dreams of Brown’s Maya informants but are a real part of the world. As Kohn (2014) points out, relationships of signs and signification are not limited to human language. Falling trees, burning brush, and animal calls have meanings to living beings. And meanings have material consequences for life. For example, the shape of an anteater’s mouth is a sign for a kind of thing—the form of an ant-hill—and these relationships of signs and significations can outlive the worlds they embody. Consider, for example, organisms that outlive the environments they evolved to fit, such as orchids whose primary pollinators have gone extinct. Kohn refers to these avenues of embodied nonlinguistic communication as “Trans-species Pigeons,” and that is precisely what co-essences are. The relational ontology Maya cosmology rests upon embodies a communicative network, like the one

Brown describes above. What the Maya hunters that Brown describes do is open the avenues of communication between communicating objects and the engaged landscape. These relationships

28 are not only social but also ecological, in that they have implications for how Maya hunters use the forest and what material residues they leave for us archaeologists.

As Lawrence Keely was fond of saying: “So what?” How does one dig up ontology, an epistemology, a cosmology, or even the ideologies that rest upon them? And, perhaps more pressing of a question: even if one could, to what end? The key to answering this rhetorical question is in the distinction between cosmology and ideology, as defined by Astor-Aguilera’s work among the Maya of Quintana Roo (2010). In distinguishing between cosmologies—the philosophies of human relationships with the world—from ideologies—the philosophies reinforcing the social order—Astor-Aguilera rightfully makes a distinction based on practice.

That is to say, ideologies are cosmology in practice. And, it is in the archaeology of these practices that we can see how competing groups in a society mobilized a similar cosmology to different ends. Moreover, we can only make sense of ideologically significant depositional patterns within the context of the cosmology and metaphysics mobilized by the people we study.

To place this discussion back into the overall framework of this dissertation, Maya cosmological concepts index relational personhood. The deposition of animal remains is the deposition of partial-selves, and the environments that these animals represent are a communicative network. To the Maya the ecological was not an external concept, but a world that was always capable of being rendered social through interaction with humans. This means that changes in the material residues of these networks should not be interpreted simply as responses to new stresses but representative of the active construction of new relationships. In this regard, decisions about animal consumption are not only about political considerations—as will be discussed in Chapter 3—but are also cosmological deployments of contested ideologies.

Therefore, any interpretation of patterns uncovered in zooarchaeological analysis must keep these concepts in mind while interpreting patterns.

Chapter 3: The Social Relationships and the Constructed Niche

3: Abstract

The following section is intended to bridge a theoretical gap between the Post-humanist anthropology that is commonly used to discuss cosmology—Chapter 2—and the Political

Ecological models commonly used to connect environment use with political organization—

Chapter 4. The proposed bridge to this gap is the use of Niche Construction Theory (NCT), which comes from Evolutionary Ecology. The reason this section uses Niche Construction

Theory to bridge this gap is because of NCT’s focus on organisms’ behaviors as sustaining—or depleting—ecological niches. Behaviors, in and of themselves, become things that are selected for or against and work towards stable states within ecological systems. In this regard behaviors operate like social machines in the New Materialism sense discussed below. This combination of

Post-humanist New Materialisms with NCT allows the interplay between various social machines—like the cosmological concepts discussed in Chapter 2—to be understood as co- constructive with and represented by material ecological conditions. This is important in understanding how a cosmological feature fits into—or is disjunctive with—ideological projects like decentralization and resistance to domination—the subjects of Chapter 4. In the larger project of this dissertation, this theoretical conjunction provides a framework for understanding how differences between zooarchaeological remains at the four sites represent material manifestations of ideological praxis—also the subject of Chapter 4.

3.A: The Niche as Social Relation

“… ‘culture’ may always have been just another word for ontology – minus nature of course; a poor man’s ontology if you will.”

-Viveros de Castro 2015, pg:9

When we take seriously the relational ontology that undergirds Maya cosmology, we see that to the Maya what we call ecological relationships are instead a network of communication between multi-component selves. One part of the hunter—a co-essence or interactive soul—also resides partly in the animal populations s/he hunts. And, this is also part of her/his friends, families, neighbors, and enemies. Moreover, these relationships are mitigated by the forest guardian, a being with agency, and perceived desires (Brown and Emery, 2008). Ultimately to the ancient Maya hunter, ecological relationships were—and to some modern Maya groups still are—perceived as a nebula of social relationships.

In a broad sense, the Maya conceiving of their ecological relationships as also social is not unique. There are numerous examples of other peoples who conceive of ecological relationships as fundamentally social ones (Descola, 2013; Ingold, 2002; Kohn, 2014;

Willerslev, 2007). And there is a modern argument that fixing the ecological problems that face the petrol-capitalist world involves recasting our ecological relationships in a similar social light

(Guattari, 1989; Haraway, 2003; Latour, 2014). Furthermore, rethinking the separation of society and nature—with its intellectual roots in the Cartesian divide between mind and body (Cronon,

1996)—is a necessary step in rethinking some forms of late capitalist expropriation (Smith,

1990). Ironically, this means that even a divided vision of society and ecology is, in fact, still a kind of social relation—just one of obfuscation.

Acknowledging that social relationships and ecological relationships are Janus-faced— that is to say inseparably one and the same and capable of creating effects in either direction— means that models of ecological relationships are also models of social ones, and vice-versa.

Ingold’s 1980 work Hunters, Pastoralists and Ranchers: Reindeer Economies and Their

Transformations provides an example of this kind of research. Here he demonstrated that

amongst the Sami, the transition from pastoralists to herders was a change related to a shift towards capitalist social relationships between humans and their herds. Using ecological data, herd composition data, and ethnohistoric data, he demonstrated the intimate detail of related changes in both social relationships and ecological relationships. As he concludes:

“Technology is a corpus of knowledge, expressed in manufacture and use, and as such it serves, alongside organizational and ideological aspects of culture, to mediate relations both between men in society and between men and the natural environment. … … However, the actual dynamic of social evolution lies not in the domain of culture, but in the reciprocal interplay between social and ecological systems, the former dominant in that it specifies the way in which the environment is to be used, the latter determinant in the negative sense of imposing the limits of viability.”

Ingold, 1980 pg:7-8

With this observation in mind, it is clear that any ecological analysis of an archaeological site requires a dynamic model in which technologies, behaviors, and the surrounding ecology are considered co-productive, with both culture and ecology imposing their own limits on the possible end results. From this perspective behaviors may emerge from a cultural logic, but they are reinforced by their capacity to reproduce in an ecology. Building from this position, the ecological model of Niche Construction Theory (NCT) provides the possibility to recast behaviors—including cultural ones—as niche constructors. NTC, therefore, places behaviors as part of a relational web in which the agency of multiple species is enmeshed with the affordances opened by one another. And, for the purposes of this dissertation, it is important to think of ideological deployments of cosmology as one of such behaviors.

Perturbation Relocation Inceptive Organisms initiate a change in their Organisms expose themselves to a selective environment by physically novel selective environment by modifying their surroundings moving to or growing into a new place

Counteractive Organisms counteract a prior change Organisms respond to a change in in the environment by physically the environment by moving to or modifying their surroundings growing into a more suitable place.

TABLE I: FOUR DIMENSIONS OF NICHE CONSTRUCTION

3.B: Introduction to Niche Construction Theory

Niche Construction Theory is best defined as:

“The process whereby organisms, through their metabolism, their activities and their choices, modify their own and/or each other's niches.”

-Odling-Smee et al. 2003 pg.419

Within this perspective, two major dimensions describe how organisms, including humans, react to and recreate their environments. The first dimension is perturbation and relocation; the second is inceptive and counteractive (Table I, reproduced from Odling-Smee et al. 2003). Perturbation is the modification of an environment. When the perturbation is

“counteractive,” it acts to stabilize or maintain an inherently unstable microenvironment.

Conversely, inceptive perturbation involves an organism creating a particular niche where one did not formerly exist. The other significant dimension of NCT is relocation. Relocation consists of an organism moving to access a niche which is not sustainable as long as the organism is using it. When relocation is inceptive, it means that an organism constantly moves in search of particular environments, moving on when the local environmental conditions are depleted. In

34 contrast, counteractive relocation entails an organism moving in response to a changing environment. Essentially, an organism follows a niche or series of niches as the location of the preferred niche moves.

Naturally, humans engage in all four kinds of niche construction. But for all intents and purposes, “agriculture” represents the counteractive side of human subsistence. Sternly (2011) has argued that, historically, humans engaged in inceptive-relocation as a response to social, demographic, or environmental pressure. The human capacity to inhabit almost every land environment on earth represents the massive impact of this kind of niche construction during human evolution. To see the degree to which humans engage in inceptive perturbation, one needs to do little more than walk past a municipal dump. Indeed, much of the recent ink spilled over the so-called “Anthropocene” has focused on global processes of inceptive-perturbation such as atmospheric CO2 emissions, soil salination, hydroelectric dams, and other inceptive- perturbations associated with the dominance of carbon-capitalist exploration of the world (e.g.

Latour, 2014).

For the sake of this dissertation, there are only two forms of niche construction that represent human agricultural activities in Late Postclassic Maya contexts: counteractive- perturbation, and counteractive-relocation. Counteractive-perturbation in agriculture is what we see anytime we drive south of Chicago for more than thirty minutes: fields whose fertility is maintained continuously by human labor—in the form of pesticides, GMO’s, and mechanical farming equipment—to continue to recreate a particular environment. But as a form of niche construction, cultural ecologists have referred to counteractive-perturbation as Landesque capital—human labor banked in infrastructure that maintains field utility for the next generation

(Nettings, 1993). However, the other kinds of agriculture, slash-and-burn, long fallow interval

35 agriculture, and pastoralism are instead examples of counteractive-relocation. In these forms of agriculture, when a plot is no longer suitable for subsistence, the human group simply moves to a new one, often changing the location of residences entirely. The distinction between these two, counteractive-perturbation and counteractive-relocation, have a political dimension to them that are the subject of Chapter 4.

Though the typology posited in the NCT model is useful for thinking about kinds of relationships between humans and the environment, this is not NCT’s most valuable potential contribution to anthropology and archaeology. As Odling-Smee et al. put it:

“It is self-evident that all organisms must interact with their environment to stay alive, and equally obvious that, when they do, it is not just organisms that are affected by the consequences of these interactions, but also the environment.”

--Odling-Smee et al. 2003 pg.2-3

At first glance, this passage seems circular; organisms interact with an environment, thus remaking an environment that in turn makes them. But the reason this passage seems muddled is that it speaks to a darker truth; that living things—including humans—are inseparable from both their environment and their behaviors. What NCT contributes to the discourse is not a final answer in a debate between the cultural constructivist visions of the natural world vs. environmentally deterministic storytelling, but the acknowledgment that the very distinction between the two is inaccurate to its core. Behaviors, organisms, and inorganic components of the environment feed into one another, and looking at any of them as partible from the whole is a fallacy. In a sense, much like way hopelessly entangles people, animals, and behaviors, NTC does the same using the language of western science. And this, I believe, is a fruitful way to reengage old anthropological questions about the relationships between humans and their

36 environments. In terms of this dissertation’s theoretical project, NTC—through entanglement of environments, organisms, and actions—provides the bridge between cosmology, humans, and political actions. This is because activities—such as socio-political organization and the cosmologies they mobilize—are creators of the niches that in turn sustain them.

The application of NCT to anthropology is a relatively recent phenomenon, which involves a diverse set of techniques and anthropological questions. Researchers, often working in the Cultural Ecological framework, have applied NCT to issues of human evolution (Sternly,

2011), domestication (Laland and O’Brien, 2010; Smith et al., 2011), sustainability (Isbell and

Loreau, 2014), and gene-culture coevolution (Gintis, 2011). Though far-flung in topics, what these studies share is a tendency to use NCT to integrate specific human behaviors into the environment without over determining the role of culture or the environment. Behaviors become literally part of an ecology, not in a determinate way but as part of a becoming. This integration is the hidden potential of NTC, its ability to reconcile some of the philosophical quandaries that post-humanist critiques have levied against traditional Cultural Ecological approaches.

One prominent critique of Cultural Ecology raised by Ingold (1986) is that of the concept of the niche itself. Ingold critiques the classic Hutchison (1957) definition of the niche: an “N- dimensional hypervolume, enclosing the complete range of conditions under which an organism can reproduce itself.” Ingold argued that in application, the niche concept was reductive and productive of a nature in which idealized pre-existed categories (niches) existed a priori to the organisms (including humans) which inhabited them. Ingold argues that, in this definition of niche, agency is removed from organisms, reducing them to mechanisms and preserving the distinction between human as an agent and animal/plant as subject common to the Cartesian ontology. Regardless of whether one accepts Ingold’s critique, one good thing about NCT is it

37 sidesteps this criticism. This is because NCT emphasizes not only the ways organisms and their niches co-construct the world, but also how behaviors themselves can be part of the niche assemblage. The reproducibility of a behavior is just as important as the reproducibility of the organism.

NCT’s emphasis on the co-constitutive role of all organisms in an ecology brings us back to the Post-humanist Kohn’s “sylvan thinking” (2014). Kohn points out that life is semiotic in the

Peirceian sense. By this he means organisms are “signs” for their historical relationships with other organisms, and these “signs” are ecological inheritances which in some cases symbolize an environment that no longer exists, for example, the orchid that still resembles its extinct pollinator (Kohn, 2014). Similarly, a niche in the NTC sense is literally a series of relationships between organisms that are continually rebuilding their environment from previously constructed environments, and in this context behaviors and adaptations can lag (Laland and Brown, 2006).

Quite literally, the historic “sign” in Kohn’s sense is the same as a lagging adaptation in NCT.

Whether it is a “lag” or a “historic sign”, what is important is that neither of these views posit the a priori niche criticized by Ingold (2010). Instead, to them, the niche is always on the move.

Thus, they both recast the niche as what Ingold would call a “going on” (Ingold, 2015) or

Deleuze might have called a “becoming.” That is to say; the niche is a phenomenon emergent from continual joint action.

In this web of relationships—or significances as the case may be—social organization has consequences, and this is not a position unique to humans. For example, how reindeer relate/interact with their environment and engage other species and conspecifics has implications for possible human social relationships of production. As Ingold argues, many of the reindeer's behaviors/relationships matter for the possibility—or impossibility as the case may be—of

38 imposing capitalist relationships of production—ranching—in the subarctic (1980). Similarly,

Haraway (2003) demonstrates that relationships between dogs, wolves, and their human companions have also undergone radical reorganization as dogs become both sites of consumption and non-human consumers in neoliberal capitalist relationships. This last point is important because it illustrates that social relations, like modes of capitalism, are themselves part of the niche.

From this perspective, I argue that animal consumption at Mensabak is not only a novel strategy of niche construction; it is also a manifestation of co-constitutive eco/social relationships—a point that Chapter 4 will elaborate on. Within the two dimensions of niche construction, two tendencies are relevant to the general trajectory of animal use amongst the

Maya of Mensabak: counteraction—again defined as investment by an organism in maintaining a niche—and perturbation—an organism moving around following an unstable niche. In this Maya area, counteractive niche construction is associated with near-site agriculture, whereas perturbation is associated with slash-and-burn agriculture. In Chapter 4, this dissertation will demonstrate that these two forms of niche construction involve different relationships with both the surrounding forest and centralized authority.

Chapter 4: Niche Construction and Land Use

4: Abstract

Building upon the past chapters, I argue that Niche Construction Theory’s focus on relationships gives it the ability to correlate material patterns—observable in zooarchaeology— with political behaviors and the ideological deployments of cosmology that undergird them.

Here, following the works of James Scott and Gill Deleuze, I argue that some kinds of human niche construction—and the behaviors imbricated in them—are better suited for the avoidance of structured hierarchical authority. Part of this chapter’s strategy involves the application of concepts from Political Ecology—such as landesque capital—to the recent works of James Scott, whose work has long examined the relationship between small-scale political resistance and the capacities of the natural environment. The higher mobility of Maya counteractive-relocation niche construction—swidden—lends itself better to the avoidance of state capture than counteractive-perturbation—infield agriculture. Finally, I hope to demonstrate that most Maya subsistence relied in part on both of these strategies, meaning Maya lowland peoples always had one foot out the door with regards to state capture. This last point will serve as an important step in interpreting the diversity of environmental relationships observed in Mensabak Faunal assemblage. In the overall flow of the dissertation this point is meant to demonstrate that the ideological deployments of the cosmology outlined in Chapter 2 could favor any combination of the subsistence strategies outlined below. Moreover, the favored deployment of cosmology had implications for the environments Maya peoples lived in and the political options available to them.

4.A: Niche Construction and Politics

Niche Construction Theory’s application to anthropology has focused initially on prehistory and the peopling of the Americas (Gintis, 2011; Laland and O’Brien, 2010; Smith et al., 2011; Sternly, 2011). However, James Scott has recently brought Niche Construction Theory to bear in an anarchist reframing of the development of the early state (Scott, 2018). Scott argues that political relations can be viewed as a niche constructor because its institutions are dependent on plants and animals that are more amenable to appropriation, state legibility, and transportability. In the case of the early states, Scott argues that cereal staples—wheat, rice, millet, and ostensibly maize—because of their periodicity, storage capacity, and transportability are both prerequisites of early states, and also reproduced and proliferated by them (2018).

Furthermore, Scott (2009), following a previous Political Ecological argument about what he calls Zomia—a political shatter zone made possible by specific environmental conditions—also argues that not all agricultural staples are conducive to expropriation (2009; 2018). Many tubers, yams, and legumes are easy to hide, can be harvested at any time, and are difficult to transport.

And, because of these qualities, they are commonly used by peoples resisting and/or avoiding political domination. Thus, not only political assemblages—such as the state—but also people who are avoiding domination are engaged in the reproduction of different environmental relationships. They construct different niches, both ecologically and politically. But more importantly, these two relationships bleed into one another, much like the way in NTC the metabolic process and environmental modifications of organisms blend into one another and shape the possibilities for life amongst other organisms.

The core of Scott’s argument is compelling, and similar observations have been made by other researchers who studied the early colonial encounters in the Americas (Crosby, 1986;

Melville, 1994). But the difference between Scott’s argument and these earlier versions is that

Scott is not arguing that these plants and animals determine the state or that the state blindly imposes the plants and animals associated with a cultural core. Instead, these plants and animals are imbricated in statecraft itself, and they contain co-constitutive feedbacks between political institutions and the environment. This distinction is important, in as much as it explains why a very small number of plants and animals dominate subsistence in the modern world. However, because the examples Scott uses are all Old World, there is a crucial point about niche construction that is missed by his argument. And it revolves around the role of animals and hunting.

The possible subsistence assemblage of the Americas is very different from the Old

World. For one, whether a farmer lives in a classic Maya city state or among the quasi-nomadic historic Lacandon, the plant resources one uses are mostly the same. Based on bone collagen, across social status most classic Maya diets were maize dependent (White et al., 2004), as were the diets of many of the commensal species associated with urban and peri-urban life (White et al., 2004.). Moreover, the reliance on maize is attested historically as well as ethnographically.

