Borders, Frontiers, and Boundaries in the Maya World: Concepts and Theory

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Introduction to the Special Section: Borders, Frontiers, and Boundaries in the Maya World: Concepts and Theory

Christina Halperin University of Montreal

Carolyn Freiwald University of Mississippi

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Recommended Citation Halperin, C., Freiwald, C., & Iannone, G. (2020). Introduction to the special section: Borders, Frontiers, and Boundaries in the Maya World: Concepts and Theory. Ancient Mesoamerica, 31(3), 453–460. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956536120000061

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INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL SECTION: BORDERS, FRONTIERS, AND BOUNDARIES IN THE MAYA WORLD: CONCEPTS AND THEORY

Christina Halperin ,a Carolyn Freiwald ,b and Gyles Iannonec aDepartment of Anthropology, Université de Montréal, 3150 Jean-Brillant, Montréal, Quebec H3T 1N8, Canada bDepartment of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Mississippi, 510 Lamar, Oxford, Mississippi 38677 cDepartment of Anthropology, Trent University, 1600 West Bank Drive, Peterborough, Ontario K9L 0G2, Canada

Abstract

The Maya area has long been characterized as a mosaic of polities large and small, with cultural connections, linguistic dialects, ethnicities, and economic networks that shifted, expanded, and contracted over time. In this paper, we examine different ways of constructing boundaries. From physical demarcations in the landscape to habitual practices of interaction and affiliation, the lines that tied and divided were both unstable and multiple. We draw on definitions and theories from anthropology, history, and geography to review the concepts of borders, frontiers, and boundaries and their implications for the Maya area over the long term.

INTRODUCTION Belize) implicitly suggests that it is a type specific to Belizean sites, and the name Peten Gloss ware or vajilla de Petén Lustroso The making of boundaries entails a continual reworking and unmak- by similar reasoning, implies a ceramic ware specific to Peten ing of places and ties among people. The Maya area was a mosaic of sites. Yet archaeological distributions of such types and wares do polities large and small, cultural connections, linguistic dialects, not conform to modern geopolitical boundaries (Chase and Chase ethnicities, and economic networks that expanded, fragmented, 2012; Halperin et al. 2020; LeCount et al. 2002), and thus create re-formed, and contracted over time. Rather than focusing on the confusion for understandings of pre-Columbian belonging and heart of these interaction spheres and landscapes, however, these interaction. Both countries also have their own intellectual interac- dynamics are also fruitfully explored at their fringes. As border tion spheres fostered through national conferences and the use of and frontier studies from multiple disciplines have underscored, cul- different languages for communication. As such, these collective tural creativity, political movements, and social transformations papers strive to dissolve these contemporary boundaries by focusing emerge in between polities and communities as much as they on the ways that political, social, demographic, and economic inter- emerge within them. This introduction to the Special Section, actions were forged, marked, and unraveled within and across this Borders, Frontiers, and Boundaries in the Maya World: Concepts region from the Classic period onward. In doing so, they help and Theory, outlines basic definitions and theories of borders, fron- enrich our understanding of the history of this contemporary tiers, and boundaries and details how such concepts have been border zone. employed in the Maya area. The Special Section centers on the eastern Maya lowlands, bringing together papers and collaborations across the LAND, PEOPLE, AND PRACTICE Belize-Guatemala border, which held no significance for pre-Columbian and early Colonial-period social ties, political alli- The meanings of the terms borders, frontiers, and boundaries are ances, trade networks, and migrations. Nonetheless, contemporary sometimes confusing since they are often used interchangeably borders can impede our understanding of past borderlands and because different disciplines, from anthropology to geography, because archaeological projects tend to work in only one country may use them in contradictory ways. Geographers, historians, and (Ford 2011; Golden et al. 2008; Golden and Scherer 2013) and Classical archaeologists, in particular, have focused on the territorial etic nomenclature of ceramics often evokes contemporary geopolit- dimensions of frontiers, such as political divisions between two ical landscapes. For example, the name of Belize Red type ceramics states or as physical zones between settled agrarian societies and (named for the original location of discovery at Barton Ramie, mobile peoples (Anderson 1996; Feuer 2016; Prescott 1987). Anthropologists, sociologists, and anthropological archaeologists have often incorporated a territorial aspect into their meaning, but E-mail correspondence to: [email protected] focus more on boundaries and frontiers as social and political 453

