Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Excavating Community and Identity in the Borderlands of Late Classic (A.D. 650-900) NW Honduras

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Archaeological research around the globe has long been focused on the grand monuments, fine artistic achievements and sweeping political dramas of ancient peoples. This emphasis has often been adopted at the expense of a smaller scale, more intimate understanding of the lives and experiences of the individual peoples comprising those cultures. A consideration of how ancient peoples perceived and identified themselves with respect to those within and without their communities will provide an important step in improving our anthropological understanding of personal and group identity in both the past and present. This research project addresses issues of co mmunity identity and its material expression on range of scales among the Late Classic (650-900 A.D.) peoples of Las Canoas, NW Honduras. Research includes the intensive excavation of both elite and non-elite houses and administrative/ritual buildings at the archaeological site of Las Canoas, as well as analysis of artifacts recovered from those structures. This information will be studied with the aim of finding patterns in the use of built spaces and the production, trade, and use of material goods, such as pottery. The design of human settlements and the changes wrought on them over time lends insight into the ways people feel their environment should be organized and communities experienced. The types of possessions made, gathered, saved, displayed, hidden, and/or discarded by individuals and families reveals much about what they value, what they are able to acquire and to what lengths they will go to access such items. Studies of both ancient architecture and artifact assemblages including pottery, stone tools, domestic refuse, burials, special caches and/or ritual deposits provide a view into how a group of people shaped, lived in, and gave meaning to their world - in essence created their identities. The proposed research will consider the layout, orientation and relationships of buildings to one another, as well as the types and styles of artifacts (especially pottery), as indicators or expressions of individual and community identity. Information recovered from Las Canoas will be analyzed with these ideas in mind and then compared to that known from contemporaneous, similarly sized sites in the surrounding area. Understanding how the peoples living at Las Canoas related to the social, political, and economic hierarchy in Late Classic Mesoamerica are basic goals of this project. The broader aim of the research, however, is to test the hypothesis that much-debated anthropological concepts such as culture and ethnicity do not always play themselves out in the daily reality of human lives. Rather, it is proposed that peoples craft their identities to suit a variety of material and symbolic needs, shifting their alliances and affiliations in response to changing pressures and situations. This research is designed to question our often-untested assumptions about the nature of interaction between different peoples and communities in achieve a better understanding of human behavior.