Maize figured heavily in the religion and cosmology of most Mesoamerican people, regardless of their degree of political centralization. Maize is generally grown with squash and beans due to the plants' complementary soil ecology. But, most fields are more diverse than just these three plants (McGee, 1990; 2002; Quintana-Ascencio et al., 1996). What is important to remember, though, is that while the subsistence base remains the same for both Classic Period urban dwellers and highly mobile Colonial Period peoples, there is a significant difference in how these two groups grow their plants and related to the surrounding forests.

Ethnographic inquiries into Maya agriculture began in earnest with Redfield and Villa

Rojas’ classic ethnographic analysis of Chan Kom (1934). Living in a Yucatec Maya village that practiced long fallow period shifting agriculture, they noted the extensive nature of Maya swidden agriculture as well as the village’s need to move every so many years. This observation spurred a series of ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological inquires that further demonstrated swidden agriculture’s ability to produce sizable quantities of food without significant landesque capital investments, sometimes referred to as the swidden hypothesis of Classic Maya agriculture

(Nations and Nigh, 1980). However, as Forrest (1991) noted, swidden alone did not make up most twentieth century Maya’s subsistence. Amongst the Maya of the Yacatán, Forrest noted that intensive near village cultivation was often conducted alongside extensive swidden agriculture, and more importantly, there was fluidity in which of these subsistence strategies provided the bulk of the diet. Thus, Maya, who lived in sedentary villages, conducted a kind of hybrid agriculture, where they cultivated some plants through laborious techniques—infields— and others were grown in swidden—outfields. This hybrid system is sometimes referred to as the forest garden (Ford and Nigh, 2009). This means, in terms of niche construction, that Maya subsistence relies on one of two different strategies; the outfields are a counteractive-relocation strategy requiring the creation of a temporary disturbance environment that the planter eventually moves on from, whereas the infields strategy is counteractive-perturbation in which the farmer constantly expends energy to maintain a fixed environment. More importantly, the potential to mix these strategies as a larger household unit means a group always had the technological know-how to do entirely one or the other (note: there is further nuance to this distinction between infields and outfields. For further discussion see Appendix A).

In the past, sedentary village life for the pre-Hispanic Maya was constituted by a mixed strategy of infield and outfield agriculture. Still, the twentieth century Lacandon Maya provides an exception that proves the rule. Operating in this region, the early twentieth century Lacandon were highly mobile, moving their residences as often as once every five to ten years (McGee,

2002), and their settlements are highly dispersed, making their capture historically difficult

(DeVos, 1988; Palka, 2005). Moreover, they frequently relocate their houses to be in whatever swidden field is currently in rotation (McGee, 2002). This lifestyle meant that groups could flee violence quickly, and that there was no single location for colonial authorities to capture and dominate. However, this strategy came at the price of being nearly exclusively swidden agriculturalists and quasi-hunter gatherers. Even though they avoided dominant political assemblages through greater reliance on outfield agriculture, a significant portion of their diet continued to be the same as Maya people who did not. In effect, they adopted the conditions best suited to avoid state capture not by changing what they ate, but how they related to it.

4.B: Zomia and Niche Construction

Returning to Scott’s argument, the historic Lacandon lived in a kind of Zomia. The Petén is what Deleuze and Guattari would have called a smooth space—that is, a region in which powerful institutions cannot modify the terrain in either the metaphorical or physical sense

(Deleuze and Guattari, 1980). But to operate in that space, the Lacandon do not abandon particular crops and take up new ones. What the Lacandon do is change how they group particular crops, where they grow them, and what parts of the forest are close to them. Stated with regards to Zomia; what the Lacandon change is not the parts constituting their political- subsistence assemblage, but the relationships that exist between the components. They adopt higher mobility and closer relationships with primary forest and more diverse planting regimes.

In a sense, Scotts’ focus on the species presents a subsistence assemblage as joined up, rather than hanging together, in the words of Tim Ingold (2015). By this, Ingold means primacy is given to the parts of the assemblage over the relationships between them. As Ingold notes, assemblage thinking often—though not always—presents relationships as “and-and-and,” or “n-

1” as Deleuze and Guattari put it (1980). What he means is that when an assemblage is “joined- up,” it is presented as if the constitutive parts will always produce the same emergent effect. To

Ingold, this kind of assemblage thinking is a kind of crypto-deterministic logic. Thus, for Ingold, what is at stake is not the parts but how they “correspond” (2015). Or, stated more directly, the relationships between things are as much part of an assemblage as the things themselves. To more clearly illustrate this point, I will turn to an example.

A North American meat-producing subsistence assemblage could be constituted by humans, bison, and prairie grass. But this simple assemblage would be very different if the relationships were the fire ecology used by pre-Columbian Native Americans, versus a high modernist capitalist system using large enclosures over a government-managed space—as is the case with ostensibly free-range bison steak one might purchase at Whole Foods. A joined-up thinker could contend that the latter example contains more non-living objects such as antibiotics, four-wheelers, and the technical-political assemblage that is the Bureau of Land

Management. And in a sense, they would be right; each of the technological additions to the subsistence assemblage comes with new affordances. But they would also be missing the point that what is at stake is how these affordances change the way living beings in the system are relating. They shift the niches that the subsistence assemblage produces and the conditions the assemblages are capable of reproducing.

Mid-twentieth century Lacandon subsistence demonstrates this point. The plants used are mostly the same as their less mobile and more politically dominated neighbors. However, they did not plant heavily modified Solares/infields or make any significant infrastructural investments in the landscape or rely heavily on marketable produce. The result is that they were able to move quickly and frequently. In a sense, all their agriculture was outfield agriculture even though the plots were close to home. This made them nomadic in the Deleuzian sense, meaning resistant to state capture, measure, or quantification (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980). Moreover, the same parts make the subsistence assemblages of both the Lacandon and their neighbors, but the

Lacandon had a different kind of relationship, one of perturbation, rather than counteraction, to use the terms from Niche Construction Theory.

This distinction, between counteractive-perturbative relationships with plants and animals, as opposed to counteractive-relocation, is what is really at the crux of Scott’s argument.

In Niche Construction Theory, counteractive-relocation niche construction is when an organism continually moves, following unstable niches that they quickly deplete (Olding-Smee et al.,

2003). Grazing mammals, for example, generally eat all available forage in an area before moving on, and only after they have moved on will the grass return to its original state.

Counteractive-perturbative, on the other hand, is a form of niche construction in which an organism labors to continually create a set of environmental conditions in the same place, for example, the beaver’s dam or the laboriously maintained soil fertility needed in modern agri- business. Human agriculture can be either of these, or—in interesting cases like the aforementioned Maya—a modular hybrid of the two.

In a real sense, the grains that Scott credits as being a significant part of the early state are not what are at issue. What is at issue is that these plants are grown through counteractive-

46 perturbative relationships with humans. And the subsistence strategies Scott notes as being state resistant—broad-spectrum foraging, swidden agriculture, and pastoralism—are all counteractive- relocation. The way these two assemblages “carry on”—that is to say co-create the conditions that allow them to inhabit the same space (Ingold, 2015)—are inherently different. Not just because of the particular plants and animals involved but because the internal arrangement of them opens or shuts possible ways of inhabiting the world. Counteractive-relocation niches are inherently schizo-nomadic (Deleuze and Guittari, 1980), which is to say, able to break-off, split, aggregate, and then disaggregate at will, in part because they are necessarily short-lived. In short, what is at stake is not the litany of plants and animals from which authoritative structures are assembled, but the ways constitutive parts of a subsistence assemblage respond to one another and whether or not they can reproduce top-down hierarchies. Or, to the point of this dissertation, how the social relations between people are also embedded into a constructed niche.

4.C: Niche Construction, Animals, and Political Possibility

The kind of relationships Maya peoples have with their agricultural plants has further consequences for how they relate to animals. An overwhelming majority of animals consumed by the pre-Colonial Maya were ostensibly wild species. These animals all have their own environmental preferences, and these preferences follow lines of flight open—or closed as the case may be—by human niche construction. In the lowland tropical forests, some animals, i.e., the White-Tailed Deer, prefer heavily disturbed ecologies associated with overly swiddened land and near-site counteractive agriculture (Nowak, 1999). In fact, the very reason White-Tailed

Deer are in the humid tropics of the Petén is precisely because of the niches created for them by humans (Quintana-Ascencio et al., 1996). On the other hand, some animals, i.e., the Brocket

Deer, have strong preferences for mature forests. As a result, humans are more likely to

47 encounter them further from aggregated centers. Thus, in the case of these two Cervids, one animal has a more definite preference for landscapes of human counteractive-perturbation, while the other does not. And, the more disaggregated people are—the more their subsistence can be characterized by counteractive-relocation—the more likely they are to encounter animals like the

Brocket Deer.

Because animal behaviors predispose them to particular kinds of human niches, they make as good a proxy as plants when trying to determine how much Maya peoples are relying on infield or outfield agriculture—that is to say, counteractive-perturbation as opposed to counteractive-relocation. But more importantly, the human niches preferred by animals are not just ecological niches but also political ones. Just as some plants are more susceptible to expropriation, some animals are more inclined to landscapes made by human investment in fixed agricultural landscapes. And, more importantly, some animals are more likely to be encountered by people living with highly mobile, long fallow time swidden subsistence.

Going back to Chapter 2, it seems that the Maya were, in part, aware of this. Animals most associated with statecraft include ones like the White-Tailed Deer (Pohl, 1985) and the wetland reptiles—turtles and crocodiles—also related to counteractive wetland agriculture. And animals sometimes reared in a semi-domesticated way, such as the rabbit, are depicted as courtly attendants or cultural heroes. Indeed, the ancient Maya seems to make a direct association with many of these animals and Classic Maya statecraft. The exceptions seem to be charismatic animals like the predatory felines and human-like primates, animals that are often a stand-in for humans themselves in mythology because of their human-like appearance or—in the case of the jaguar—their humanlike predatory behavior (see more comprehensive discussion: Viveiros de

Castro, 1998; 2015; Kohn, 2014).

To operationalize this position, we must compare what happens at Mensabak to other

Maya groups who were not the subjects of dominate authoritarian projects. DeFrance and

Hanson’s (2008) work at the site Ek Balam makes an excellent case study to this effect. The site of Ek Balam was under direct Spanish control, including restrictions to mobility and increased labor demands. The Ek Balam assemblage was unusual in that the major animals in it included primarily domesticates, including European ones like chickens and the domestic pig. These, of course, make sense as these are animals of the state, but more interesting about Ek Balam is which indigenous animals continued to be part of the assemblage. DeFrance and Hanson note that dog becomes the number one contributor to the colonial assemblage, while deer and peccary drop off dramatically. Likewise, aquatic reptiles fall out of the assemblage despite the close water sources where they are abundant. Instead, the indigenous animals that people consume are increasingly small nocturnal pest animals. DeFrance and Hanson note these animals as being abundant because they are easily caught near the site. With regards to my thesis the reason these animals are important is that they prefer near site disturbance niches, and in NCT would represent an increased reliance on the infield.

The point, in the end, is that the niches animals occupy are not a random assortment of resources distributed across a landscape, but a co-produced world. And, more importantly, a world that maps with the terrain of human political possibilities, not over or under it. Both statecraft and domination avoidance in the Maya area involves the rearrangement of the relationships between plants in ways that change people’s relationships with uncultivated forest.

These landscapes affect what animals will be available for hunting. Moreover, these relationships are not only ecological in the traditional sense of the word but are also the ideological redeployment of a Maya cosmology in which relatability, personhood, and the self are all

49 flexible. This is important because it means that differences in Maya faunal assemblages are not epiphenomenon. Maya people did not consider the political possibilities of flight and disaggregation alone and let the relationships with the forest come second. This is the point of this dissertation’s lengthy treatment of the environment and Maya cosmology: that when we dig up changes in use of fauna we are not just digging up the residues of different niches utilized by

Maya peoples. We are also exhuming the residues of an ideological deployment of Maya cosmology. These two phenomena are as inseparable in the archaeological record as they were in

Maya cosmology.

Chapter 5: Excavation and Data Recording Methodology

5: Abstract

This section introduces Lake Mensabak and summarizes the archaeological excavations conducted at six sites on the lake from the years 2010 to 2014. The purpose of this section is to demonstrate variability between the Mensabak sites in both chronological occupation and overall size and influence. Additionally, this section is intended to demonstrate that archaeological recovery methods were similar at all sites, and therefore their associated faunal assemblages are comparable.

5.A: Survey Methodology

Excavations and surveys around Lake Mensabak targeted Terminal Postclassic and

Protohistoric sites. Lacandon informants, who lived in the town of Mensabak, largely guided the survey methodology. Most of the informants were either informal tour guides or park rangers; both professions involved prolonged amounts of time in the forests surrounding the lakes. But previously, their fathers and grandfathers had houses and milpa plots around the lake. Moreover, some members of the Mensabak community still make ritual use of the lakes’ many archaeological sites. This methodology heavily skewed the sample of sites to be the ones nearest to the upland peninsulas around the lake and rock-shrine/burials located near cliff faces. In addition to relying on Lacandon informants, the project also surveyed the lakeside during years when the lake level was abnormally low. This pedestrian survey identified sites associated with concentrations of artifacts on their associated beaches. Identified sites were mapped using a total station. Other larger features, like canals, modified ponds, and walls, were sometimes mapped using a GPS. This digital data was stored in ArcGIS and processed to create maps of individual sites (for detailed results see: Etds. Deeb et al., 2011, Núñez Ocampo and Good 2013).

From 2012-2014 excavations were conducted at seven sites: Tzibana (TZ), Los

Oloras/Kéchem (LO), El Mirador (EM), La Punta (LP), Ixtabay (IX), Mensabak (MT), and Sak

Tat (ST). Two of these sites, MT and ST, were rock-shrines where human remains were interred starting in the Postclassic up until recent modern history. Similarly, the El Mirador Mountain also contained pilgrimage shrines that have been used in recent history. The other sites were all habitation sites with a varying mixture of domestic and ritual structures. Excavations at the rock- shrines were conducted using a grid that was broken into special deposits when complete burials were uncovered (Cucina and Chi Keb, 2011). The habitation sites, however, were all subjected to systematic test pit excavations (Etds. Deeb et al., 2011; Edts. Juarez et al., 2013).

Test pit excavations around Lake Mensabak focused on answering three primary research questions initially pursued by Palka (Eds. Deeb et al., 2011; Palka et al., 2006). First, when were the sites occupied, and for how long? What connections did Protohistoric Maya peoples have outside of Chiapas? How did changes in the Maya world impact protohistoric Maya in this rural place? How did cultural changes and continuities lead to the origins of Lacandon Maya culture?

And, what faunas were being consumed by pre-Historic Maya people living around Lake

Mensabak? These goals meant that test pits were primarily located in one of two contexts. First, test pits to test chronology were placed in plaza groups or adjacent structures. Secondly, test pits were placed near spaces commonly used for the disposal of refuse—the edges of platforms and near the lake. These contexts were dated using either a relative ceramic chronology established at

Mensabak (Núñez Ocampo, 2012) or direct radiocarbon dating.

5.B: Excavation Methodology

The sources for the faunal assemblage analyzed in this dissertation were five sites surrounding Lake Mensabak; all were excavated between the years 2010 to 2014. Several

52 archaeologists, the project directors, the author, and a team of Lacandon from the town of

Mensabak excavated all of the sites (Etds. Deeb et al., 2011; Edts. Juarez et al., 2013). Though many people were involved in these excavations, all were conducted using the same methodology, recorded data using the same form-structure, and targeted the same kinds of contexts.

Data recording at Mensabak used a modified form structure adopted from an op-subop type form structure hybrid of the Petexbatun Project (Palka, 1997), a previous Peten Lacandon

Project (Palka, 2005), and the Chan Project in Belize (Robin, 2004). This form structure presents units in the following manner and contains each of the following forms for every excavated stratum: Operation, Sub-operation, Unit, Level, and Context. Together, these forms constituted the specific names of each unit in the following order Operation(Number).Sub-

Operation(Letter).Unit(Number).Level(number)—thus, the first unit in this series was written

1.A.1.1. This methodology is redundant, forcing pertinent information from lower orders to be repeated on higher-level forms. Overall, this method of recording served to condense the information on key forms while preserving detailed observations on lower-order forms.

In the project form structure, the highest level of analysis is the peration. Operations were arbitrary designations given to all excavations conducted at a given site in a given year.

Fundamentally, operations were generally designated based on the following: who was excavating, what site they were excavating at, and when they conducted excavations. This form contained the following information: the year of the excavation, the site, the names of all involved supervisors and crew members, the number of sub-operations inside of the operation, a description of the findings, and a Harris Matrix.

Beneath the level of the Operation is the Sub-Operation. The Sub-Operation, in general, distinguished between observable parts of the site. This distinction is arbitrary and based on a site’s topographic layout. Generally, a Sub-Operation will be an observable feature (e.g., shoreline, a series of canals, or a group of structures sharing a plaza). Because these designations are based on subjective expectations of the excavator, they are arbitrary. These forms contain the following information: an informal map of the designated area, a description of the area and the reason for its designation, a list of all units in the Sub-Operation, a list of contexts in the Sub-

Operation, a list of special artifacts designated in the field, a list of all samples taken from the

Sub-Operation, and a list of every mapped datum associated with this feature.

Units are designations for the smallest possible amount of horizontal space excavated.

Generally, units were arbitrary two-meter by two-meter squares. However, on some occasions, smaller units of one by two meters or one by one meter were also designated. The unit form contained the following information: the reason for unit designation, a list of adjacent units, a list of contexts in the unit, a list of all special artifacts, a list of all soil samples, a list of all types of artifacts found in the unit, a list of all levels in the unit, and a count of how many buckets of soil were removed from the unit.

The most numerous forms recording data at Mensabak were the level forms. One level form was filled out for every vertical level of excavations inside of every unit. Generally, levels were excavated in arbitrary 10 cm but could be larger or smaller if the archaeologist detected a change in matrix. These are the most detailed forms, and they contain information such as depths below datum, number of buckets, names of supervisors and excavators, types and numbers of artifacts recovered, descriptions of the unit, informal pictures, lists of equipment used, contexts in the level, features in the level, and a list of all soil and radio-carbon samples taken.

In addition to the forms that recorded horizontal context and vertical stratigraphy, individual forms for context were filled out as a means to tie together lot forms between units and sub-operations. These context forms named stratigraphic units based on their structural relationships with other units (e.g., Floor, Fill, Refuse). These forms contain: lists of all units and levels containing a given context, names of all excavators and supervisors who encountered the context, relationships with the surrounding contexts, and the suggested period of the context, based on ceramic chronology or radiocarbon (assessed after laboratory analysis). Ultimately, completion of the context forms formed the basis of all Harris matrices at all sites and allowed data to be comparable between sites.