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identities, as “us” vs. “them,” and as social, political, and economic and gift exchanges helped create economic and cultural interaction practices of affiliation and belonging that create divisions that may spheres that were reinforced and cross-cut by community, lineage, or may not relate to the physical landscape (Alvarez 1995; Barth linguistic, polity, and regional affiliations (Fox et al. 1996; Smith 1969; Fassin 2011; Lamont and Molnár 2002; Schlegel 1992). and Berdan 2003). For example, network analyses have the poten- Political and social identities have the potential to be deterritorial- tial to show how economic interactions cross-cut or reinforced pol- ized. At the heart of such ambiguities, however, is an inherent ities and how such economic interactions had their own boundaries tension in how divisions, limits, and points of convergence manifest or limits (Golitko and Feinman 2015; Meissner 2017, 2020). The since human practices and interactions not only transpire as part of a circulation of both quotidian and precious objects, however, was physical landscape but also as part of ongoing material practices, part of the place-making of communities, regions, and polities as imagined communities, and situated understandings of self. They people moved and brought precious objects with them, journeyed are relational, dynamic, mutually constituting, and entangled to and from market centers, and traveled afar with gifts to cement (Ashmore 2002; Hodder 2011; Hutson 2009; Smith 2003). diplomatic and social ties between families and polities (Halperin To more clearly describe these entanglements and tensions, 2014). however, we draw from the terminology of Parker (2006:79), in Migration is also a critical factor in the making and unmaking of which “borders” are linear dividing lines in the landscape and borders and boundaries. Recent isotopic analyses have underscored “frontiers” are interstitial zones of interaction between political, that Maya peoples were highly mobile, but with the large majority of administrative, and cultural entities (also see Iannone 2010: movements within an individual’s lifetime as occurring between 353). While both concepts may entail spatial relationships, regions rather than long distances (Freiwald 2011; Freiwald et al. borders have a more clearly marked manifestation, and frontiers 2020; Price et al. 2008, 2010, 2014; Somerville et al. 2016). are zones or regions, and as such, are more porous. For Unlike the hyper-policing and surveillance of twenty-first century example, while precise borders may be a product of borders (Fassin 2011), pre-Columbian polities, as in Colonial “18th-Century absolutism” (Wendl and Rösler 1999:7) and the times, likely had relatively little control over the migration of their rise of the contemporary nation-state (Parker 2002:327; Prescott constituents (Inomata 2004). The isotopic identification of who is 1987:1; Ratzel 1897), there are examples of incipient borders as considered “foreign” and “local” based on geological and environ- early as 1290 b.c. when a formal treaty between Hittites and mental variation over a given area, however, often differs from Egyptians legally recognized the territorial jurisdictions of the boundaries identified by ceramic production and distribution two states (Pritchard 1969:199). spheres, architectural styles, or even biological affinity. Despite In contrast, the term “boundary” is more general and signifies these discrepancies, it is clear that demographic shifts constantly the bounds or limits of anything. As such, it encompasses both altered polity sizes and power structures and, in turn, helped forge borders and frontiers. The term boundary has limitations in that new social and cultural affiliations and senses of place. it is more ambiguous and can apply to different types of interac- Nonetheless, ethnohistoric, ethnographic, and archaeological tions and different ways to conceptualize and divide people and evidence also suggest that the Maya were known to have created places. Nonetheless, flexible terms are heuristically useful, as physical borders in the landscape and, in some cases, engaged in seen with recent discussions of “communities,” which are heavy boundary maintenance practices (Iannone 2010:353; dynamic social formations that operate on multiple, overlapping McAnany 1995:87). Boundaries and frontiers were most often levels and that include ideological, material, spatial, and practice- demarcated using prominent features on the landscape, such as based manifestations (Canuto and Yaeger 2000; Varien and Potter caves or springs, or by erecting shrines or artificial mounds 2008). (Marcus 1993:126; Pohl et al. 1997:208–214; Roys 1943:181, In the Maya area, scholars have debated whether polities were 192). There are rare cases of cities with defensive features and defined through the physical landscape or through relationships walls that delimit the capital, such as the Classic-period Tikal earth- of debt, obligation, alliance, and hierarchy between people. works, the wall encircling the Postclassic city of Mayapan, the Hammond (1991:275–281), for example, argued that Classic defensive moat around Classic-period Becan, and the agave palisade Maya polities were not forged by high degrees of boundary mainte- and moat around the Chinamita town of Tulumci (Puleston and nance or through clear territorial divisions. Likewise, Graham (2011: Callender 1967; Marcus 1993:124; Masson et al. 2006; Webster 29–39) has asserted that pre-Columbian polities were defined prin- et al. 2007). Large investments were made to create defensive fea- cipally through relationships among people, particularly patron- tures in the valley zone between El Zotz and Tikal, underscoring client relationships that dictated the tribute and labor obligations regional geopolitical border maintenance practices (Garrison et al. peoples had to rulers, and in return, the responsibilities of rulers to 2019). Classic-period defensive features between Yaxchilan and their communities. During the Colonial period, the Spanish often Piedras Negras also reveal that the two competing political designated political units based on señoríos, the domain of a lord, centers vied for control over riverine and land routes of exchange and the encomienda system, in which primarily Spanish and and were also heavily concerned with marking territories within Creole men were given tribute rights over particular peoples and and between the two regions (Davenport and Golden 2016; their labor (Farriss 1984:38). Among Colonial Quiche Maya speak- Golden et al. 2008; Golden and Scherer 2013). ers, for example, vinak literally meant “people,” but was also used to Contemporary nation-state border issues provide some reflection refer to Quiche and Cakchiquel polities with territorial extents (Hill for these archaeological border maintenance practices. The desire 1996:63–64), further underscoring the dialectics between land and among some U.S. political officials to create larger and longer phys- people. ical barriers between the U.S. and Mexico serves as much as a sym- Research on pre-Columbian Maya market systems suggest that bolic divide between types of people on racial, criminal, and the distribution of goods was characterized more as overlapping economic grounds as a concerted effort to block the northward market spheres than isolated “solar” markets centered at polity cap- movement of people (Dick 2019), and it points to potentially mul- itals (Eppich and Freidel 2015; Masson and Freidel 2013). Markets tilayered meanings and purposes of ancient border practices.

