Pathways of Power and the Colonial Process in Petén, Guatemala

Cuny Queens College, Flushing NY

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation funding, Dr. Timothy Pugh and a team of international scholars will investigate the creation of political power and the flow of valued goods among the Itza, the last independent Maya kingdom, during initial contact with the Spanish and subsequent colonialism. This research will involve two seasons of archaeological excavation and laboratory analysis in Petén, Guatemala. Team members will include professors and students from the United States and Guatemala. This project will illuminate the roles of, and reactions to objects appropriated in situations of cultural contact and how, over time, these roles/reactions relate to social value and power. The Petén is a particularly good place to study these issues since its Maya inhabitants were able to successfully deter Spanish incursion, while adopting some European material culture far longer than other Maya groups. Items produced by Colonial powers and traded into groups unaccustomed to them are frequently appropriated initially as highly valued objects of political and religious power for the receivers. As time passes and the relations between the intruders and the indigenous populations become closer and intermeshed, the roles of appropriated objects likewise change. The project will investigate these complex changes in power relations as they are manifest in material culture using Spanish-Maya contact at the lowland Itza Maya sites of Tayasal and Nixtun-Ch'ich', Guatemala, as a case studies. The project will explore the shifting role of European material culture in the Itza socio-political system from the Contact period (A.D. 1525-1697) through the early Spanish Colonial period (A.D. 1697-1750), and the effect of Spanish conquest and subsequent colonialism upon Maya social organization and political power. Through the examination of the practices of restriction and redistribution of European items, the work will illuminate something of the value of these objects. The study of restrictions of use and redistribution by Maya elite of iron, glass, and other European objects will reveal how colonial objects can be strategically appropriated and rejected in the course of contact. The examination of social restrictions will inevitably tell us something about gender relations in the stream of colonial process, as we know that the Spaniards gave many of these items to women. The project will reveal the hierarchies of power and their transformations over the course of contact and conquest. The research will make a number of broader impacts including the training of both U.S. and Guatemalan students. Dr. Pugh has a longstanding relationship with Centro Universitario del Petén (CUDEP) and will support CUDEP students' efforts to complete research practicums and theses at various levels. This particular impact is critical as students from Petén do not have the resources to undertake and complete their research without external collaborations. Graduate students from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and other universities will also be supported and will conduct research leading to graduate degrees.