5.C: Results of Archaeological Investigations

5.C.1: Survey and Lake

Archaeological survey around Lake Mensabak began in 2006 (Palka et al., 2006). These early surveys were mostly informal and relied on Lacandon informants' local knowledge.

Lacandon informants viewed these archaeological sites as emplaced in broader cosmologies of religion and history (Palka, 2014). In many cases, they viewed specific ruins as the houses of pre-Hispanic deities with precontact roots (Boremanse, 1986; McGee, 1990; Palka, 2005). As a result of this methodology, the survey focused on rock shelters with historic and

TABLE II: CALIBRATED AMS DATES

modern human remains and sites with visible masonry architecture, both of which are significant in modern Lacandon cosmology.

From 2012 to 2014, a systematic survey expanded the known occupation at Lake

Mensabak. These surveys discovered several smaller sites, as well as a series of channels and artificial ponds (Núñez Ocampo and Good, 2013; Kestle, 2013). Furthermore, these investigations dug test pits at four of these sites and took a series of radiocarbon dates (TABLE

II). Using these dates as a guideline Núñez Ocampo established a ceramic chronology for the lake sites (Núñez Ocampo, 2012). The conclusion of this research was a basic chronology with

56 three major periods of building: Postclassic 950-1200 CE, Late Postclassic 1200-1400 CE, and

Terminal Postclassic 1400-1500 CE. Within this chronology, four habitation sites were excavated: Tzibana, Ixtabay, Kéchem/Los Olores, and La Punta. In addition to these sites, two rock shelters were also excavated. However, the rock shelters contained few animal remains, so discussion of them will be limited below.

5.C.2: Tzibana

Tzibana was one of the first sites recorded at Lake Mensabak (Sanchez Balderas, 2006).

This site is notable for the presence of large Late Preclassic pyramids. Several structures at this site once had standing walls, though most of the site’s twenty architectural features appeared to be raised platforms for perishable structures. This site also has a wall-like feature running between larger structures on the site’s northern extent (Figure 2). This wall appears to have been a later construction and may indicate a move towards fortification later in the site’s occupation.

The ritual constructions at Tzibana included the largest single pyramidal structure around the lake—in the sites north west—as well as a smaller raised platform with a ramp—in the south east. Though there are 20 basic structures at Tzibana if we add terraces and assumed that individual platforms in plaza groups count as different households then the number of possible habitations at Tzibana jumps to 40. Using Haviland’s (1972) estimate of 5 people per household, then the core area probably only supported a population of about 200, though it is likely there were other, yet un-mapped, perishable houses also associated with the site. Tzibana was primarily excavated in 2011 (Deeb, 2011; Sánchez Balderas, 2011). These excavations opened

14 test pits that focused on plazas and the edges of raised platforms. Their primary goal was to find clear midden structures and provide a relative chronology of construction at the site.

The results of these excavations were: 1- the establishment of an early date for construction (around 1201 CE, calibrated), 2- ceramics indicated occupation until at least the

Late Postclassic, and 3- the recovery of animal bones spanning the period of occupation (n=853,

NSP).

The picture of Tzibana that emerges from these observations suggests that it experienced a significant change in status during the lakes’ later occupation. The relatively early radiocarbon dates (1201 CE calibrated) suggest that it might have been among the first sites constructed at

Mensabak but still firmly a Postclassic occupation. Furthermore, dates from (1359 and 1352 CE, calibrated) suggest that it continued in importance until the Late Postclassic. During this time span, the presence of green obsidian and copper artifacts suggests that the site had connections to the central and western Mexican trade sphere. However, unpublished p-XRF data from the site’s obsidian show additional connections to Guatemala (Deeb, 2010; personal communication), meaning that Tzibana, as well as other sites, may have been an inter-zone, facilitating some trade between the two networks. Ceramics, however, show little evidence of long-distance trade

(Deeb, 2010, personal communications; Núñez Ocampo, 2012), so Tzibana’s place in these networks may have been marginal (possibly by the intention of Tzibana’s inhabitance). By the late Postclassic occupation, there is little evidence for additional ritual construction at Tzibana, however house compound construction continued. By the terminal occupation, it seems likely that neighboring sites eclipsed Tzibana’s ritual importance.

Ritual Structure Tzibana

Ritual Structure Key Excavation 2011 Loote

Structurd eWall Topo-line 1m

Figure 2: Map of Tzibana modified from Good 2013

5.C.3: Ixtabay

Ixtabay was one of the last sites recorded at Mensabak. It was notable for having a unique chronology, as well as several examples of structures with masonry walls. The site was primarily mapped and excavated in 2014. These investigations demonstrated that the site had sixty-nine architectural features, most of which were either platforms for perishable structures or masonry walls for perishable roofs (Figure 3). If we assume that all of these structures are household and use the Haviland’s (1979) 5 persons per household, then Ixtabay is one of the densest sites with a population around 350. This sizable population is interesting because this is also the site with the most permanent standing walls and is directly associated with the nearby ritual center of El

Mirador. Ixtabay itsself does not have any clear ritual context, but it was connected to the mountain top ritual complex El Mirador through a series of terraces. Excavations at Ixtabay included four test pits placed in plazas or the edges of platforms. These test pits did encounter one midden-like feature possibly associated with the original construction at Ixtabay. These test pits established a relative ceramic chronology at the site and acquired a sizable faunal sample

(NSP n=1281).

Ceramics from Ixtabay demonstrated that the major construction of low household platforms was during the Late Postclassic (Núñez Ocampo, 2012). Also noteworthy was the presence of occasional Preclassic ceramics mixed into strata at Ixtabay, suggesting that the construction of the site might have incorporated fill from an earlier occupation. The large buildings and platforms at this site date to the Late Preclassic, and possibly the Early Classic.

The low platforms on the plaza date to the Late Postclassic. The reoccupation of the site has been presented as evidence that Ixtabay may have been part of a pilgrimage complex that predated the major Postclassic occupation of the lake (Palka, 2014). However, the lack of clear architecture

60 associated with only the Preclassic structure on top of El Mirador indicates that there must have been a hiatus between the two periods of occupation.

Boat Launch

Ritual Structure North Plaza Boat Launch

Key Excavations 2013 Structures Terraces Feature Bedrock Feature Cave Collapse Topo-line 1m

Figure 3: Map of Ixtabay, modified from Núñez Ocampo and Good 2013

5.C.4: Kéchem/Los Olores

Kéchem/Los Olores is a peninsular site located on the southwestern shore of the lake.

Original mapping at Los Olores found two wall-like features, two stairs leading up from the lake, one boat launch-like feature, and twelve structures, including a ritual structure built over a cave.

If we assume that both the well-made platforms and the occasional hillside terrace were sites of perishable structures, there are 21 features that might represent habitations. This would give Los

Olores a population of around 110, using Haviland’s (1979) calculations. Furthermore, the ritual feature makes Los Olores the smallest site with clear ritual architecture. In addition to the cave covered by a platform, there is one other cave at Los Olores containing human remains, and a small rock shelter containing an unusual deposit of animal remains (Kestle, 2011). In 2013 additional mapping was done in the Bajo southeast of the site as part of Palka’s canal and fishpond study (Kestle, 2013; Núñez Ocampo and Good, 2013; Palka, 2020). This expanded survey found additional platforms associated with the lakes’ high-water levels, a canal-like system, and some potential human-made ponds (Figure 4). Excavations at Los Olores opened nineteen test pits that intended to establish a chronology, probe midden deposits, and trench through a canal.

The results of these excavations concluded: 1- Major construction at Los Olores started later in the Postclassic (ca. 1335 CE, Calibrated), 2- Los Olores had a midden dating to the

Protohistoric (1507 CE, Calibrated) but most of its occupation would have been during the

Terminal Postclassic, 3- Los Olores was likely dependent on wetland agriculture in the bajo to its southwest, and 4- Los Olores had its own small ritual structures but was not likely a dominant political force in the Mensabak lake system. Los Olores had a robust sample of faunal remains

(NSP n=2135). What is also unique in that it is the only site with a small rock-shrine-like deposit

62 containing exclusively animal bones. This deposit mostly contains the bones from Armadillo and

Paca (NISP n=183). Additionally, Los Olores seems to be one of only two sites in which anthropomorphic ceramic sculpture is common. One possible explanation for Los Olores’ unique features—differential treatment of animals, unusual ceramic artifacts, and the presence of a small ritual structure—might be that the people of Kéchem were later immigrants to the lake, possibly from a different language group or local lineage. These observable phenomena may have indicated a kind of cultural difference compared to other sites and should be considered in the interpretation of Los Olores’ faunal materials.

Los Olores Ritual Structure

Possible Dock

Seasonally Inundated Land

Primary Canal (1) Key Structure

Terrace Spillway (1) Excavation 2013 Spillway (2) Excavation 2011 Canal Pond (1) Eroded Canal Secondary Canal (2) Pond (2) Pond Feature Wall Spillway (3) Stairs Cave Secondary Canal (3) Topo-lines 1m

Figure 4: Map of Los Olores, modified from Kestle 2013

5.C.5: La Punta

The La Punta survey in 2013 found seventy-eight architectural features, including a large raised plaza built onto a modified natural hill. La Punta also had a dock-like feature similar to

Los Olores, which flooded over when the lake levels were at their annual highs (Figure 5). If we assume that all of these structures were habitation, then we get a very large population of almost

400 people—using Haviland’s (1979) estimations. This makes La Punta by far the most densely populated site around Mensabak. La Punta’s size is interesting because it did not have clear ritual structures, pyramid temples, or caves, though a large plaza appears to have been the site of a ritual feast (Palka, 2011). Excavations at La Punta included a series of test pits targeting plaza fill and a midden thought to be associated with feasting (n= 9). These excavations revealed that La

Punta was built up over a relatively short period of time. The oldest radiocarbon dates at La

Punta are 1356 CE (Calibrated), but the midden dates to 1678 CE (Calibrated). However, the period 1600-1700 is a plateau on the oxford calibration curve, meaning dates in this period tend to have wide errors and multiple peaks. Ceramics recovered at La Punta corroborate the radiocarbon dates, most being types associated with the Late Postclassic.

The results of these investigations concluded that: 1- Major construction at La Punta was primarily in the late Postclassic, making it a contemporary of Los Olores, 2- La Punta may have become a major political center, but it was likely not a major ritual center, and 3- a sizeable amount of faunal material is present at La Punta (NSP n= 2996). It is noteworthy that the large faunal sample at La Punta appears to have been accumulated in a single event (Palka, 2011). This suggests that La Punta was a site for a large feast or other gatherings possibly related to the consolidation of political power around the lake. This event would have taken place after

Tzibana was past its prime as a political-economic rival. Interestingly, no pyramids ritual structures are located at La Punta, but one ritual platform was built at Tzibana in the Late

Postclassic, which bears resemblance to the La Punta predominate platform. Overall, this may indicate major shifts in how the people of the lake system related to political and religious authority during the Terminal Late Postclassic, such as a rise in La Punta’s political prominence.

La Punta Key Structure Terrace Feature Wall Collapse Cave Excavation 2013 Excavation 2011 Lake level Topo-line 1m

Main Platform

Possible Dock

Figure 5: Map of La Punta, modified from Palka 2013

5.C.6: Rock-Shrines

Until recently, the modern Lacandon had a very active relationship with burial features such as rock-shrines and caves. These shrines were continually revisited during pilgrimages made by Lacandon men as part of their god house rituals (McGee, 1990; Palka, 2011). In many cases, god-pots that were at the ends of their lives were ritually killed and deposited with the human remains at these sites. Additionally, offerings made at the rock-shrines around the lake often incorporated bones from both recently deceased and disinterred skeletons from the past.

Though the ritual use of the shrines has fallen off in recent generations, these places are still revered. As a result, community permission to engage in archaeological recovery at these sites was granted only for two rock-shrines and only for very limited excavations. Thus, only limited results have been published.

Two rock-shrines and one cave were excavated at Mensabak during the 2012 to 2013 field seasons: Sak Tat and a cave found under structure 3 at Los Olores/Kéchem. Excavations of these features primarily focused on the recovery of human remains. Radiocarbon dating found internments from 1650 at Sak Tat. Burial goods were infrequent with the remains, but one faunal element, a carved ulna from a large felid, was included as a burial good in Sak Tat (Figure 6).

This artifact is somewhat reminiscent of a scepter and exhibits polish on its distal end suggesting frequent handling. This artifact associated with an early internment might indicate that early on, the rock shelters were originally spaces for the burial of important individuals. However, by the nineteenth century, the direct ancestors of the modern Lacandon were using the sites.

Figure 6: Modeled Field Ulna from the Sak Tat burial

5.D: Cross-Site Comparisons

Before discussing the differences between the Mensabak sites, it should be noted that despite their differences Lake Mensabak was likely in a precarious position regionally. For one, at this time the Chontal Maya were an active and bellicose presence in the lake region (Scholes and Roys, 1948). This group was actively expanding in their activities and may be part of why some sites had defensible layouts. The Chontal were likely perusing the same ends as the Aztec in the region, who were actively making roads and trade routes to connect themselves with the southern region of Xoconocho (Navarrete, 1978). The region was a major port of trade and a tributary responsible for cacao production (Voorhies, 1989). Thus, the differences seen between the sites of Mensabak during the late Postclassic should be understood in the context of the threat of possible violence regionally, as the migratory effects such conditions often have.

Excavations at Mensabak resulted in several general observations about the area’s demographic history. First, the general chronology at the lake includes evidence of major occupation around the Preclassic, Postclassic, and Protohistoric, with only periodic ritual use during the interim. Preclassic ceramics were found in lesser quantities than Late Postclassic ceramics. And when recorded, they were generally mixed with ceramics from other periods, suggesting that Preclassic occupations around Mensabak were small and primarily mixed into the building projects of the Protohistoric. The Preclassic exception being, the large temple mounds around the lake and on Mirador Mountain. It is also important to note the overall absence of a clear Classic Period occupation around the lake. Some minimal numbers of ceramics that could be from this period were recovered at Ixtabay (Núñez Ocampo, 2012). But in general, there is little evidence of a Classic Period occupation at other lakeside sites. Finally, it seems that all the major sites excavated between 2012 and 2014 had their earliest constructions during the Late

Postclassic period. It appears that no major constructions at any site were dated exclusively to the

Protohistoric, though some middens provide evidence of continued occupation dated to this period.

Overall the chronology suggests a shift over time. Early in the Preclassic, the site near the lake was likely at Ixtabay, which is located closest to a mountain with significance as a pilgrimage site. But occupation was likely concentrated away from the lake at another site, Noh

K’uh (Palka, 2011). Later the lake was reoccupied in the Postclassic, with Tzibana being the primary focus of the initial occupation. Then, during the Protohistoric less evidence of occupation was found at Tzibana. While in the meantime, Kéchem built is own religious structure, and La Punta began hosting feasting events.

Though there is some variation in the overall occupation of sites at Mensabak, other factors remain relatively consistent between the sites. First, the general construction of all sites tended to favor steep karst hills on peninsulas around the lake. In some cases, it seems that ritual structures and raised platforms are mostly just modified natural features. Notably, sites with earlier importance—Ixtabay and Tzibana—were built very close to natural features that have cosmological significance to this day. Other sites with later major occupations were built on peninsulas and often had several defensive features associated with them. All sites, including the ones with early importance, have defensive features, but it seems like more than just defensibility was at play in the sites with ritual components with Preclassic origins.

Another important observation is that sites generally disposed of animal remains in one of two ways: by incorporating them in fill or by tossing them over hills into the lake flood zone.

Flood zone middens were found at the sites of La Punta, Los Olores/Kéchem, and Ixtabay.

Additionally, because major construction at Mensabak was largely contemporaneous, it means that all animal remains recovered from these sites were likely deposited at around the same time and exposed to similar post-depositional environments. This pattern is important because it means all middens at all sites experienced similar post-depositional taphonomic processes. Thus, though occupation at Mensabak was varied, faunal remains from the sites excavated between

2012 and 2014 are all part of a comparable larger sample.

Chapter 6: Analysis and Quantification of Faunal Remains

6: Abstract

The following section intends to explain how faunal remains were identified, coded, counted, and categorized. This section explicitly explains some of the basic derived techniques commonly used in the analysis of faunal remains as well as lists the identified taxa from this analysis. This section introduces species found in the Mensabak assemblage based on their predisposition towards infield or outfield agriculture. There is also discussion of known cosmological significances of some animals when relevant. The point of arranging species this way, rather than in regular taxonomic order, is to act as a helpful guide that relates species to the ideological deployment of Maya cosmology. Here the ideological deployment is seen as both the infield-outfield relationships between animals and Maya subsistence, as well as the specific relationships between some animals and Maya cosmology.

6.A: Analysis

Excavated material was compared to collections housed at the Chicago Field Museum, a type collection on loan from Autonomous University of Yucatan (UADY), published digital collections, published photo guides (Arce Chavez, 2009; France, 2009; Gilbert, 1990; Gilbert et al., 1996; Olsen, 1968; 1982), taxonomic reference guides (McKenna and Bell, 1997; Miller et al., 2005; Reid, 2009; Van Perlo, 2006), and an unpublished photo collection amassed by the author.

Remains were identified to the most specific taxonomic level possible. When an element could not be identified to the level of the species, then the narrowest possible taxonomic category was used. At the most general level, elements were at least identified to a generic Phylum.

Elements were then identified, sided, and counted (for a detailed description of coding methods,

71 see Appendix B). In some cases, this meant that some closely related species were difficult to disambiguate. One taxon, the two species of turkey, presented a problem for the Niche Fidelity analysis (Chapter 8) because they had very different environmental preferences. However, these species could be combined so that the ambiguous specimens would not skew the final results in any particular direction (see Chapter 8 for explanation).

Once elements were identified and tabulated, they were quantified using the following standard methods: number of identified specimens present (NISP), minimum number of individuals (MNI), and Total Bone Weight. Each method has its advantages and constraints and should be considered together when possible (Grayson, 1984; Lyman, 2008). The following chapters use both methods, but because the sample size is an issue in many meta-analyses, NISP was often preferred.

NISP—number of identified specimens—is the most straightforward counting methodology. This method involves counting every single identified example to each taxon.

Elements that cannot be assigned to genus or species categories are counted representing the most specific taxonomic level possible or are counted as an unidentified bone. The major advantage of this method is it creates a much larger sample size (total NISP for all sites was n=7270). This larger sample size is an advantage for some statistical analysis. But the major disadvantage of this method is every bone is counted as if it was an independently assorted variable. This assumption has several drawbacks. First, this method inflates the importance of species with more bones (Grayson, 1984). Secondly, larger animals with more fragmentary bones will be better represented in a sample’s NISP (Grayson, 1984). Finally, because fragmentation creates larger NISP counts, intra-site comparison can be difficult unless the sites were subjected to similar taphonomic processes (Lyman, 1994). For the following analysis, NISP

72 is the preferred counting methodology for Niche Fidelity analysis (Chapter 8). This is because it was the methodology that increases sample size and has the fewest opportunities to introduced analytical biases (Emery, 2004; 1999; 2016). Furthermore, this methodology was considered ideal for the study of epiphyseal fusion (Chapter 9) because it maintained the largest possible sample size, and because it gives consideration to multiple kinds of elements. For comparing relative frequencies of fauna, % - NISP was used (Chapter 7). This statistic, % - NISP, was calculated by dividing the species of interests’ NISP by the total identifiable specimens at a given site. Note that this calculation was made excluding elements that could not be identified to a level better than Order. This method of calculation could potentially inflate the representation of rare species. But, because the percentage of the assemblage that was too fragmented to identify to a level better than Order was similar between all sites, any biases brought in by this method were likely similar between sites. Thus the results of this method are comparable between sites.