Immigrants embody the articulation of territorial borders and social Epigraphic research in the Maya area, for example, reveals that boundaries since they cross borders to settle within a new commu- some places, as identified by place names, may overlap with nity, but also often encounter new social boundaries in the different emblem glyphs (royal titles), as in the examples of Yaxha, ways they are treated in their new homelands (Fassin 2011:215). K’anwitznal (Ucanal), and Lakam-ha (Palenque) (Stuart and Likewise, the recent vote in Belize in May of 2019 to ask the Houston 1994:3–10). Not all emblem glyphs, however, evoke top- United Nations to settle the border territory dispute in which onyms, and as dynasties splintered or migrated, such royal titles Guatemala claims 11,000 km2 of Belizean territory (Sanchez were associated with new peoples, deities, and places, such as the 2019) underscores the ways in which borders are never fixed, but Mutul dynasty at Tikal that fragmented in the early seventh in a constantly shifting state of negotiation and contestation. Houk century with the foundation of a splinter polity in the Petexbatun and Bonorden’s(2020) article in this Special Section on the San region. Likewise, new epigraphic readings suggest that multiple pol- Pedro Maya from the Kaxil Uinic village document that this territo- ities may have forged together to form regional group identities. rial dispute has existed longer than the establishment of the country While such formulations sometimes evoked the quadripartite direc- of Belize and even the colony of British Honduras. They argue that tions (Marcus 1976:16–17; Rice 2004), royal titles also included the borders are manifestations more of political aspirations than lived Huk Tzuk (Seven Divisions) and Huxlajuun Tzuk (Thirteen experiences of belonging. Divisions) titles that may reference a geopolitical group of multiple One way that pre-Columbian Mesoamerican borders were reaf- royal families or an ethnic identity that cross-cut polities firmed was through ritual circuits, in which groups of people encir- (Tokovinine 2013:98). cled settlements, communities, or regions in their pathways to and Likewise, ethnohistoric data indicate that ethnicity sometimes from shrines and key landmarks, such as caves, mountain tops, overlapped with political boundaries, such as the Kowoj and Itza and springs (Garcia-Zambrano 1994; Halperin and Hruby 2019; Maya who occupied the Peten Lakes region during the Postclassic Hill 1996; Reese-Taylor 2002; Tozzer 1941:139). Community period. These two ethnic groups spoke the same Maya language, leaders also regularly surveyed territorial limits using these proces- but possessed different origin stories, had different architectural sions to (re)confirm both natural and artificial features as legitimate styles and ceramic production communities, and ultimately consid- territorial markers (Iannone 2010:355; McAnany 1995:87; Roys ered themselves enemies (Cecil 2009; Cecil and Neff 2006; Jones 1943:181, 192). Contemporary and historic data indicate that 1998; Pugh 2003; Rice and Rice 2018). Yet when the Kowoj ritual circuits undertaken as part of annual New Year ceremonies were annexed into the larger Itza kingdom, the Itza kingdom encom- or to establish settlements often began at the center of the commu- passed multiple ethnic groups, including not just the Kowoj, but nity and followed a counter-clockwise direction around it. The also the Tuluncies (enemies who were referred to as na uinicob or shrines and landscape features visited along the way served not “not men”; Marcus 1993:127), and the Mopan Maya, who spoke only as zones between earthly and otherworldly realms, but as a different Yucatecan Maya dialectic (Jones 