Dissertation Research: Social Power and Domestic Labor in Yoro, Honduras

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Under the direction of Drs. Rosemary Joyce and Julia Hendon, Mr Christopher Fung will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will conduct excavations at sites which are located in the Yoro region of Honduras and which date to late Classic and Terminal Classic times. It was during this period that Mayan and related societies reached their height of cultural development. Mr. Fung will select a series of mounds which probably represent domestic compounds. He will strip large lateral areas to uncover artifacts in spatial context and use these to reconstruct the organization of activities within each. On this basis he will attempt to determine the role of food preparation activities and the relative importance of this in contexts which, on the basis of other evidence, appear to represent elites and non-elites. He will then attempt to determine the role which food preparation played in the development and maintenance of status differentiation and also determine the degree to which these Honduran societies were internally differentiated. He will use ethnographic models as the basis for such analysis and will compare the results to those obtained from nearby Mayan sites. Honduras is of great interest to archaeologists who study Middle America because it marks a frontier between Mayan and non-Mayan societies. While the outline of Mayan prehistory in Honduras is well known, the nature of their non-Mayan neighbors is less well understood. If in fact the non-Mayan counterparts do not exhibit such a strong degree of social complexity, it provides a situation in which archaeologists can examine interaction along a frontier zone. The sites Mr. Fung will study are non-Mayan and his work should yield new insight both into their level of complexity and the nature of their interaction with the Maya. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide data of interest to many archaeologists. By its focus on food preparation and examination of the broader context within which this takes place, it will help to develop an approach which archaeologists may employ in many situations in many parts of the world. The project will also assist in the training of a promising young archaeologist.