MNI—Minimum number of individuals—is a derived statistic intended to correct the issue of independent assortment. This statistic calculates the minimal number of individual animals that could have created an assemblage. There are several ways that this statistic can be derived (Grayson, 1984; Lyman, 2008). Generally, all of these methodologies involve first identifying remains to a specific taxon, element, and side to see which element/side/portion is most abundant, then counting that element to represent the entire taxon. As mentioned above, in the Mensabak assemblage, several species could not always be disambiguated (e.g., Turkeys—

Meleagris galopavo and Meleagris ocellata—Peccaries—Pecari tajacu and Tayassu pecari— and several species of Turtles). In these cases a higher taxon including both ambiguous species was used. In most cases, these conflations would have little impact on the Niche Fidelity analysis

73 because fidelity data was assigned to the ambiguous category that included the habits of both species averaged against one another. In the study of epiphyseal fusion, only Peccaries were included, and all specimens of both species were simply combined into a single taxon to avoid confusion. Ultimately, this method effectively deals with the issue of independent assortment, but it does introduce several new biases into a sample. First, MNI inflates the importance of species that have fewer elements (Grayson, 1984; Lyman, 1994). Secondly, this method inflates the value of rare taxa (Grayson, 1984:49). Because of these issues, it is best to present both NISP and MNI together. However, NISP is the primary count used in the derived analysis because it is not a derived statistic (see Chapter 8 for further discussion). And, because the research question at hand is about the overall environmental use—rather than life histories of specific animals—

NISP alone is an adequate measure. MNI, however, is considered an important statistic when comparing sites to one another (Chapter 7). Therefore, it was considered as part of the discussion of specific (not necessarily environmental) animal preferences between sites. Much like NISP, the data presented in Chapter 7 also relied on “% - MNI” as a comparative statistic. Because

MNI was already calculated excluding specimens that could not be identified to a better level than Order, the % - MNI could be calculated by simply dividing a species MNI by the total MNI for the sample.

This study also includes the combined weight for a given taxon. Needless to say, weight artificially inflates the overall abundance of the largest animals at a site. Thus, weight totals do not directly represent the abundance or frequency of a species in any way. The reason for weight’s inclusion is as a simple proxy for biomass (Casteel, 1978; Reed, 1963; White, 1953).

Though numerous middle range theory publications have provided more intricate means of calculating biomass (Casteel, 1978; Reed, 1963; White, 1953), the general conclusion is that

74 calculations must be done differently for each taxon and only after repeated ethnoarchaeological experimentation. In this study, such experimentation was deemed impractical for two reasons.

First, one of these experiments on its own could suffice as a dissertation. And, such study is impractical because there are many rare—and in some cases endangered—taxa included in the

Mensabak sample. Thus, raw weight was used as a practical proxy for raw biomass. In this study, raw weight is presented because the research question at hand asks how much people are utilizing particular niches, and arrogated biomass is a better indicator of how much a particular niche contributes to the overall diet. But weight is only intended to add nuance to the discussion of NISP for each assemblage. Weight is not the quantification method used in Fidelity Analysis

(see Chapter 8 for further discussion).

6.B: Note on the Absence of Shellfish in the Analysis

Shellfish make up a reasonable portion of the Mensabak faunal assemblage. However, the dominant species, Jute Pachychilus spp., are fundamentally incomparable with vertebrates of all sizes. The first reason for this problem revolves around the law of independent assortment. The significant species of shellfish found at Mensabak is a variety of Pachychilus spp. with a single element. Thus one element always represents a single specimen. In the case of NISP, this dramatically deflates the value of Pachychilus spp. relative to other multi-boned species. In the calculation of MNI, this dramatically inflates the importance of Pachychilus spp. Pachychilus spp. is also left out of the discussion of weight because the density of shell is much greater than bone, meaning that Pachychilus spp. will crowd out all other species. There are published studies on estimating the biomass of Pachychilus spp. (Emery, 1989). However, because no such estimations were used to calculate biomass for vertebrates, it is unwise to use these estimates for one and not others because one would be effectively comparing meat weight to bone weight.

The absence of Pachychilus spp. is unlikely to affect the final derived statistics used in

Chapters 8 and 9. This is because the focus of this study revolves around the distinction between infield and outfield. Pachychilus spp. being a river and stream species cannot be attributed to either of these environments. Ethnographically today, most Pachychilus spp. are caught at the mouth of the river feeding the Mensabak system. But they are also harvested from the canals, aguadas, and streams found all over the region. Thus, because of their distribution across the landscape, their absence should have minimal effect on this study's intended objective.

6.C: Major Contributors to the Sample

Rather than present the major species in the Mensabak assemblage by their normal taxonomic relationships (TABLE III – TABLE V), I have opted to present them based on their relationship to Maya agriculture. As discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, Postclassic and Protohistoric

Maya agriculture is a combination of infield and outfield agriculture. Though similar plants can be associated with either of these strategies, both strategies have different effects on animal populations. It is important to note that no animal strictly relies on either of these two environments, but rather the probabilities of humans encountering them goes up or down with one environment or the other.

Associations with infields and outfields were made based on published materials and observations made by Lacandon informants who live in the modern village of Mensabak. In some cases, animals had specific research on them that demonstrate their propensity for proximity to near-site agriculture (Cervids- Bitetti et al., 2008, White et al., 2004; Canids- White et al., 2004; Large Fields- Varadez Azua, 2009); in other cases, more general publications had to be used (Alvarez and Villalobos, 1998; Emery, 1999; Hamblin, 1984; Miller, 2005; Nowak,

1999; Olsen, 1968; Perlo, 2006; Reid, 2009; Schlesinger, 2001). These assessments by specific species can be found in Appendix D.

6.C.1: Major Infield Taxon

6.C.1.a: Mammals

Within orders Rodent and Lagomorpha, small rodents associated with human habitation and domesticated cottontail rabbits (Sylvilagus spp.) are both considered infield species. Of these two, there is ample evidence that the rabbit is associated with healing and the Moon deity (Millar and Taube, 1993), and it’s often depicted as a courtly scribe on Classic Maya vases (no. 511 in

Kerr and Coe, 1989). The large rodent Dasyprocta punctata (Agouti) is loosely associated with infields, as this species can be found in peri-urban environments today (Reid, 2009).

Of the two species of Cervidae found at Mensabak Odocoileus virginianus (White-Tailed

Deer) has the strongest associations with infield agriculture. These deer are generally, though not exclusively, disturbance preferring browsers. However, they do use fallow milpa—associated with outfields—as refugia. Iconographically, this animal has a special place in Maya cosmology.

They were commonly used in rituals associated with calendric events (Schele, 1984; Von Nagy,

1997). Calendric cycles controlled the trapping and hunting of deer (Vail, 1997). And, there are ethnohistoric accounts of people nursing orphaned deer to adulthood (Landa, 2000). To this last point, stable carbon isotope studies have demonstrated that sacrificial deer had corn heavy diets

(White and Pohl et al., 2004), implying that they were raised or brought to maturity in infield agricultural space. For this last reason, Odocoileus virginianus is included in the list of major infield taxa.

One species of Canidae is associated with infields and villages, Canis familiaris, the domestic dog. Examples of Canis familiaris are rare, NISP=6, but 13% of all NSP at Mensabak

77 exhibit some chewing from medium-sized animals, likely dogs. The discrepancy between the numbers of identifiable Canis familiaris remains alongside circumstantial evidence of their role as bone accumulators suggests that they were not consumed the same way as other animals. Or, at the least, their entry into the faunal assemblage followed a different waste-stream than other animals.

The nine-banded armadillo, Dasypus novemcinctus, is another common disturbance preferring species found in the Mensabak assemblage. This species is widespread, making up some 12% of the total NISP and 7% of the total bone weight, and appears to have been consumed at similar rates in both the Terminal Postclassic and the Protohistoric.

5.C.1.b: Fish

Though fish, Osteichthyes, are not technically related to agriculture, the lakeside occupations at Mensabak make them a de facto near-site resource. The role of these animals in the Historic era Maya diets are attested to in both historical accounts (Villagutierre Soto-Mayor,

1983:40,84 and 305-306) and archaeology (deFrance and Hanson, 2008; Hamblin, 1984).

Unfortunately, the Mensabak assemblage contains very few fish, NISP=4 from two families,

Aridae and Cichlidae. The scarcity of fish is likely due to two factors. First, recovery at used

1/8th-inch screens, which, though better than ¼ inch screens, still drastically reduced the number of small animal bones recovered. Second, modern Lacandon tend to consume fish whole if they are small, and/or feed the bones of larger fish to household animals. These digested bones are very unlikely to make their way into the archaeological record (Wheeler and Jones, 1989). What is important to remember is that these two factors are likely affecting all parts of the Mensabak assemblage equally.

6.C.1.c: Reptiles

Like fish, the reptiles present in the Mensabak assemblage are not strictly considered infield preferring species. Still, because many of the species present are associated with the lake, the analysis will consider them as near village resources. The most common species of reptiles in the Mensabak assemblage are almost all freshwater turtles, Dermatemys mawii, Kinosternon acutum, Kinosternon leucostomum, Malaclemys terrapin, Staurotypus triporcatus, Trachemyss scripta, and the Moreleti Crocodile, Crocodylus moreletii. Both turtles and crocodiles have cosmological significance, the latter with long count endings, and the former with animal sacrifices (Landa, 2000).

6.C.2: Major Outfield Taxon

6.C.2.a: Mammals

The one species of Rodentia considered to have associations with outfield environments is the Cuniculus paca (Paca), which in superficial appearance is very similar to the infield associated Agouti. However, unlike the Agouti, the Paca prefers densely forested spaces further from human habitation.

Of the two species of Cervidae found at Mensabak, the Mazama Americana (Brocket

Deer) is more associated with outfield agriculture. This deer prefers rugged karst uplands, and modern Lacandon lists it as a common pest animal in milpas. Iconographically, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish this animal from the White-Tailed Deer, though the two have been recognized with different names in ancient Maya texts (Macri and Vail, 2009; Vail, 1997).

Furthermore, there is evidence that White-Tailed Deer were occasionally raised to maturity

(White et al., 2001), but there is as yet no evidence for this practice with Brocket Deer. Thus, it remains difficult to say if raising Brocket Deer to maturity occurred as it did for the White-Tailed

Deer. It seems likely orphaned Brocket Deer were raised to adulthood, but given the animal’s preferences it is less likely that they were encouraged to live in infields.

Tapirus bairdii is the rarest species from Ungulata at Mensabak. Though it is rare (about

1% of NISP), its bulk makes it a notable species by weight (7% of identified specimen weight).

This species has been subjected to a considerable amount of radio collar research, which has demonstrated its preference for undisturbed jungle habitat as refugia. However, it will graze in recently fallowed milpa land (Foester and Vaughan, 2002; Trolle et al., 2008). These habits make it largely a species associated with outfield agriculture.

All three species of Felidae found in the Mensabak assemblage are considered outfield preferring species: Panthera onaca, Felis concolor, and an unidentified small feline (likely

Herpailurus yagouaroundi or Leopardus pardalis). Though bones from Felidae are rare, they are present at all sites. It is more likely they were consumed for ritual purposes than as food. This assertion is supported by first: an unusual taphonomic treatment that caused 100% of identifiable

Felidae bones to be burned, and second: an example of a Panthera onaca ulna that was carved and deposited in one rock-shrine burial.

One species of Canidae present at Mensabak is associated with outfields, the grey fox

Urocyon cinereoargenteus. However, overall examples of this taxa are rare (NISP=2). This low sample size means we cannot tell whether these animals were used for pelts or simply consumed for meat.

Although primates are a commonly consumed class of mammal among the modern

Lacandon (McGee, 1990; 2002), the two species found in the Mensabak assemblage, Ateles geoffroyi and Alouatta pigra, are scarce. It is noteworthy that these two animals are common

Lacandon onen (Bruce, 1979). And so, their lack of consumption in the past may have been

80 related to cosmological implications more than availability. The small size of these animals was likely not a factor in their underrepresentation in the Mensabak assemblage because similar-sized mammals, such as the Agouti and Paca, were present in abundance.

6.C.3: Major Taxon with Ambiguous Skeletal Structure

Unfortunately, there are several closely related species in the Mensabak assemblage that have very different ecological preferences. In many cases, the following species cannot be told apart from their closest taxonomic relatives without specific key elements. Or, in some cases, the differences between the two taxa are primarily based on size, but there are many individual specimens that fallout in an overlapping ambiguous size range. Overall, this problem of ambiguous taxa did not have a significant impact on the later analysis; this is for two reasons.

First, many ambiguous taxa, for example, Philander opossum and Didelphis spp. or species in family Procyonidae, are rare in the overall assemblage. The other ambiguous taxa that are common, unfortunately, do have different environmental fidelities. However, they can be put into a blended category for the sake of fidelity analysis, which prevents them from skewing the data. Listed below are the details for several species where the two taxa with similar skeletal structures have notably different environmental preferences.

6.C.3.a: Mammals

The most abundant ambiguous—skeletally—taxa are the two species from the family

Tayassuidae: Pecari tajacu and Tayassu pecari. The differences between the two are difficult to distinguish in much of the post-cranial skeleton (Olsen, 1982). Therefore, when lacking a secure identification, a specimen was simply designated Tayassuidae. Unfortunately, this imprecise designation blends two animals with very different environmental preferences. The significant differences between these two species are that the Tayassu pecari is more social, sometimes

81 living in groups of 40-200 individuals; these larger groups tend to live in more remote primary forest environments (Reid, 2009). The Pecari tajacu, on the other hand, tend to live in much smaller groups and are more likely to spend time in secondary growth forests and recently abandoned agricultural land (Reid, 2009.).

Though two species of Procyonidae (the White Nosed Coati and the Raccoon) are present in modern Mensabak, only one, the White-Nosed Coati Nasua narica, has been identified in the

Mensabak assemblage. The place of these animals in Maya land use is very ambiguous because the White-Nosed Coati is a highly intelligent and behaviorally adaptive species. Modern

Lacandon report that large groups of Nasua narica can occasionally destroy distant milpas. But, large groups of these animals are also known to live in modern urban and peri-urban spaces

(Reid, 2009).

The two marsupials found at Mensabak, Philander opossum and Didelphis spp., are also behaviorally adaptive generalists. Modern Lacandon report both as major agricultural pests, but they are not always consumed after being killed. But, for the sake of environmental reconstruction, the similar niche preferences between the two mean that using a more generic designation will not have an adverse effect on the following analysis.

6.C.3.b: Birds

A majority of the identified birds in the Mensabak assemblage were Galiforms,

Meleagris gallopavo, Meleagris ocellata, and Ortalis vetula. Of these birds, the two turkeys,

Meleagris spp., have very different environmental preferences. The domestic turkey, Meleagris gallopavo, is associated with the near village and infield agriculturem whereas the oscillated turkey, Meleagris ocellata, is associated with deeper forest and uses fallow swidden fields for

82 refugia. The problem is that distinguishing between the bones of these two birds is often difficult, and many specimens could not be assigned to either species.

6.C.4: Notably Absent or Rare Animals

There are many animals common to the Chiapas lowlands that are known to have been used by Maya at other sites but are notably absent (or extremely rare) in the Mensabak sample.

The reasons for these animals’ exclusion are difficult to explain but should be noted. Firstly, several of the taxa that are mentioned above are rare in the overall assemblage, including large felids, both species of monkey, dogs, and Muscovy Ducks. The generally paucity of large felids is not a surprise, as noted above this was a ritually significant animal and not something one would expect to encounter often. Monkey, however, is unusual. Modern Lacandon are known to consume them, though there may be ritual taboos on their consumption depending on ones’

Onen. It’s difficult to extrapolate a general lakewide taboo on their consumption, but their unusual rarity should be noted. The extreme rarity of Muscovy Duck is also confounding, as it is one of the few well known domesticates found in the sample. Moreover, the lake side sites would be the ideal place to maintain a population of this domestic. Though the reason for this animal’s relative rarity is difficult to say, it and other domesticated—note I do not say tamed—animals could be related to this dissertation’s overall thesis, that people living on the lake actively maintained an “illegible” portion of their subsistence. Unfortunately, to say such would be premature with the data at hand. Finally, the rarity of dog is also interesting. Dog, unlike the

Muscovy Duck, was a domesticated animal that did blur the line between human and animal in significant ways. As mentioned above, dogs are known to gain human-like qualities through interaction with humans. It is also interesting that evidence of dogs chewing bones are present at the sites, meaning they were present but not disposed of like other animals.

In addition to the unusual rarity of some taxa, the absence of others is noteworthy. First, that no species of amphibian were identifiable is unusual. There is one species of frog,

Rhinophrynus dorsalis, which is generally identified as edible and a preferred food. Its absence in the assemblage is likely the product of the same taphonomic processes operating on fish, mentioned above. Generally, this animal is consumed whole, including bones. Also noteworthy is the general lack of snakes. The only two examples of snake present in the assemblage are both constrictors; no venomous snake bones were recovered even though they are an occasional ritual species found at other sites (Hamblin 1984). Another species with ritual connotations absent in

Mensabak are bats. No species of Chiroptera were present, though it is a known ritual class of animal. Overall, it is difficult to say what of these absent animals was a product of their mode of consumption versus their ritual status. But what can be said is that they represent some unusual patterns unique to the Lake Mensabak system as a whole.