1998:19–22). ways to create and reinforce divisions between people and places. As Marcus (1993, 1998; Iannone 2002) stressed in her dynamic model of ancient Maya polities, provinces expanded and contracted over time, a process of centralization and decentralization that constantly shifted political frontiers. While some provincial regions MULTIPLE, OVERLAPPING, AND DYNAMIC may have been highly controlled or tightly allied with dominant BOUNDARIES centers, such as Yaxchilan and its subordinate centers (Golden In the same way that social identities are situated, multiple, and et al. 2008:2), others may have been “semi-autonomous buffer dynamic, boundaries should also be viewed as multiple, overlap- states” (Braswell et al. 2004:200; Iannone 2010) with only weak ping, and constantly shifting. While one spot may mark the heart- connections to more powerful centers. Alternatively, some provin- land for some, that same spot may encompass a hinterland for cial polities may have always been autonomous and never incorpo- others. For example, today’s Hong Kong is both a modern world rated into larger political formations (Scarborough et al. 2003). metropolis and a peripheral Chinese city (Tenzin 2017:551) Michelet (2012), for example, argues that, unlike most polities in whose political status and incorporation into mainland China has the Maya area, the Rio Bec region during the Late and Terminal been increasingly contentious with the protest over the Fugitive Classic lacked both a clear political frontier and a political center. Offenders bill in 2019–2020. In turn, political, economic, ideolog- Its “great houses” were numerous, but without the typical signs of ical, military, social, demographic, and geographic boundaries may centrality and hierarchy (no open central spaces, no ballcourts, correspond closely with, and dialectically create one another, while and/or dispersed rather than nucleated monumental architecture). other boundaries may vary substantially from one another as contra- In his study of African political formations, Kopytoff (1987) dis- dictory to, nested within, or cross-cutting one another (Alvarez tinguished between external and internal frontiers. External frontiers 1995; Campbell 2009; Hegmon 1998; Parker 2006; Rodseth and were frontiers between complex political entities, such as expanding Parker 2005). Likewise, Smith (2005) argues that ancient states empires, and more sparsely populated areas with less complex soci- should not be conceived as homogenous and uncontested territories. eties. Internal frontiers, on the other hand, were interstitial zones Instead, she contends, a focus on multiple, shifting networks, as between metropolises. Internal frontiers were often home to ethni- seen through the development of interconnected roads or the distri- cally ambiguous, politically fragmented, and marginal societies bution of state-sponsored inscriptions, allow us to rethink how that fell in between more powerful political entities (the “institu- boundaries transpired from the perspective of overlapping and tional vacuum”). They were also dynamic places where new politi- uneven connections rather than a homogenous territorial division cal centers emerged as a result of people moving from the (see also Martin and Grube 2000:21; Munson and Macri 2009). metropolis. The idea of the external frontier is difficult to apply to As such, it is imperative to consider multiple scales of analyses the Maya area, since Maya polities were not necessarily more pop- whereby placing-making, social memory, and practices of affiliation ulous or more politically complex than their neighbors (Goldstein forge uneven and intersecting senses of belonging. 1994; Schortman 1989; Schortman and Urban 1994; Stoner

