Utatlan: The Constituted Community of the K'iche Maya of Q'umarkaj

The Greater Utatlán Project
situations change, in response either to internal events or to outside circumstances
(Smith 2003: 4–5).
Community as a Framework for Conceptualizing the Archaeological Record
Weeks (1980) excavated at the K’iche’ center of Chisalin, although he confined
his work to the epicenter of that site and its elite structures. He did, however,
attempt to describe the social integration of the site, using a functional assessment
of excavated mound groups based on architectural and artifact variations (1980:
11–139). He assumed Chisalin to be an “integrated entity” and that the spatial
organization of the site should “be related to the organization of the social community
that occupied it” (1980: 175). On the basis of the archaeological remains,
Weeks attempted to define the social space of Chisalin using concepts of connectivity
and accessibility (1980: 196–207).
Brown (1987) commented: “Mayanists have developed an interesting assumption:
mounds clustered together produce a social group. People clustered together
may produce a social group, but mounds never do” (Brown 1987: 196; italics in
original). He questioned Weeks’s assumption that patterns of access, which reflect
in turn patterns of interaction, would thereby reflect interaction of groups of individuals.
Archaeology is primarily a study of human behavior and intends to make
interpretations about human behavior based on the archaeological record. This may
be represented by groups or mounds or by households, however defined, their artifact
inventory, and their spatial arrangement. Brown refers to a “theoretical/methodological
trap,” but the criticism itself is a semantic trap. It is appropriate that we
conceptualize the human behavior represented in the archaeological record while
recognizing that it was people who created and used the artifacts or who were the
socially interacting groups. At the same time it is also appropriate to limit our statements
to what is, in fact, observable in the record. This was clearly expressed by
Weeks regarding interpretation of mounds; that is, the mounds do not form social
groups. Concerning residential structures, Weeks states, “This tendency for spatial
segregation suggests that these buildings did not serve the needs of the general population”
(1980: 212).
At Copán, Honduras, Fash and colleagues used a conjunctive approach to the
archaeological excavations (Canuto 2003; Canuto and Fash 2004), in which “the
larger research enterprise was designed to balance separate efforts targeting different
scales of analysis at the same Classic period polity” (Canuto and Fash 2004: 53).
Part of this process involved the de-emphasis on spatial or physical characteristics
and sought to establish a constituted community that represented not a physical
place but rather an idea about that place (2004: 65). One component of the Copán
studies was household analysis (Freter 2004; Johnston and Gonlin 1998). Johnston
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