Class Order Family Genus species Common Name Didelphis spp. Large Opossum Didelphimorphia Didelphidea Philander opossum Four-eyed Opossum Marmosa alstoni Alston's mouse opossum Tamandua Pilosa Myrmecophagidae Anteater mexicana Dasypus Cingulata Dasypodidae Nine-Banded Armadillo novemcinctus N/a Unknown: New World Monkey Primates Alouatta pigra Howler Monkey Atelidae Ateles geoffroyi Spider Monkey Lagomorpha Leporidae Sylvilagus spp. Cottontail Rabbit Geomyidae Orthogeomys spp. Gophers Myodonta N/a Unknown: Small Rodents

Rodentia N/a Unknown Large Rodent Cavioidea Cuniculus paca Spotted Paca Mammalia Dasyprocta Agouti punctata Urocyon Grey Fox cinereoargenteus Canidae Canis familiaris Domestic Dog

Carnivora N/a Unknown Canide Procyonicae Nasua narica Coati N/a Unknown: Cat Felidae Puma concolor Puma, Mountain Lion Perissodactyla Tapiridae Tapirus bairdii Baird's Tapir Collared Peccary or White-Lipped N/a Peccary Tayassuidae Pecari tajacu Collared Peccary Artiodactyla Tayassu pecari White-Lipped Peccary N/a Unknown Deer Cervidae Mazama americana Red Brocket Deer Odocoileus White-Tailed Deer virginianus

TABLE III: TAXONOMIC REPRESENTATION ALL MENSABAK, 1 OF 3

Class Order Family Genus species Common Name Phalacrocorax Phalacrocoracidae Double-crested Cormorant Suliformes auritus Anhingidae Anhinga anhinga Darter Unknown: Ducks, Geese, Swans Dendrocygna Anseriformes Anatidae Whistling Duck discolors Cairina moschata Moscovy Duck Aves Pheasants, Chickens, Turkeys Ortalis vetula Chakalaka Cracidae Penelope Guana purpurascens Galliform Meleagris spp. Turkey Meleagris Phasianidae Domestic Turkey gallopavo Meleagris ocellata Ocellated Turkey Staurotypus Mexican Musk Turtle triporcatus Kinosternon Tabasco Mud Turtle acutum Kinosternoidea Kinosternon White-Lipped Mud Turtle leucostomum Dermatemys mawii Central American River Turtle Testudines Dermatemys spp. Unknown: River Turtle Testudinidae Unknown: Tortuous Unknown: "Pond" or "Marsh" Turtles Malaclemys Sliders Reptiles Emydidae terrapin Trachemyss scripta Trachemys spp. Sliders Crocodylus spp. Unknown Crocodile Crocodilia Crocodylidae Crocodylus Morelet's Crocodile moreletii Unknown: Anoles, Common Basilisk,

Iguanidae Iguanas Squamata Anolis spp. Anole Boidae Boa constrictor Common Boa Colubridae Various non-venomous snakes

TABLE IV: TAXONOMIC REPRESENTATION ALL MENSABAK, 2 OF 3

Genus Family Class Order species Common Name Amphibian Unknown Amphibian Siluriformes Ariidae Brackish water catfish Actinopterygii Perciformes Cichlidae "Tilapia" Arthropoda Decapoda Pseudothelphusidae Freshwater Crab

TABLE V: TAXONOMIC REPRESENTATION ALL MENSABAK, 3 OF 3

6.D: General Taphonomic Concerns

The intention of the following discussion of burning and fragmentation is to demonstrate the similarities between sites. The reason for making this demonstration is to show that differences between sites in the following analysis are not likely the results of these processes but rather the results of decisions made during the procurement, processing, and consumption of animals. Burning and higher rates of fragmentation can introduce a bias towards larger animals in an assemblage, as a highly fragmented larger bone could be counted multiple times for the same NISP (Grayson, 1984). Thus, because several of the following chapters rely on NISP, it is important to have a discussion of particular species or sites which might have been biased differently by the effects of burning or fragmentation. The overall conclusion of the following section is that, though there are some possible biases introduced through burning, these biases are similar between sites. Thus, whatever biases these taphonomic processes introduced to the assemblage were ubiquitous across all sites, making them comparable for the sake of the subsequent analysis.

6.D.1: Burning

Burning is present in the Mensabak assemblage and likely resulted from a combination of past agricultural practices, burning of ritual materials, and burning of waste. Regardless of the source, fire and heat alteration have three reasonably predictable effects on an assemblage. The first two alterations are only interesting in as much as they are predictive of the third. Firstly, color alteration, which some analysts have attempted to use to measure the overall degree of burning at a site (Shipman et al., 1984; Sillen and Hoering, 1993; Stiner and Kuhn, 1995).

Secondly, prolonged heat/burning removes moisture and organic components (Kiszely, 1973;

Shipmen et al., 1984). Thirdly, as a result of the two aforementioned effects, burning has a

88 measurable effect on the degree of fracture in an assemblage (Knight, 1985). This last effect is significant because higher rates of fragmentation may inflate the representation of larger animals in the following analysis.

Modern Maya Lowland agricultural practices involve the regular burning of large sections of forests, and semi-mobile swidden agriculture as a dominant mode of subsistence has roots in at least the contact period (Farriss, 1984; Hellmuth, 1977). Moreover, the use of several archaeological sites as spaces for slash-and-burn agriculture is an event that several Lacandon community members remember. This observation is troubling because heat alteration can affect bone as deep as 10 cm beneath the soil surface (Bennett, 1999). This means remains left in a field as refuse has a high probability of heat alteration that is related to deposition rather than processing. Moreover, having assisted in slash-and-burn agriculture, I have observed that the involved fires tend to be concentrated. This concentration of fire means the hottest points can maintain temperatures well over the 600-degree mark noted by Shipman et al. (1984). This is the point at which the heaviest bone modification occurs.

Unfortunately, the lines between burning in a ritual setting and a waste disposal setting are likely blurred, as osseous materials are known to travel between these two contexts throughout their use-life. As Astor-Aguilera (2011) has pointed out regarding human remains, the ritual burning of bone is common, as well as their internment as refuse. Indeed, this seems to be a broad pattern across Mesoamerica. Similarly, burning is also a component in modern

Lacandon ritual (McGee, 2002). Unfortunately, this means burning is of little use in inferring the individual use-life of a specific bone. But, its ubiquity across context means that burning is unlikely to affect ritual contexts over mundane ones disproportionately.

TABLE V: BURNED BONE ACCOUNTED FOR BY SITE.

Tzibana Burning Burning Intensity Count Weight Count % Weight % Of burning Burned 10 17.7 1.1669 2.992 Count % Weight % General 7 11.06 0.8168 1.8696 70 62.4859 Grey 2 5.69 0.2334 0.9618 20 32.1469 Epiphysis 1 0.95 0.1167 0.1606 10 5.3672 Unburned 847 573.87 98.8331 97.008 Sum 857 591.57 100 100 Los Olores Burning Burning Intensity Count Weight Count % Weight % Of burning Burned 22 43.15 1.0304 0.044622 Count % Weight % General 17 32.4 0.7963 0.033505 77.2727 75.0869 White 3 1.84 0.1405 0.001903 13.6364 4.2642 Epiphysis 2 8.91 0.0937 0.009214 Unburned 2113 923.862 98.9696 0.955378 Sum 2135 967.012 100 100 La Punta Burning Burning Intensity Count Weight Count % Weight % Of burning Burned 181 258.82 8.4778 26.7649 Count % Weight % General 178 254.37 5.9413 9.3062 98.3425 98.2807 Grey 1 0.58 0.0334 0.0212 0.5525 0.2241 White 1 2.48 0.0334 0.0907 0.5525 0.9582 White/blue 1 1.39 0.0334 0.0509 0.5525 0.5371 Unburned 2815 2474.511 93.9586 90.531 Sum 2996 2733.331 100 100 Ixtabay Burning Burning Intensity Count Weight Count % Weight % Of burning Burned 121 561.13 9.4457 17.5952 Count % Weight % General 86 444.22 6.7135 13.9293 71.0744 79.1653 White 35 116.91 2.7322 3.6659 28.9256 20.8347 Unburned 1160 2627.97 90.5543 82.4048 Sum 1281 3189.1 100 100

With these considerations in mind, burning was very infrequent in the overall Mensabak assemblage (NSP=4.5%, Weight=11.7%). However, there are notable differences between these

Mensabak sites (See TABLE VI). When comparing the sites, it appears that Los Olores/Kéchem and Tzibana had rates of burning more similar to one another (Count % burned = 1.08% and

1.17% respectively), and correspondingly Ixtabay and La Punta were more similar (Count % burned = 9.45% and 8.48% respectively). However, when looking at the percentage burned by weight, there is a notable difference between Ixtabay and La Punta (Weight % burned = 17.60% and 26.75%, respectively). The differences between these two sites may have been the result of what species were commonly burned. At La Punta, the most commonly burned taxon of animals was turtle (including Emydidae, Kinosternon species, and Dermatemys species) n= 160, which is

88.4% of the n=181 burned specimens from La Punta. This is notably different from Ixtabay, where only n=27 turtle specimens make up 22.31% of the total n= 121 burned specimen sample.

In this regard, Ixtabay is more similar to the other two sites, Los Olores/Kéchem and Tzibana, in which turtles represent 5% and 30% of their respective burned samples.

Overall, the effects of burning on comparisons between the sites of Mensabak might have the effect of inflating the representation of turtles at one site, La Punta. Burning, as noted, can inflate the NISP for a species by subjecting it to greater fragmentation. And turtles were preferentially burned at La Punta. Furthermore, the overall weight of burned turtle bones is only

234.29g out of the 258.82g of burned material at La Punta (90.52%), which means that despite their small size, turtles were the most significant contributor of burned bones at La Punta.

That said, burning was not the only source of fragmentation operating on the Mensabak assemblage. When considering overall fragmentation at these sites, it seems that they still all have similar rates of fragmentation. Therefore, it seems that the preferential burning of

turtles might not have that large of an overall effect on fragmentation as a whole. Overall, burning in the Mensabak assemblage played a negligible role in fragmenting bone in the total

Mensabak assemblage (TABLE VII). By count, only 4% of bones were burned and by weight,

11%. Within these small numbers, a majority of heat-altered bone exhibited only light charring or blacking (86% of burned bone by count and 84% by weight). These kinds of heat alterations can be achieved by relatively light exposure to fire (Shipman et al., 1984), suggesting the inhabitants of Mensabak did not intentionally incinerate that refuse. Most of this burning likely occurred during food preparation.

Entire Assemblage Burning

Burning Intensity Count Weight Count % Weight % Of Burning Burned 334 880.8 4.5942 11.73 Count % Weight % General 288 742.05 3.9615 9.8822 86.2275 84.2473 Epiphysis 3 9.86 0.0413 0.1313 0.8982 1.1194 Grey 3 6.27 0.0413 0.0835 0.8982 0.7119 White 39 121.23 0.5365 1.6145 11.6766 13.7636 White/Blue 1 1.39 0.0138 0.0185 0.2994 0.1578 Unburned 6936 6628.143 95.4058 88.27 Sum 7270 7508.943 1 1

TABLE VI: BURNED BONE ENTIRE ASSEMBLAGE

Entire Assemblage Fragmentation by size Category

NSP Weight Percent of NSP Percent of Weight

Less than 1/4 6218 4939.559 85.55% 65.81%

1/4 to 1/2 339 897.924 4.66% 11.96%

1/2 to 3/4 221 673.42 3.04% 8.97%

Greater than 3/4 221 591.74 3.04% 7.88%

Complete 269 402.85 3.70% 5.37%

Sum 7268 7505.493

TABLE VII: FRAGMENTATION RATES ENTIRE ASSEMBLAGE

6.D.2: Fragmentation

During the data collection phase, the bone was coded with a general fragmentation category based on how much of the element they represented was present. These categories included: Less than ¼, ¼ to ½, ½ to ¾, Greater than ¾, and Complete. Though these categories are somewhat subjective, because the categories were assigned during the same analysis, they are internally consistent across all sub-assemblages. Furthermore, they can be used to determine how fragmented a sub-assemblage is relative to the others. Thus, they provide a line of evidence to suggest whether or not assemblages experienced similar depositional processes.

93 some notable differences. For example, Ixtabay has an abnormally low amount of fragmentation, while Los Olores had an abnormally high rate (TABLE IX). This observed difference is particularly interesting because Ixtabay has notable differences in the primary animals represented in its assemblage (see Chapter 7), which included species of turtle that tend to be highly fragmented. Nonetheless, this difference is not outside of possible random variation.

Fragmentation appears to be mostly the same between the four major sites. When the

“Less than ¼ of element” category for every sample was considered together, then the mean percentage of NISP was 85.26% with a standard deviation of only 0.03, a standard of error of

0.0193, and variance of 0.001488. Overall, there is a good chance that the differences we see could be the result of a simple sampling error, rather than a cultural or natural process. Low standard of error was also found for the categories of “¼ to ½” (standard of error = 0.0102) and

“½ to ¾” (standard of error = 0.0042). Thus, there appears to be little variation in the amount of fragmentation in the overall Mensabak assemblage.

It should be noted that there is also little evidence to argue that the observable differences could be the result of the differential burning mentioned above. That burning might be the reason for the higher fragmentation of an assemblage is not supported by the fact that the two sites with the largest percentage of fragmentation, Los Olores and Tzibana, are not the same as the two most burn sites, Ixtabay and La Punta. This runs counter to the conventional ethnoarchaeological studies of burning (Knight, 1985), which generally show a positive correlation between the two.

Thus, any patterns observed here are likely the result of selective human behaviors, rather than the inadvertent result of post-depositional processes. Whatever these processes may have been, it is noteworthy that they seem to have resulted in four assemblages that have approximately equal rates of fragmentation.

The fact that differences in fragmentation between sites were minimal is essential given the above differences in burning mentioned in 6.D.1. The primary concern in 6.D.1 was that having differential burning between sites might cause more fragmentation in a selectively burned sample. However, as the above discussion of fragmentation demonstrates, there appears to be little difference across the sites in the final effects of fragmentation. Ultimately, this is a good thing because it shows that though there are some differences in the depositional process across the sites, there is little evidence that these differences would have dramatically skewed the samples in a way that would make sites incomparable to one another.

Fragmentation, Ixtabay Fragmentation, Tzibana Weight Weight NSP Weight NSP % % NSP Weight NSP % % Less than 78.77 Less than 1/4 1009 1983.12 % 62.18% 1/4 744 408.71 86.92% 69.43% 1/4 to 1/2 112 480.2 8.74% 15.06% 1/4 to 1/2 25 55.66 2.92% 9.46% 1/2 to 3/4 58 408.41 4.53% 12.81% 1/2 to 3/4 35 50.82 4.09% 8.63% Greater Greater than 3/4 50 208.61 3.90% 6.54% than 3/4 29 41.78 3.39% 7.10% Complete 52 108.76 4.06% 3.41% Complete 23 31.67 2.69% 5.38% Sum 1281 3189.1 Sum 856 588.64 Fragmentation, Los Olores Fragmentation, La Punta Weight Weight NSP Weight NSP % % NSP Weight NSP % % Less than 90.63 Less than 1/4 1934 638.512 % 66.06% 1/4 2531 1909.21 84.48% 69.85% 1/4 to 1/2 78 134.39 3.66% 13.90% 1/4 to 1/2 124 227.67 4.14% 8.33% 1/2 to 3/4 54 92.39 2.53% 9.56% 1/2 to 3/4 74 121.8 2.47% 4.46% Greater Greater than 3/4 33 49.59 1.55% 5.13% than 3/4 108 263.83 3.60% 9.65% Complete 35 51.61 1.64% 5.34% Complete 159 210.81 5.31% 7.71% Sum 2134 966.492 Sum 2996 2733.33

TABLE VIII: FRAGMENTATION RATES BY SITE

Chapter 7: Results by Site

7: Abstract

The following chapter will present all the Mensabak Taxa using their MNI, NISP, and

Weight following the methodologies outlined in Chapter 6. The results of the analysis are first presented in aggregate. Then each subsequent subsection will be divided between the four sites:

Los Olores/Kéchem, La Punta, Tzibana, and Ixtabay. Based on the completed data, a few additional taphonomic concerns are discussed at the end of this section. Overall, the point of this section is first to introduce the raw data that is used in subsequent sections, and second to demonstrate a few trends in land use based on the species present at the four major sites. To do this, I will establish what the dominant contributing species were at each site then discuss them all together.

Common Class Genus species MNI% MNI NISP% NISP Weight% Weight Name Large Didelphis spp. 0.64% 1 0.16% 3 0.06% 2.58 Opossum Philander Four-eyed 1.28% 2 0.53% 10 0.19% 8.36 opossum Opossum Alston's Marmosa alstoni mouse 0.64% 1 0.05% 1 0.04% 1.62 opossum Tamandua Anteater 0.64% 1 0.05% 1 0.10% 4.2 mexicana Dasypus Nine Banded 8.97% 14 8.76% 164 5.66% 248.63 novemcinctus Armadillo Howler Alouatta pigra 0.64% 1 0.11% 2 0.08% 3.34 Monkey Spider Ateles geoffroyi 0.64% 1 0.16% 3 0.11% 4.9 Monkey Homo sapien Human 0.64% 1 0.48% 9 3.35% 147.2 Cottontail Sylvilagus spp. 1.28% 2 0.48% 9 0.23% 10.26 Rabbit Orthogeomys Gophers 2.56% 4 0.91% 17 0.14% 5.99 spp. Mammalia Cuniculus paca Spotted Paca 14.10% 22 22.16% 415 15.95% 700.99 Dasyprocta Agouti 7.69% 12 9.34% 175 3.83% 168.28 punctata Urocyon Grey Fox 0.64% 1 0.11% 2 0.05% 2.01 cinereoargenteus Domestic Canis familiaris 1.92% 3 0.32% 6 0.91% 40.04 Dog Nasua narica Coati 0.64% 1 0.32% 6 0.39% 17.32 Puma, Puma concolor Mountain 0.64% 1 0.16% 3 0.49% 21.74 Lion Panthera onca Jaguar 0.64% 1 0.05% 1 0.64% 27.93 Tapirus bairdii Baird's Tapir 0.64% 1 1.01% 19 5.74% 252.21 Collared Pecari tajacu 2.56% 4 2.14% 40 5.90% 259.32 Peccary White-Lipped Tayassu pecari 1.28% 2 0.21% 4 0.64% 28.26 Peccary Mazama Red Broket 7.05% 11 8.54% 160 10.49% 461.002 americana Deer Odocoileus White Tailed 3.21% 5 5.55% 104 13.85% 608.72 virginianus Deer Tayassuidae Peccary 1.28% 2 3.20% 60 3.81% 167.27

TABLE IX: FULL COUNTS ALL SPECIES ALL MENSABAK, 1 OF 3

Common Class Genus species MNI% MNI NISP% NISP Weight% Weight Name Unknown n/a 25 71.59 Artiodactyla Unknown n/a 2 3.79 Canidae Unknown n/a 2 16.53 Mammalia Felidae continued Unknown n/a 1 1.47 Primate Unknown n/a 61 41.15 Rodent Unknown n/a 4435 2408.18 Mammal Phalacrocorax Double-crested 0.64% 1 0.05% 1 0.02% 1.06 auritus Cormorant Anhinga Darter 0.64% 1 0.05% 1 0.02% 0.68 anhinga Dendrocygna Whistling Duck 0.64% 1 0.05% 1 0.08% 3.42 discolors Cairina Moscovy Duck 0.64% 1 0.05% 1 0.07% 3.22 moschata Ortalis vetula Chachalaka 1.28% 2 0.37% 7 0.08% 3.63 Aves Penelope Guana 0.64% 1 0.05% 1 0.01% 0.38 purpurascens Meleagris spp. Turkey 2.56% 4 3.15% 59 2.14% 93.98 Meleagris Domestic 3.85% 6 1.01% 19 1.34% 59.05 gallopavo Turkey Meleagris Ocellated 13.40% 21 5.71% 107 3.66% 160.66 ocellata Turkey Unknown n/a 65 71.46 Galaform Unknown Bird n/a 399 154.76