2012), and since pre-Columbian Maya peoples never considered diverse influences and ways of being co-existed, but could also be themselves as a singular cultural or political entity (Beyyette and places of innovation and agency (see also Stein 2002). LeCount 2017; Hutson 2009). Nonetheless, the interstitial zones One way in which diversity and difference is mediated is through between dominant Maya political formations could aptly be consid- “boundary objects” that link different practices, values, and view- ered as internal frontiers (Iannone 2010). points. In applying Star and Griesemer’s(1989) concept of boundary objects, some archaeologists (Mills 2018; Roddick and Stahl 2016) have emphasized the bridging role of particular people, CULTURAL CREATIVITY, DIVERSITY, AND POLITICAL places, and things in translating and making connections between INNOVATIONS different communities and their practices. Boundary objects One of the critiques of many previous core-periphery studies is the inhabit multiple social worlds and as such, destabilize the bounded- emphasis on the metropolis as the source of influences and migrants. ness of social boundaries. Harrison-Buck and Pugh (2020) consider In fact, many agency and postcolonial approaches have emphasized fine paste ceramic vessels as boundary objects that facilitated the frontier zones as places of ethnogenesis, cosmopolitanism, cultural interactions between diverse ethnolinguistic, regional, and social creativity, political innovations, and hybridity (Bhabha 1994, 1996; groups in the Maya lowlands during the Terminal Classic period. Cobb 2019; Lightfoot and Martinez 1995; Ogundiran 2014; Such interactions were also fostered through elite women who inter- Schortman and Urban 1994; Silliman 2015; Stein 2002; Voss married into distant polities and communities during all time 2005, 2008). Despite their more peripheral status, frontiers are periods and who were integral in serving as intermediaries often places of contact for different cultural, social, and linguistic between regional differences. groups. Bhabba (1994), for example, argues that hybridity is a Accommodations and negotiations of difference may also be process in which different cultural forms and ways of being are highly situational. Schortman and colleagues (1994, 2001), for mixed to create new subjectivities. It is from a marginalized posi- example, find that elites in the Naco Valley, a zone often considered tion, in particular, that the mixing of and creative reworking of to be the southeastern frontier between Maya and non-Maya traits and dispositions take on new meanings and stimulate change. peoples, drew on multiple political identities and practices of affil- Tenzin (2017) argues that borders and frontiers can be conver- iation. They linked themselves to Maya elites to the northwest in gence zones, places of cultural hybridity, linguistic diversity, and their adoption of turban headdresses, use of Spondylus sp. shell in fluid identities. It is not just the interstitial character of the frontier ceremonial contexts, and in their construction of monumental archi- itself—and the institutional vacuum that it provides—that leads to tecture as a means to legitimize their higher status while they simul- the hybrid qualities that are often ascribed to frontier communities. taneously promoted a local regional identity in the construction and The intermingling of local and immigrant cultures within frontier display of ceramic vessels and figurines that strategically cross-cut settings is equally important (Koptyoff 1987:28–29). Despite their status divides to forge social solidarity among community members. peripheral status, frontier settlements can be self-sufficient power Iannone (2010) incorporates many of these dynamic processes centers. For example, in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, Tenzin associated with internal frontier communities in his analysis of the (2017) finds that Qiangzu peoples take advantage of Tibetan “petty kingdom” of Minanha, a small capital city situated in what unrest to advance their own political interests as they sit in the is now Belize’s north Vaca Plateau, an area that was once located shadow of the Han and Tibetan states. In turn, both Gyalrongwa equidistant (25 km) between the two larger—and antagonistic— and Qiangzu communities in this borderland region position them- kingdoms of Caracol and Naranjo (see also Schwake and Iannone selves as dynamic centers through historical narratives and origin 2010, 2016). By taking into consideration Minanha’s environmental stories, and both groups pick and choose different cultural traits setting, geopolitical location, and developmental history—along- from each other and from their more dominant neighbors to side its architecture, artifacts, and ritual practices—Iannone (2010: define their identities and assert their political and economic 362–364) highlights several characteristics that are indicative of interests. an internal frontier community. These include evidence for political Likewise, Ogundiran (2014) considers Early Osogbo, Nigeria, volatility (the periodic destruction of stelae, buildings, and even the as a dynamic internal African frontier during the seventeenth and purposeful burial of an entire elite residential courtyard), hybridity eighteenth centuries. Rather than passively emulating ceramic (a site plan that reflects multiple, extraregional influences, and a styles from Yorubaland, the metropolis from the northwest, Early comparatively intensive use of slate unlike that seen at either Osogbo was a convergence of three different ceramic complexes: Caracol or Naranjo), emulation (evidence for caching behavior, the local Osun complex, the Oyo complex from northwest mortuary practices, and both architectural and artifactual traits that Yorubaland, and the Ife ceramic complex from central are similar, albeit not identical, to those of Caracol), and negotiation Yorubaland, where different cultural expressions were displayed (shifts in rulership and political affiliations that are suggestive of and negotiated in the context of food service and hospitality. In everchanging relationships with the Caracol and Naranjo polities). fact, the Early Osogbo ceramic assemblage was more diverse than The tensions and tumultuous relationships between these two those from the metropolis. Similarly, Halperin and colleagues superpowers, as well as with Tikal and Calakmul, over the (2020) have found that the Maya site of Ucanal did not blindly rep- course of the Classic period are seen to varying degrees at other licate the ritual practices and material culture of the larger polities of sites in the eastern lowlands, including Xunantunich (Awe et al. Naranjo and Caracol that dominated it during the Late Classic 2020), Ucanal (Halperin et al. 2020), and Nakum (Z´ rałka et al. period. Rather, Ucanal took advantage of its frontier status 2020), providing, at the polity level, different perspectives of between these political superpowers to eclectically incorporate “the outside looking in.” Further explorations, however, are influences and social practices of multiple regions and eventually needed to examine how such relationships manifested at different to establish itself as a vanguard of Terminal Classic-period political social scales, such as the household level, whereby the potential changes. These and other archaeological examples point to the pos- for internal heterogeneity and unevenness in such tensions can sibility that frontiers not only accommodated difference whereby be better understood.