TABLE X: FULL COUNTS ALL SPECIES ALL MENSABAK, 2 OF 3

Common Class Genus species MNI% MNI NISP% NISP Weight% Weight Name Mexican Staurotypus triporcatus 1.28% 2 0.53% 10 0.76% 33.21 Musk Turtle Tobasco Mud Kinosternon acutum 0.64% 1 0.37% 7 0.32% 14.26 Turtle Kinosternon White-Lipped 0.64% 1 0.11% 2 0.06% 2.59 leucostomum Mud Turtle Kinosternon spp. Mud Turtle 0.64% 1 1.66% 31 0.74% 32.35 Central Dermatemys mawii American 3.85% 6 1.17% 22 1.23% 54.39 River Turtle Unknown: Dermatemys spp. 0.64% 1 14.26% 267 9.63% 423.44 River Turtle Malaclemys terrapin Sliders 0.64% 1 0.05% 1 0.04% 1.95 Trachemyss scripta 0.64% 1 0.59% 11 0.73% 32.15 Trachemys spp. Sliders 1.92% 3 4.54% 85 4.59% 201.96 Reptiles Unknown Crocodylus spp. 0.64% 1 0.48% 9 1.03% 45.34 Crocodile Morelet's Crocodylus moreletii 0.64% 1 0.43% 8 0.88% 38.53 Crocodile Anolis spp. Anole 0.64% 1 0.11% 2 0.02% 0.67 Boa constrictor Common Boa 0.64% 1 0.16% 3 0.04% 1.57 Unknown n/a 8 7.79 Colubridae Unknown n/a 94 127.62 Emydidae Unknown n/a 2 0.72 Iguanidae Unknown n/a 1 0.79 Testuidae Unknown n/a 188 194.12 Turtle Unknown Amphibian n/a 1 0.01% 0.41 Amphibian Actinopterygii Ariidae Catfish 0.64% 1 0.11% 2 0.01% 0.23 Arthropoda Cichlid Lake Fish 0.64% 1 0.11% 2 0.02% 0.93 Fresh Water Sum 1.28% 2 0.37% 7 0.18% 7.99 Crab Sum Identified 156 7157 7495.94 100% 156 100% 1873 100% 4395.56

TABLE XI: ALL COUNTS ALL SPECIES ALL MENSABAK, 3 OF 3

7.A: All Fauna Combined

Shown in TABLE X – TABLE XII are the combined results for all fauna found at all sites of the Mensabak assemblage. The analysis identified 48 species from within the total

NISP=1873 of recovered specimens at Mensabak. The most common species, by NISP, at

Mensabak was the Lowland Paca (22.16%)—Cuniculus paca—and River Turtles from the genus

Dermatemys spp. (14.26%). However, using NISP doesn’t give as good an estimate of biomass as weight. When bone weight is used to measure proportional contributions to the assemblage, these two species—Cuniculus paca and Dermatemys spp.—went down in frequency to 15.95% and 9.63% respectively—while White-Tailed Deer—Odocoileus virginianus—and Brocket deer— Mazama Americana—both go up (13.85% and 10.49% respectively). This discrepancy is likely a result of the two species of deer having significantly larger body sizes than the rodent and turtle. A similar issue is that Ocellated Turkey—Meleagris ocellata—is not a significant contributor to the assemblage NISP (5.71%) or Weight (3.66%). However, by MNI, the turkey makes up a sizable portion of the assemblage (13.46%). Thus, if we take all three measures together, the following are the significant contributors to the overall assemblage: infield species:

Dermatemys spp. (River Turtles), Odocoileus virginianus (White-Tailed Deer), and outfield field species: Cuniculus paca (Paca), Mazama Americana (Brocket Deer), and Meleagris ocellata

(Ocellated Turkey).

Though the most common species in the overall assemblage have diverse environmental preferences, we can make a few observations from this list. Firstly, a majority of the dominant species in the assemblage are species that prefer access to primary or old-growth forests. These animals are more associated with fresh milpas further from permanent habitation sites. Secondly, of the dominant species in the assemblage, only two are associated with near-site agriculture:

White-Tailed Deer and River Turtles. Of these two species, only one of them uses niches

100 specifically created by disturbance agriculture, the White-Tailed Deer. The other, River Turtles, is a lake and river preferring animal, meaning its proximity to human habitation has more to do with the Maya preference for lakeside villages than with the disturbances these villages created.

Overall these observations suggest a strong preference for outfield associated animals during the

Terminal Postclassic. However, when we divide the assemblage up by sites, we see more diversity in varied strategies used by Maya people at Mensabak.

7.B: Los Olores/Kéchem

Shown in TABLE XIII – TABLE XIV are the combined results for all fauna found at Los

Olores/Kéchem. The analysis identified a total of 30 species out of a sample of n=271 identifiable elements. The most common species, by NISP, was again the Lowland Paca

(35.79%)—Cuniculus paca—and the Brocket Deer (11.44%)—Mazama Americana. When we use bone weight to measure prevalence, White-Tailed Deer—Odocoileus virginianus— becomes the second most prevalent species (16.5%), putting it between Cuniculus paca (24.12%) and

Mazama Americana (14.93%). MNI counts were not a reliable means for measuring this assemblage because most species ended up with only 1 to 3 individuals. However, it is noteworthy that Cuniculus paca continued to dominate the assemblage in both counting methods. Thus, if we take all these measures together, the following are major contributors to the overall assemblage: infield, Odocoileus virginianus (White-Tailed Deer), and outfield: Cuniculus paca (Paca) and Mazama Americana (Brocket Deer).

101

Class Species Common Name MNI% MNI NISP% NISP Weight% Weight Didelphis spp. Opossum 2.08% 1 0.37% 1 0.27% 1.44 Philander Grey four-eyed 2.08% 1 2.58% 7 0.52% 2.79 opossum Opossum Marmosa Woolly Mouse 2.08% 1 0.37% 1 0.30% 1.62 alstoni Opossum Dasypus Nine-banded 6.25% 3 6.27% 17 5.46% 29.46 novemcinctus Armadillo Black Howling Alouatta pigra 2.08% 1 0.37% 1 0.34% 1.85 monkey Sylvilagus spp. Cotton tail Rabbit 2.08% 1 0.74% 2 0.54% 2.91 Orthogeomys Pocket Gopher 2.08% 1 4.43% 12 0.25% 1.35 spp. Cuniculus paca lowland Paca 20.80% 10 35.70% 97 24.12% 130.12 Dasyprocta Central American 6.25% 3 7.01% 19 2.44% 13.18 Mammals punctata Agouti Canis familiaris Dog 2.08% 1 0.37% 1 0.62% 3.33 White-Nosed Nasua narica 2.08% 1 0.37% 1 0.15% 0.8 Coati Tapirus bardii Baird's Tapir 2.08% 1 2.21% 6 8.99% 48.52 Pecari tajacu Collared Peccary 2.08% 1 2.58% 7 3.67% 19.81 Tayassuidae Peccary 4.17% 2 2.95% 8 4.81% 25.95 Mazama Red Brocket Deer 4.17% 2 11.40% 31 14.93% 80.53 americana Odocoileus White-Tailed 4.17% 2 5.54% 15 16.50% 89 virginianus Deer Unknown n/a 1 2.05 Canidae Unknown Primate n/a 1 1.47 Unknown Rodent n/a 14 7.82

TABLE XII: ALL COUNTS ALL SPECIES LOS OLORES, 1 OF 2

102

Weight Class Species Common Name MNI% MNI NISP% NISP Weight % Penelope Crested guan 2.08% 1 0.37% 1 0.07% 0.38 purpurascens Meleagris Domestic Turkey 2.08% 1 0.37% 1 0.49% 2.66 gallopavo Meleagris Aves Ocellated Turkey 4.17% 2 2.95% 8 1.81% 9.75 ocellata Meleagris Unknown Turkey 4.17% 2 1.85% 5 1.68% 9.05 spp. Unknown n/a 10 8.25 Galaform Staurotypus Mexican Giant 2.08% 1 0.37% 1 1.54% 8.33 triporcatus Musk Turtle Kinosternon Tobasco Mud 2.08% 1 1.48% 4 0.69% 3.72 acutum Turtle Kinosternon Mud Turtle 2.08% 1 1.48% 4 0.51% 2.75 spp. Trachemyss Slider 2.08% 1 2.21% 6 2.00% 10.81 spp. Crocodylus Crocodile 2.08% 1 2.21% 6 5.89% 31.78 Reptiles spp. Anolis spp. Anole 2.08% 1 0.37% 1 0.03% 0.14 Boa Boa constrictor 2.08% 1 0.74% 2 0.17% 0.9 constrictor Unknown n/a 6 6.06 Colubridae Unknown n/a 18 14.31 Emydidae Unknown n/a 1 0.33 Iguanidae Actinopterygii Cichlid Lake Fish 2.08% 1 0.37% 1 0.12% 0.63 Arthropoda Fresh Water Crab 4.17% 2 1.85% 5 1.10% 5.96 Unknown n/a 1813 387.2 Sum 48 2135 967.01 100.00 Sum identified 100.00% 48 271 100.00% 539.52 %

TABLE XIII: ALL COUNTS ALL SPECIES LOS OLORES, 2 OF 2

103

7.C: La Punta

Shown in TABLE XV – TABLE XVI are the combined results for all fauna found at La

Punta. In all, the study identified 36 species from the n=1022 identifiable specimens recovered at

La Punta. The most common species, by NISP, was the Lowland Paca (18.79%)—Cuniculus paca—and River Turtles from the genus Dermatemys spp. (25.93%). By weight, these two species continued to dominate the assemblage. However, MNI counts found Dermatemys spp. dropped to a very low contribution, while the Cuniculus paca (26.75%) and Meleagris ocellata increased (10.47%). Thus, if we take all these measures together, the following are significant contributors to the overall assemblage: infield, Dermatemys spp., and outfield, Cuniculus paca, and Meleagris ocellata. In this regard, La Punta appears to be different from both the overall assemblage and Los Olores/Kéchem.

104

Class Species Common Name MNI% MNI NISP% NISP Weight% Weight Didelphis spp. Opossum 1.16% 1 0.20% 2 0.07% 1.14 Dasypus Nine-banded 6.98% 6 8.02% 82 5.74% 98.314 novemcinctus Armadillo Homo sapien Human 1.16% 1 0.39% 4 0.20% 3.38 Sylvilagus spp. Cotton tail Rabbit 1.16% 1 0.10% 1 0.03% 0.58 Orthogeomys spp. Pocket Gopher 2.33% 2 0.20% 2 0.04% 0.67 Cuniculus paca lowland Paca 26.74% 23 18.79% 192 16.86% 288.54 Dasyprocta Central American 9.30% 8 9.59% 98 4.62% 79.16 punctata Agouti Urocyon Grey Fox 1.16% 1 0.10% 1 0.04% 0.66 cinereoargenteus Mammal Canis familiaris Dog 1.16% 1 0.20% 2 0.25% 4.2 Nasua narica White-Nosed Coati 1.16% 1 0.20% 2 0.13% 2.27 Puma concolor Cougar 1.16% 1 0.10% 1 0.08% 1.4 Tapirus baridii Baird's Tapir 1.16% 1 0.29% 3 0.92% 15.8 Pecari tajacu Collared Peccary 2.33% 2 1.57% 16 3.76% 64.43 Tayassuidae Peccary 2.33% 2 3.62% 37 3.72% 63.75 Mazama Red Brocket Deer 4.65% 4 5.09% 52 6.10% 104.37 americana Odocoileus White-Tailed Deer 2.33% 2 2.35% 24 7.49% 128.26 virginianus Unknown Rodent n/a 21 13.86

TABLE XIV: ALL COUNTS ALL SPECIES LA PUNTA, 1 OF 2

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Class Species Common Name MNI% MNI NISP% NISP Weight% Weight Phalacrocorax Double-crested 1.16% 1 0.10% 1 0.06% 1.06 auritus cormorant Anhinga Neotropic 1.16% 1 0.10% 1 0.04% 0.68 anhinga Cormorant Ortalis vetula Plain chachalaca 1.16% 1 0.59% 6 0.14% 2.33 Meleagris Aves Domestic Turkey 3.49% 3 1.27% 13 2.49% 42.58 gallopavo Meleagris Ocellated Turkey 10.47% 9 7.44% 76 6.08% 104.12 ocellata Meleagris spp. Unknown Turkey 2.33% 2 3.03% 31 3.20% 54.77 Unknown n/a 38 41.55 Galaform Staurotypus Mexican Giant 1.16% 1 0.39% 4 0.47% 7.99 triporcatus Musk Turtle Kinosternon Tobasco Mud 1.16% 1 0.20% 2 0.38% 6.51 acutum Turtle Kinosternon White-Lipped Mud 1.16% 1 0.20% 2 0.15% 2.59 leucostomum Turtle Kinosternon Mud Turtle 1.16% 1 0.98% 10 0.59% 10.11 spp. Dermatemys Central American 1.16% 1 1.47% 15 2.34% 40.13 mawii River Turtle Dermatemys River Turtle 1.16% 1 25.93% 265 23.85% 408.26 Reptiles spp. Trachemyss Pond slider 1.16% 1 0.88% 9 1.77% 30.22 scripta Trachemyss Slider 1.16% 1 5.68% 58 6.12% 104.67 spp. Crocodylus Morelet's 1.16% 1 0.59% 6 2.07% 35.41 moreletii Crocodile Boa constrictor Boa constrictor 1.16% 1 0.10% 1 0.04% 0.67 Unknown n/a 43 51.05 Emydidae Unknown n/a 1 0.39 Iguanidae Unknown Amphibian n/a 1 0.41 Amphibian Actinopterygii Ariidae Catfish 1.16% 1 0.10% 1 0.03% 0.53 Arthropoda Fresh Water Crab 1.16% 1 0.20% 2 0.12% 2.03 Unknown n/a 1870 914.48 Sum 86 2996 2733.33 100.00 Sum Identified 100.00% 86 1022 100.00% 1711.59 %

TABLE XV: ALL COUNTS ALL SPECIES LA PUNTA, 2 OF 2

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7.D: Tzibana

Shown in TABLE XVII are the combined results for all fauna found at Tzibana. In all 20 species were identified from in the NISP=132 identifiable specimens recovered at Tzibana, which makes the Tzibana sample noticeably smaller than the other sites. The most common species, by NISP, was the White-Tailed Deer (24.24%)--Odocoileus virginianus—followed by the Lowland Paca (17.42%)—Cuniculus paca—the Brocket Deer (11.36%)—Mazama

Americana—the nine-banded armadillo (10.61%)—Dasypus novemcinctus—and the Central

American Agouti (13.64%)—Dasyprocta punctata. By weight, however, only Odocoileus virginianus (42.84%), Cuniculus paca (9.86%), and Mazama Americana (8.54%) dominate the assemblage. Thus, if we take all these measures together, the following are major contributors to the overall assemblage: infield, Odocoileus virginianus (White-Tailed Deer), Dasypus novemcinctus (Armadillo), and Dasyprocta punctata (Agoti) and outfield, Cuniculus paca

(Paca), and Mazama Americana (Brocket Deer).

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Class Species Common Name MNI MNI NISP% NISP Weight% Weight Dasypus Nine-banded 8.33% 2 10.61% 14 4.91% 12.19 novemcinctus Armadillo Ateles geoffroyi Spider Monkey 4.17% 1 0.76% 1 1.11% 2.75 Sylvilagus spp. Cotton tail Rabbit 4.17% 1 0.76% 1 0.37% 0.92 Cuniculus paca lowland Paca 8.33% 2 17.42% 23 9.86% 24.47 Dasyprocta Central American 4.17% 1 13.64% 18 3.64% 9.04 punctata Agouti Canis familiaris Dog 4.17% 1 1.52% 2 6.89% 17.11 White-Nosed Nasua narica 4.17% 1 0.76% 1 0.06% 0.16 Coati Mammal Tapirus bairdii Baird's Tapir 4.17% 1 0.76% 1 3.15% 7.83 Pecari tajacu Collared Peccary 4.17% 1 3.79% 5 3.90% 9.69 Tayassuidae Peccary 4.17% 1 3.03% 4 5.28% 13.1 Mazama Red Broket Deer 8.33% 2 11.36% 15 8.54% 21.19 americana Odocoileus White-Tailed 8.33% 2 24.24% 32 42.84% 106.32 virginianus Deer Unknown n/a 1 1.74 Canidae Unknown Rodent n/a 7 3.39 Meleagris Domestic Turkey 4.17% 1 0.76% 1 1.16% 2.88 gallopavo Meleagris Ocellated Turkey 4.17% 1 0.76% 1 0.74% 1.84 Aves ocellata Meleagris spp. Unknown Turkey 4.17% 1 2.27% 3 1.52% 3.77 Unknown n/a 2 0.79 Galaform Staurotypus Mexican Giant 4.17% 1 1.52% 2 2.79% 6.92 triporcatus Musk Turtle Kinosternon spp. Mud Turtle 4.17% 1 1.52% 2 0.25% 0.63

Reptiles Trachemyss spp. Slider 4.17% 1 2.27% 3 1.60% 3.96 Crocodylus Morelet's 4.17% 1 1.52% 2 1.26% 3.12 moreletii Crocodile Unknown n/a 9 12.86 Emydidae Actinopterygii Cichlid Lake Fish 4.17% 1 0.76% 1 0.12% 0.3 Unknown n/a 706 324.6 Sum 24 857 591.57 Sum Identified 100.00% 24 100.00% 132 100.00% 248.19

TABLE XVI: ALL COUNTS ALL SPECIES TZIBANA, 1 OF 1

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7.E: Ixtabay

Shown in TABLE XVIII – TABLE XIX are the combined results for all fauna found at

Ixtabay. In all, the analysis identified 36 species from in the n=447 identifiable specimens recovered at Ixtabay. The most common species, by NISP, was the Lowland Paca—Cuniculus paca—(23.4%), the Brocket Deer—Mazama Americana—(13.87%)¸ and the nine-banded armadillo—Dasypus novemcinctus—(11.41%). By weight White-Tailed Deer (15.26%)—

Odocoileus virginianus—and Baird's Tapir (9.64%)— Tapirus bairdii—become significant contributors to the assemblage. Thus, if we take all these measures together the following are significant contributors to the overall assemblage: infield, Odocoileus virginianus (White-Tailed

Deer), and Dasypus novemcinctus (Armadillo), and outfield, Cuniculus paca (Paca), Mazama

Americana (Broket Deer), and Tapirus bairdii (Tapir). Thus, Ixtabay is overall the most diverse site at Mensabak.

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Class Species Common Name MNI % MNI NISP% NISP Weight% Weight Grey four-eyed Philander opossum 1.35% 1 0.67% 3 0.30% 5.57 Opossum Tamandua Sothern tamandua 1.35% 1 0.22% 1 0.22% 4.2 tetradactyla Dasypus Nine-banded Armadillo 9.46% 7 11.41% 51 5.82% 108.67 novemcinctus Alouatta pigra Black Howling monkey 1.35% 1 0.22% 1 0.08% 1.49 Ateles geoffroyi Spider Monkey 1.35% 1 0.45% 2 0.12% 2.15 Homo sapien Human 1.35% 1 1.12% 5 7.70% 143.82 Sylvilagus spp. Cotton tail Rabbit 1.35% 1 1.12% 5 0.31% 5.85 Orthogeomys spp. Pocket Gopher 1.35% 1 0.67% 3 0.21% 3.97 Cuniculus paca lowland Paca 13.51% 10 23.04% 103 13.80% 257.86 Dasyprocta Central American 6.76% 5 8.95% 40 3.58% 66.9 punctata Agouti Urocyon Grey Fox 1.35% 1 0.22% 1 0.07% 1.35 Mammal cinereoargenteus Canis familiaris Dog 1.35% 1 0.22% 1 0.82% 15.4 Nasua narica White-Nosed Coati 1.35% 1 0.45% 2 0.75% 14.09 Puma concolor Cougar 1.35% 1 0.45% 2 1.09% 20.34 Tapirus bairdii Baird's Tapir 1.35% 1 2.01% 9 9.64% 180.06 Pecari tajacu Collared Peccary 2.70% 2 2.68% 12 8.85% 165.39 Tayassu pecari White-Lipped Peccary 1.35% 1 0.89% 4 1.51% 28.26 Tayassuidae Peccary 1.35% 1 2.46% 11 3.45% 64.47 Mazama americana Red Brocket Deer 6.76% 5 13.87% 62 13.64% 254.91 Odocoileus White-Tailed Deer 6.76% 5 7.38% 33 15.26% 285.14 virginianus Unknown Felidae n/a 2 16.53 Unknown Rodent n/a 19 16.08 Dendrocygna Southern Black Bellied 1.35% 1 0.22% 1 0.18% 3.42 autumnalis discolor Whistling Duck Cairina moschata Muscovy Duck 1.35% 1 0.22% 1 0.17% 3.22 Ortalis vetula Plain chachalaca 1.35% 1 0.22% 1 0.07% 1.3 Aves Meleagris Domestic Turkey 2.70% 2 0.89% 4 0.59% 10.93 gallopavo Meleagris ocellata Ocellated Turkey 10.81% 8 4.92% 22 2.41% 44.95 Meleagris spp. Unknown Turkey 2.70% 2 4.47% 20 1.41% 26.39 Unknown Galaform n/a 15 20.87

TABLE XVII: ALL COUNTS ALL SPECIES IXTABAY, 1 OF 2

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Class Species Common Name MNI % MNI NISP% NISP Weight% Weight Staurotypus Mexican Giant 1.35% 1 0.67% 3 0.53% 9.97 triporcatus Musk Turtle Kinosternon Tabasco Mud Turtle 1.35% 1 0.22% 1 0.22% 4.03 acutum Kinosternon Mud Turtle 1.35% 1 3.36% 15 1.01% 18.86 spp. Dermatemys River Turtle 1.35% 1 0.45% 2 0.81% 15.18 spp. Malaclemys Diamondback 1.35% 1 0.22% 1 0.10% 1.95 terrapin terrapin Trachemyss Reptile Pond slider 1.35% 1 0.45% 2 0.10% 1.93 scripta Trachemyss Slider 4.05% 3 4.03% 18 4.42% 82.52 spp. Crocodylus Crocodile 1.35% 1 0.67% 3 0.73% 13.56 spp. Unknown n/a 2 1.73 Colubridae Unknown n/a 24 49.4 Emydidae Unknown Testuidae n/a 1 0.79 Actinopterygii Ariidae Cat Fish 1.35% 1 0.45% 2 0.01% 0.23 Unknown 771 1215.37 Sum 74 1281 3189.1 100.00 100.00 Sum Identified 74 447 100.00% 1868.3 % %

TABLE XVIII: ALL COUNTS ALL SPECIES IXTABAY, 2 OF 2

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7.F: Overall Trends

A cursory inspection of the species present in the overall Mensabak assemblage demonstrates that while there are a few preferred species that are the same between all sites, there are also some significant differences between the sites. Regarding common animals, it is interesting to note that all sites have the Paca (Cuniculus paca) listed amongst their preferred outfield fidelic species. The preference for this species should not come entirely as a surprise.

When not overhunted, these jungle rodents reproduce quickly. Modern Lacandon tend to hunt this animal as an agricultural pest. Lacandon interlocutors have informed me that one can tell when Pacas have been active in their outfield milpas, and these same farmers will often set up and camp in their outfields in hopes of catching these animals at dawn. These efforts are because the Paca is considered a prized source of meat, and a delicacy. Similar hunting practices were also reported to me for the armadillo, an animal also considered extremely tasty. Though interestingly enough, this animal was the major contributor to only two of the sites, even though the armadillo is more closely associated with heavily disturbed infields. It is also interesting that the White-Tailed Deer is listed amongst the common disturbance preferring species for all but one of the sites, La Punta. This is one of the ways that La Punta appears different from other sites.

When considering the species lists for the four sites side by side, La Punta appears to be the most aberrant of them. Firstly, as noted above, it is the only site where White-Tailed Deer was not a major contributor. Instead, River Turtle was one of its most abundant taxa. This is interesting because La Punta is not physically closer to the lake than any other of the Mensabak sites. La Punta also appears different on the level of diversity. The La Punta assemblage has more major contributors than any of the other sites. However, this site is oxymoronically impoverished when sample size is considered. In understanding La Punta’s difference from the

112 other sites, it is noteworthy that one of its deposits was thought to represent a political event.

This may well have altered its sample compared to other sites, but this difference would remain consistent with the point of this dissertation: that each of these sites fostered different relations with the animals surrounding them.

La Punta’s impoverishment is demonstrated by the well-documented logarithmic relationship between sample size and the number of taxa represented in the sample (Grayson,

1984). Grayson notes that—assuming sites have similar human selection of animals—sites will have more diversity as sample size goes up. But these is an upper limit to diversity, as there are only so many in an environment used by people. Thus, the relationship between diversity and sample size is logarithmic. Using this methodology, he demonstrates that if a faunal analysis wishes to make an argument about species richness, it must demonstrate that a site—or sites— are outliers in a larger sample. Ideally this method of analysis will have more assemblages to compare to one another. Here, our sample of assemblages is small (n = 4), and so the following observations should only be considered with regards to other observations made in this and the following chapters, and could be the product of a low sample size.

In terms of raw NISP compared to species richness, La Punta has the same species richness as Ixtabay, but over twice the sample size. Because the relationship is logarithmic, it could be that La Punta and Ixtabay have simply hit the upper limits for species in assemblages around Mensabak. However, when charting the log of all species present against the log of

NISP—as Grayson does (1984)—a different story emerges. In Figure 7, we see that the line of best fit for these sites has an R2 value of 0.8012, meaning that this line is an 80% match for the data. However, when we remove La Punta from the sample, we see the line of best fit for the remaining three sites has a R2 value of 0.993 (Figure 8). Conversely, if we assume that Ixtabay

113 might have been the outlier and remove it, we get a line of best fit with a R2 value of 0.850

(Figure 8). Though our sample size is too small to definitively reproduce Garyson’s methodology, it does appear that La Punta’s species richness is below what we would expect for its expanded sample size. Alone, this discussion of species richness is not entirely convincing— due to the small sample size involved. However, taken with a grain of salt, this data suggests one more way in which La Punta is different from the other sites.

Difference is also seen between the sites by the fact that each site has at least one unusual animal on its short list of major contributors. As already mentioned, River Turtles are amongst

La Punta’s largest contributors, making it the only site where a reptile makes the short list. The other very unusual site is Ixtabay, which is the only site where the Tapir is a significant contributor. This unusual addition of Tapir may be related to the site’s proximity to El Mirador, a pilgrimage center that remained important throughout the lake’s chronology. Similarly, the other site with major ritual structures, Tzibana, was the one site where White-Tailed Deer where not only present but dominated the assemblage by weight. This is important because, as noted above, deer are a major animal in Maya ritual life. Finally, Los Olores does not have any particularly unusual animal associated with it, but it does have an unusual feature reminiscent of a hunting shrine. In all by the raw counting data alone, there is notable diversity between the Lake

Mensabak sites.

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Diversity as Function of Sample Size All Sites 2 y = 0.2743x + 0.7624 1.5 R² = 0.8012 1 Log 10 of NISP

0.5 Linear (Log 10 of 0 NISP) 0 1 2 3 4

Log 10 of NISP Log 10 10 Log ofNumber ofSpecies

Diversity as Function of Sample Size (No Ix Tabi) y = 0.2419x + 0.8219 1.6 R² = 0.8504 1.55 1.5 1.45 Species 1.4 Count 1.35 1.3 Linear 1.25 (Species 0 1 2 3 4 Count) Log 10 10 Log ofNumber ofSpecies Log 10 of NISP

Figure 7: Logarithmic relationship between sample size and diversity, all sites included. La Punta is the fourth data point in this chart.

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Diversity as Function of Sample Size (No La Punta) 1.6 1.55 y = 0.4628x + 0.3245 R² = 0.993 1.5 1.45 1.4 Log 10 of NISP 1.35 Linear (Log 10 of NISP) 1.3 1.25

Log 10 10 Log ofNumber ofSpecies 0 1 2 3 Log 10 of NISP

Figure 8: Logarithmic relationship between sample size and diversity, without La Punta

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Chapter 8: Niche Fidelity Analysis

8: Abstract

This chapter introduces the primary derived analysis in the dissertation. First, I will introduce Niche Fidelity analysis and explain how it is a good comparative method for analyzing niche use between sites. I will use fidelity analysis to reconstruct which ecological niches were the primary contributors to the four main faunal assemblages at Mensabak. Then I will examine the relationships between the identified ecological niches and infield/outfield agriculture. In the context of niche construction, some assemblages are demonstrated to have a greater reliance on infield agriculture while others are skewed more towards outfield agriculture. I will use these observations to assert that there was diversity in ecological/political arrangements between the sites around the lake. These differences likely mean some sites were better suited to quickly decentralize. In the context of the dissertation, these observations will later be combined with other analyses before drawing broader conclusions.

8.A: Fidelity Analysis

In the Maya area, Fidelity analysis—using faunal assemblages to reconstruct environment use—was adopted by K. Emery (Emery, 2004; 1999; 2016) from its original use in paleozoology (see Stahl, 2006). Fidelity reconstruction's methodology involves comparing the identified fauna in an assemblage to the known micro-environmental preferences of each taxon.

Following Emery, this dissertation presents these preferences as relative proportions of time an animal spends in various environments. Construction of these proportions used a combination of environmental studies and ecological reports. Therefore, these reconstructions are better for some animals than others, a point that Emery also concedes in her work (2016). These proportions are then compared to the NISP for each species in each assemblage, which produces

117 the derived environmental fidelity index for each of the given environments. A full explanation of this process follows in section 8.B.

Using variations of this methodology, archaeologists have demonstrated reduced use of lacustrine resource zones amongst colonized Maya (DeFrance and Hanson, 2008). Additionally, they have shown increased use of disturbance species and domestic species amongst missionized

Maya (Emery, 1999). They have demonstrated that Classic Maya elites at Tikal continued to access a wide range of environments even as deforestation intensified during the Terminal

Classic (Emery, 2004). And finally, researchers have provided broad regional environmental reconstructions of variation in drought conditions throughout the classic “collapse” (Emery,

2016). Thus, this method has a great breadth of diversity in its application and is appropriate for reconstructing infield/outfield practices during the Protohistoric transition. Here, Niche

Construction analysis will be used for an internal comparison of Mensabak’s sites.

When given an ostensibly blind comparison to other methods of environmental reconstruction, fidelity analysis has proven comparable. In an earlier study, fidelity data from the

Petexbatún was compared to stable isotope data from human bones. This study concluded that the fidelity analysis concurred with isotope analysis in showing a decrease in access to close canopy forest during the Terminal Classic (Emery, 2004). In another blind test of fidelity analysis, Emery compared faunal data from across the Petén to drought reconstructions based on river and lake cores (Emery, 2016). This second example is interesting because it is seemingly at odds with lake core data in the region. Emery demonstrates that variations in the faunal assemblage do not follow the same general trend towards less closed-canopy forests. She also found statistically significant examples of sites that managed to buck general trends, due to local variation in drought conditions. Ultimately, though fidelity analysis is not as flashy as other

118 approaches to environmental reconstruction, it is a cheaper alternative with a better potential to reveal unusual or interesting outliers in regional data.

Thus, Fidelity analysis has the methodological potential to demonstrate Maya Niche

Construction during the Terminal Postclassic because several environment types have differing relationships to swidden (outfield) and counteractive (infield) agriculture. To make this examination, this study will use the same arrogated environmental types identified by Emery

(2016). These are: RES—residential—representing the actual immediate spaces of human occupation; AGR—agriculture—representing fields currently in cultivation; SEC—secondary growth—recently fallow fields associated with post-rotation slash-and-burn fields; MF—mature forest—all forest types that have achieved a full canopy; WET—wetlands—combination of swamps, marshes, and seasonally inundated lowlands; RIV—fresh standing water—a combination of both rivers and lakes; and finally OCN—ocean—ocean-related species (See

TABLE XX). This simplified list of environments proposed by Emery works well with the infield-outfield model because some environments (e.g., SEC and MF) are easily related to outfields, while others (e.g., WET, RES, RIV) represent resources close to the lakeside habitations.

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Abbreviation Name Included Environments

Village spaces, disturbed non- RES Residential agricultural spaces AGR Agricultural Spaces currently in agricultural use Includes both recently fallowed spaces and recent/non-mature SEC Secondary Forest forest All forest types that have achieved MF Mature Forest full canopy Combination of swamps, marshes, WET Wetlands seasonally inundated lowlands Combination of both rivers and RIV Freshwater lakes OCN Ocean Ocean and shoreline

TABLE XIX: NICHE FIDELITY ANALYSIS ABBREVIATIONS

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8.B: Fidelity Analysis Methodology

Fidelity analysis is a somewhat complicated methodology for deriving a ratio for a microenvironment’s relative contribution to an overall assemblage. For this reason, this dissertation presents the following subsection with step-by-step bullet points.

1. Establish Niche Fidelity Indices for all species present in the assemblage.

The first step in Fidelity Analysis is to create a Niche Fidelity Index (NFI) for each environment type used by each species. These indices represent the approximate amount of time a given species spends in a given microenvironment. Because they are estimated proportions of time spent in an environment, unless the animal is a Time Lord, the total for all environmental indices for a given species must equal one. This is because they are simple ratios.

For example, allow us to examine a single species, the White-Tailed Deer—Odocoileus virginianus. This common species is known to prefer disturbance environments associated with swidden agriculture, and not have strong affiliations with mature closed-canopy forest. Based on a combination of the following publications (See Appendix D) and Emery’s published NFI’s

(2016), the White-Tailed Deer has the following proportional environmental preferences:

RES=0.0, ARG=0.45, SEC=0.45, MF=0.10, WET=0.0, RIV=0.0 OCN=0.0. Ultimately these numbers are a hypothetical probability of encountering the animal in an environment based on how fidelic it is to a given environment.

Appendix D lists the indices for all identified taxa, as well as the citations used to drive each NFI. In this study, most of the NFI’s used are the same as ones reported by Emery (2016).

Her primary sources for the indices are listed in Appendix D; however, in some cases, I have

121 modified Emery’s inputs. These are also noted in Appendix D, with citations supporting the changes.

2. Use NFI’s to generate the total environmental contribution for all animals in a given species.

a × b = e1, 2, 3 …

(a) Niche Fidelity Index for a specific niche type (b) NISP for a specific species (e) Niche Proportion Contribution for a given land type

The second step in Fidelity Analysis is to use the NFI’s to generate Niche Proportion

Contribution (NPC) for each land type and each species. This step starts by multiplying the total

NISP for each taxon by each of the seven given indices. This generates an aggregated index for each land type for each species, the sum of which should be the original NISP.

Sticking with the hypothetical example of White-Tailed Deer, let’s say a given sample has a NISP=10 sample. In the above equation, the NFI for White-Tailed Deer’s use of RES=0.0.

So, (0.0)*(10)=0. The Niche Proportion Contribution for the residential niche based on the

White-Tailed Deer sample is zero. We then repeat the above for all niches and get NPC-RES=0,

NPC-ARG=4.5, NPC-SEC=4.5, NPC-MF=1.0, NPC-WET=0.0, NPC-RIV=0.0 NPC-OCN=0.0.

We can check our work by adding all of these above NPC’s back together to see if we get the original NISP for White-Tailed Deer. In this case, 4.5+4.5+1.0=10, so our work is correct.

3. Aggregate all NPCs for each niche combining all species.

∑e1, 2, 3 … = d c

(∑e) Sum of NPC for all species in a given environment

122

Once an NPC has been generated for each species in each environment, the entire assemblage can then be considered in aggregate. To do this, first a sum of all NPC’s for all species in a given environment is tabulated, then divided by the total NISP for all specimens used in the analysis. This generates an overall NISP value for a single environment’s contribution to the assemblage.

The final result of this analysis is a percentage contribution for each of the niches. This is a derived statistic that represents the overall relative proportion of any one niche in the formation of a site’s assemblage. Thus, it is not a measure of what the area surrounding a site “looked like” but more a measure of how people used that space.

Building on our hypothetical example, we will add NISP=10 Mexican Mud Turtles—

Staurotypus triporcatus. This animal has an NFI of RIV=0.5 and WET=0.5; all of the other NFIs are 0.0 for this turtle. Thus, the NPCs for this animal are NPC-RIV=5.0 and NPC-WET=5.0.

Added to the White-Tailed Deer (combined NISP=20) the final percentages of the overall assemblage would be: RES= 0.0%, ARG=22.5%, SEC=22.5%, MF= 5.0%, RIV= 25.0%, WET=

25.0%, OCN= 0.0%. Overall, this would be a good example of an assemblage where the consumed animals came mostly from infield lacustrine agriculture.

8.C: Concerns and Biases Inherent in the Method

Overall, it is important to remember that the final percentage of an environmental niche is a derived statistic and only as good as the initial NFI’s generated at the beginning of the method

(Appendix D). It is also important to note that, if the initial NFI’s are correct, then what they represent is only the preferences for the animals people are hunting, not the relative proportions

123 of environments in the immediate proximity of the site. Hunters may range very far to acquire some animals, or exchange with other groups further from the lake. That said, the kinds of animals represented at a site might provide some clues in trends towards mobility and in Maya people’s decisions to rely more on infield and/or outfield agriculture.