CONCLUSION the loci of political power today (Schwartz 1990). Its colonial frontier status was partly inherited from the Postclassic period, Boundary studies in archaeology help focus social, political, and in which the eastern lowlands were home to many decentralized cultural analyses at key pulse points of ancient interactions, con- political entities that were smaller and less powerful than flicts, and ethnogenesis. In order for them to be successful, Chichen Itza and later Mayapan in the northern lowlands, as however, they must consider the situated, historical, and multiscalar well as the Kaqchikel and K’iche’ polities in the Guatemalan ways in which people make or break ties with each other and the highlands. Despite this, eastern Maya lowland centers were well- ways in which marks on the ground were experienced and con- connected with peoples in northern Yucatan and other regions of stantly reworked. The shifting entanglements of people and place Mesoamerica (Awe et al. 2020; Halperin et al. 2020; from the pre-Columbian and historic periods in what is now the Harrison-Buck and Pugh 2020; Meissner 2020;Z´ rałka et al. Belize-Guatemala border point to the rich integration of polities 2020). During the Classic period, in contrast, the eastern lowlands and communities in this contemporary border zone and to ways in contained some of the largest political capitals and urban centers, which frontiers and borders were fragile formations. whose expansion and limitations can be usefully explored through Historic documents and archaeological research indicate, for the study of smaller centers at their shifting frontiers (Awe et al. example, that the borders of Spanish and British colonial powers 2020;Halperinetal.2020;Z´ rałka et al. 2020). in this region were fluid, porous, and rarely enforced, a phenomenon Although spatial borders are often dualistic in that they often (but that has spilled over into more contemporary national border con- not always) create divisions between two political entities, a focus flicts (Houk and Bonorden 2020). Likewise, the isotopic evidence on boundaries, frontiers, and borders in a more encompassing from the Colonial mission of San Bernabé on the shores of Lake array of social, ethnolinguistic, material, and landscape perspectives Peten Itza underscores the possibility of ties between Central underscores a more multi-sited tension of political and social Belize and the Peten Lakes region (Freiwald et al. 2020). The move- dynamics. Frontiers were often diverse places and the home to mul- ments of people between these regions have a long history, with evi- tiple different ethnic, linguistic, and cultural groups whose practices dence of migration during the Classic and Postclassic periods and material productions often selectively combined influences (Freiwald 2020; Hoggarth et al. 2020; Wright 2005), and with sig- from afar to create new sense of people and place. The consideration nificant mobility of people today, whether legal or illegal. of multiple, situated, nested, and entangled boundaries highlights During the Colonial period, however, this entire region was the ways in which people and place mutually create one another, considered a political frontier, distant from the colonial capitals as well as the ways in which their divergences stimulate change. in northern Yucatan and highland Guatemala, which continue as

RESUMEN

El área maya ha sido caracterizada por mucho tiempo como un mosaico de el paisaje hasta las prácticas habituales de interacción y afiliación, las políticas mayores y menores, con conexiones culturales, dialectos líneas que unían y dividían fueron inestables y múltiples. Nos basamos en lingüísticos, etnias y redes económicas que se cambiaron, se expandieron definiciones y teorías de la antropología, la historia y la geografía para y se contrajeron con el tiempo. En este artículo, examinamos diferentes revisar los conceptos de fronteras, bordes, y límites y sus implicaciones formas de construir límites y fronteras. Desde las demarcaciones físicas en para el Área Maya a largo plazo.

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