8.D: Results of Fidelity Analysis

When considering all sites’ Late Post Classic occupations together, we see some interesting variation in some of the environmental contributions, but notably less variation in others (Figure 9). Overall, it seems that all sites had a strong preference for a flexible and heterogeneous subsistence. The one factor that seems to have the most variation appears to be the sites’ direct reliance on the lake system. The indices for RIV are noticeably higher at two sites,

Los Olores/Kéchem and La Punt, compared to the other two sites. And, of these two, La Punta's reliance on RIV is extremely unusual. The indices for ARG are also more variable than others; just as Los Olores/Kéchem and La Punta are the most reliant on RIV, they too are the least reliant on ARG. Because all these indices are dependent variables, this dissertation provides an additional chart where RIV was removed entirely from the analysis to check and see if the differences in ARG remained (Figure 10). The resulting chart shows that without the RIV sucking the air from the room, ARG’s contributions to these sites was observably smaller, but not enough to be statistically significant. The final index with notable variation in use was WET, which appears in Figure 9 to be less of a contributor to the samples at Tzibana and La Punta.

However, unlike ARG, when RIV is removed, only Tzibana appears to be anomalous (Figure

10).

Though environments that are more associated with water or disturbance agriculture have observable variations between sites, forested land seems to have similar contributions between

124 the sites. Both MF and SEC are the dominant niches in three out of the four sites (Figure 9).

Moreover, the three sites with these forest types as their dominant contributors all have relatively similar contributions from these two. The exception is Tzibana, which has a slightly higher use of secondary forest. Also interesting is that if we remove La Punta’s use of RIV, it too falls in line with the other sites. This does not mean that La Punta’s reliance on forests is the same as the other sites, but it does suggest that though forests contributed less to La Punta, it was used in a manner like the other sites. Also interesting is the fact that all sites had relatively small but similar contributions from RES, suggesting that domesticates and dedicated disturbance species were not particularly relevant to any of the Mensabak sites.

From these observations, this dissertation draws a few conclusions. First, Los

Olores/Kéchem and La Punta are somewhat different from Tzibana and Ixtabay. The first two sites have noticeably higher uses of RIV resources and relatively lower preferences for agricultural pest species. In the case of La Punta, the differences are even more pronounced, which results in it having noticeably less contribution from forest resources and more from river resources. This is an interesting deviation from the less accurate raw data presented in Chapter 7.

Furthermore, as noted in Chapter 7, La Punta also has an abnormally low amount of diversity, suggesting that this trend is not a random sample error, but the result of decisions made by Maya people in the Late Terminal Postclassic. The fact that La Punta and Kéchem resemble one another is also interesting given their geographical proximity and the suggestion that they were both built later in the lake’s occupation. The second observation is that all sites other than La

Punta have a similar preference for animals that use Primary Forest Niches. What this suggests is, as expected, these sites have a significant outfield component to their subsistence.

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It is important to note that the differences outlined here are marginal at best. They are variations on a team rather than radically different strategies. At their core all the sites maintained a relatively diverse set of environments for their subsistence. For the sake of this dissertation this overall similarity with a few minor variations means that all the sites were engaged in maintaining a flexible eco/social terrain, one that could be dissolved into dispersion and greater outfield reliance at a moment’s notice, which was not during the Terminal

Postclassic. With this in mind, the minor differences outlined above should be seen not as dramatically different subsistence strategies, but slightly different deployment of fundamentally the same cosmology—with regards to human/animal relationships. This baseline will become important when considering the species differences in the previous chapter alongside the age differences in the subsequent one.

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Fidelity Analysis Results 0.4

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Figure 9: Fidelity Analysis without RIV

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8.E: Derived Infield/Outfield Analysis

Unlike Emery, who focused on niches to address questions of environmental stability, the focus of this work is on the distinction between Infield agriculture (counteractive-perturbation) and Outfield agriculture (counteractive-relocation). To better exemplify the differences between the two, I have made a series of further indices that weight each of the NPC’s into either infield fidelic (IN) or outfield fidelic (OUT). The following analysis is a derived statistic of a derived statistic and should rightfully be viewed as somewhat suspect. However, the point of this analysis is to provide one more visual example of a trend already observed above, as well as one observable from the species data in Chapter 7.

1. Establish Infield to Outfield fidelity ratios for each niche

The first step is to estimate how fidelic each of the niches described by Emery (RES, MF,

SEC, ARG, RIV, WET) are to either an infield-based agricultural strategy versus an outfield- based strategy. Unfortunately, most modern studies of direct land type distribution are focused on deforestation in the context of population explosion in the lowland forests in combination with increased pressure to convert land for market-driven monocropping and cattle ranching (e.g.

Bray et al., 2008; Carr, 2008). The maps produced in this research generally shows deforestation concentrated in the immediate vicinity of habitation sites and roads, while areas dedicated to outfields are predominantly less likely to be deforested—especially when indigenous forms of land use are maintained (Dalle et al., 2005). However, this research needs to be considered alongside numerous ethnographic examples of slash-and-burn agricultural land use (Bautista and

Zinck, 2010; Cowgill, 1961; DeLanda, 2000[1572]; Farris, 1984; Ford and Nigh, 2009; Nation,

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1979; Nations and Nigh, 1980; Redfield and Villa Rojas, 1935). Which generally demonstrates a similar tendency to have patchy secondary forest closer to habitations and primary forests further away and closer to milpas. Unfortunately, solid statistical landcover percentages are rare in this body of data (see Dalle et al., 2005), so this anecdotal data must be considered to make an educated hypothesis about what land type ratios are more associated with infield or outfield.

Listed below are the relative proportions for land type contributions for infield versus outfield fidelity. The base line for these numbers is based on Dalle et al. (2005), which lists the land cover types and proportions for an ejido in Quintana Roo spanning 30 years of aerial photography and satellite imagery. The problem with the original data used by Dalle, is that it is not based on actual animal resources used, but a brute measure of landcover. Furthermore, the earliest data points in this study were from the 1970s, and therefore represent historical land-use patterns that coincide with the opening of the region to modern capitalist exploitation of forest secondary products (namely logging, chicle extraction, low intensity cash crop production, and moderate amounts of cattle ranching). Therefore, these numbers represent a community that was highly sedentary and more reliant on infields for agriculture. Nonetheless, their baseline can be modified to create a model more useful to this dissertation’s data through some informed modifications. Firstly, in Dalle’s study areas of habitation and milpa land—what would most closely be identified with RES in this dissertation’s terminology—was almost entirely within the zone of easiest access. Thus, the estimations below associate RES very strongly with IN (infield agriculture), but not exclusively as some milpas are outside of the immediate habitation zone.

Mature forest, as one might expect, was mostly located in the furthest zone of habitation, with only occasional patches of recently used fallow land or milpa. Thus, below MF is very strongly associated with OUT (outfield). Secondary forest, however, is significantly more complicated. It

129 is distributed throughout both near habitations and distant land, but secondary forest tends to border primary forest regardless of its location relative to populations. Thus, it is slightly more associated with OUT, but not by a very large margin. AGR in this dissertation is a combination of what Dalle referred to as both young fallows and milpa. In Dalle’s findings these kinds of land use are also found in far flung patches; however they are most concentrated near habitations.

Thus, below they are slightly more weighted towards IN. Finally, RIV and WET represent a point of departure with Dalle’s findings. Dalle’s work was in a dryer area where cenotes and

Agudas (sinkholes and small ponds) were the only year-round standing water, and so their data was not applicable to these landforms at Mensabak. However, given the proximity of Mensabak sites to these land features they were both associated strongly with near-site land use. The overall results of these adaptations are as follows:

RES, 0.80(IN):0.20(OUT) MF, 0.20(IN):0.80(OUT) SEC, 0.40(IN):0.60(OUT) AGR, 0.60(IN):0.40(OUT) RIV, 0.90(IN):0.10(OUT) WET, 0.80(IN):0.20(OUT)

These are the ratios that will be the bases for the following steps.

2. Calculate the final percentage contribution

∑e1, 2, 3 … *(f1, 2) = d1, 2 c

(∑e) Sum of NPC for all species in a given environment (f) f1 is the percentage infield ratio, f2 is the percentage outfield (c) Total identified bone NISP for assemblage (d) d1 Final percentage infield contribution, d2 Final percentage outfield contribution

Unlike the original step three in Emery’s fidelity analysis, the NPC’s are also multiplied by the ratio that each niche contributes to the infield/outfield model. The result is the creation of

130 two different Final Percentage Contributions (rather than the seven used by Emery): one for infield fidelity, the other for outfield. It is noteworthy that these results are dependent variables.

As one goes up, the other necessarily goes down. Alone, such a measure would be suspect; however, in this analysis, the result is considered alongside the Niche Fidelity analysis as well as the species analysis.

8.F: Results of Further Derived Analysis

The results of this analysis show that La Punta and Los Olores/Kéchem continue to be observably different from other sites, and that there are also some subtle differences between

Tzibana and Ixtabay (Figure 11). As expected, the infield outfield model for Los Olores and La

Punta have a more definite preference for infield or near-site resources. This preference is probably a result of both sites having strong preferences for RIV resources, which this analysis categorized as infield or near-site. What is interesting is that Ixtabay and Tzibana were much more evenly split on their use of infields or outfields—suggesting that these sites had more of a healthy mix of agricultural regimes. Interestingly enough, only one site, Tzibana., had more outfield use than infield. This is interesting because Tzibana is a site with visible monumental pyramidal architecture. Ixtabay is also considered a site with a long occupation and also has a nearby mountain shrine associated with it. In all, it is notable that the sites with ritual components that date to the Preclassic and monumental architecture were the sites that also had greater access to forest resources.

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Figure 11: Results of Infield vs Outfield Model

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Chapter 9: Mammal Fusion

9: Abstract

The purpose of this section is to extend the analysis beyond the infield/outfield model of

Maya agriculture to examine the shifting relationships between humans and the animals they prey upon. The following section will use epiphysial fusion as a proxy for animal age at death.

The purpose of doing so is to see if selective hunting of animals occurred at any of the sites.

And, if so, how these differences related to differences in environmental use described in the previous chapter. The overall conclusion of the following section is that Ixtabay selectively harvested young animals associated with agricultural spaces and near-site disturbances. In contrast, sites Tzibana and La Punta have lower rates of juvenile hunting all around. Los Olores, however, seemed to have its own unique pattern. In terms of the overall dissertation, this section demonstrates one more example of heterogeneity in the deployment of Maya cosmology.

9.A: Methods

One of the concerns in this dissertation is not only how people construct niches given particular political relations, but also how people map those relationships onto other forms of life. In the Maya area, the concept of relationality (see Chapter 2) should be used alongside animal treatment to examine animals as resources. To do so we must also examine them as related-to social others. Maya peoples did not only eat their animal neighbors, but they also related to them as quasi-persons. At times, these forms of relating would have accompanied practices, such as raising orphaned animals or prescribed and scheduled hunting and trapping, which have measurable effects on the age of animals in an assemblage. Thus, differences in the age of death for a Maya archaeo-fauna reflect a harvesting strategy that was couched in Maya

133 ideas about personhood and relationality. Moreover, these ideas could be deployed in different ways depending on the political ends in mind.

In the complete Mensabak assemblage, several mammal species had sizable enough samples to conduct a study of epiphyseal fusion as a proxy for the age at the time of harvesting.

Mammal bones grow along a cartilaginous plate located between the shaft and the articulate ends of long bones (Walker, 1987:166-72); these plates become fully fused as the animal approaches adulthood. Though these plates fuse at different times and are subject to numerous external factors affecting their rate of fusion (see Reitz and Wing, 1999:74-76 and 181-182), they are, nonetheless, the best available proxies for animal age at death. Generally, when epiphyseal fusion is studied, it is in populations with large sample sizes, generally domestic populations, and is used alongside tooth development data (see Moran and O’Connor, 1994; Silver, 1970).

Unfortunately, the Mensabak assemblage is much smaller. And, because no fully domesticated animals are in question, there is no published data to make age categories more precise than simply juvenile/adult distinctions.

Due to the paucity of bone with qualifiable epiphysis, in order to increase the sample size, the following methodology does not take independent assortment into account. Usually, studies of epiphyseal fusion avoid the problem of independent assortment by only using a specific single-sided element from each species in a single assemblage. This method effectively makes it impossible to count an individual animal multiple times. However, due to the small sample size of each assemblage, this method would have been impracticable at Mensabak.

Instead, all epiphyseal elements that could display fusion were counted together for a raw-NISP- fusion. Every example of any epiphyseal plate (fused or unfused) is counted as part of this total, including elements with multiple plates. For example, a mammal humorous has both a distal and

134 proximal epiphyseal plate; thus, a complete humorous would have been counted twice in the raw-NISP-fusion count. Ultimately this methodology does inflate the overall representation of animals with more complete skeletons and effectively means that individual animals could be counted multiple times. Unfortunately, it proved to be the best way to make sure an adequate sample-size was available for statistical testing. More importantly, because everything was counted, this method likely did not inflate the importance of juvenile elements over adult ones.

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Taxa Period Fused Partly Fused Unfused Sum Fused Partly Fused Unfused Dasyprocta punctata Ixtabay 17 2 10 29 58.62% 6.90% 34.48% Central Tzibana 6 0 2 9 66.67% 0.00% 22.22% American Los Olores 10 0 1 11 90.91% 0.00% 9.09% Agouti La Punta 63 1 17 81 77.78% 1.23% 20.99% Sum 96 3 30 129 74.42% 2.33% 23.26% Cuniculus paca Ixtabay 60 4 9 73 82.19% 5.48% 12.33% Tzibana 14 0 2 16 87.50% 0.00% 12.50% Paca Los Olores 44 1 17 62 70.97% 1.61% 27.42% La Punta 146 1 33 180 81.11% 0.56% 18.33% Sum 264 6 61 331 79.76% 1.81% 18.43% Dasypus novemcinctus Ixtabay 24 0 13 37 64.86% 0.00% 35.14% Nine- Tzibana 7 0 2 9 77.78% 0.00% 22.22% Banded Los Olores 8 0 3 11 72.73% 0.00% 27.27% Armadillo La Punta 71 1 13 85 83.53% 1.18% 15.29% Sum 110 1 31 142 77.46% 0.70% 21.83% Tayassuidae Ixtabay 21 0 1 22 95.45% 0.00% 4.55% Pecari Tzibana 3 0 0 3 100.00% 0.00% 0.00% tajacu and Tayassu Los Olores 10 0 0 10 100.00% 0.00% 0.00% pecari La Punta 64 0 0 64 100.00% 0.00% 0.00% Sum 98 0 1 99 98.99% 0.00% 1.01% Odocoileus virginianus Ixtabay 28 9 11 39 71.79% 23.08% 28.21% Tzibana 30 9 3 33 90.91% 27.27% 9.09% White- Tailed Deer Los Olores 11 9 3 14 78.57% 64.29% 21.43% La Punta 25 1 1 27 92.59% 3.70% 3.70% Sum 94 1 18 113 83.19% 0.88% 15.93% Mazama americana Ixtabay 50 0 5 55 90.91% 0.00% 9.09% Red Brocket Tzibana 11 0 2 13 84.62% 0.00% 15.38% Deer Los Olores 25 0 6 31 80.65% 0.00% 19.35% La Punta 63 0 3 66 95.45% 0.00% 4.55%

Sum 149 0 16 165 90.30% 0.00% 9.70% TABLE XX: EPIPHYSIS FROM SELECT SPECIES

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9.B: Results

The results of this counting were the following epiphyseal samples: Dasyprocta punctata

(NISP n=96), Cuniculus paca (NISP n=264), Dasypus novemcinctus (NISP n=110), Odocoileus virginianus (NISP n=94), Mazama americana (NISP n=149) and Tayassuidae—a category combining both Pecari tajacu and Tayassu pecari—(NISP n=98) (TABLE XXI).

The resulting counts were divided between their respective sites. Unfortunately, for many animals, the sites had dramatically different sample sizes. For some animals, like the Nine-

Banded Armadillo, the Central American Agouti, and the Paca, the sample sizes were dramatically different because of one site dominating the assemblage. However, in all three of these cases, it was the same site, La Punta, that had the lion’s share of the assemblage. For the other species, most sites were closer to one another in sample size, or only one site, usually

Tzibana, was unusually smaller. Overall, these size differences are interesting because La Punta is not a particularly unusual sub-sample in the following analysis, suggesting that its observed difference from the other sites are not a result of a random sampling error.

Visually, there appear to be three different preferences for juveniles amongst the four sites (Figures 12 through Figure 16). The first pattern is the baseline similarity between Tzibana and La Punta. For all animals apart from the Red Brocket Deer, these two sites have approximately similar proportions of unfused epiphysis. Though, it is notable that the Red

Brocket Deer was a rare species in the Tzibana assemblage, which may have inflated the importance of the few present examples of unfused epiphysis. The second pattern is that of Los

Olores/Kéchem, which had a high representation of unfused epiphysis for all species except the

Central American Agouti and the species of Tyassudae. The most unusual pattern is that of

Ixtabay, which generally had a higher representation of unfused epiphysis for animals associated

137 with infields and lower representation of animals associated with forests. In all, it appears that there was a great deal of diversity in how sites around Mensabak harvested younger animals.

Visual inspection of these differences provides a useful framework for understanding the statistical variations between these samples. A series of Chi-Square Tests were conducted first by comparing differences between sites for each species, then by comparing differences between species at each site (Appendix E). The first thing to note is that when all site samples were compared by species, only the White-Tailed Deer had a P-value that could support the hypothesis that the variation was non-random. That said, when comparing specific sites to one another, several of the above anecdotal observations came into focus. For one, with Los Olores and Tzibana, there were no species with P-values suggesting non-randomness in explaining the differences, supporting the observed similarities to the sites. With that observation in mind, comparing the sites without Tzibana in the sample (it was excluded because its sample size was lower) showed more variation between the three observed ways of using animals. Between these three sites, White-Tailed Deer, Nine-Banded Armadillos, and Central America Agouti all had P- values suggesting non-random variation. When Ixtabay was compared only to Los Olores, only the variation in Agouti had P-values suggesting non-randomness. But when compared only to La

Punta, the same pattern of non-randomness remained for the same three key species. Finally, when only Los Olores and La Punta—the two sites closest to one another—were compared, the

Red Broket Deer had a non-random P-value. All the Chi-Square tests assert that generally, the above-observed differences are mostly statistically significant ones.

Chi-Square tests also measured internal variation in specific animal use at each site

(Appendix E). The first important observation is that the two similar sites, Los Olores and

Tzibana, both had P-values that suggest differences between the species were likely the result of

138 random chance. That is to say, these sites consumed animals of generally adult age regardless of species. At the other two sites, this was not the case. Both La Punta and Ixtabay had P-values suggesting the differences between the amounts of unfused epiphysis present for any animal was non-random. In short, these sites did discriminate between animal species before deciding at what age to consume them.

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Ix Tabi Tzibatna