material relations: the marriage figurines of prehispanic honduras

M a t e r i a l r e l a t i o n s


T h e M a r r i a g e F i g u r i n e s o F P r e h i s P a n i c h o n d u r a s

Julia A. Hendon, Rosemary A. Joyce, and Jeanne Lopiparo

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Hendon, Julia A. ( Julia Ann) Material relations : the marriage figurines of prehispanic Honduras /Julia A. Hendon, Rosemary A. Joyce, and Jeanne Lopiparo. pages cm. ISBN 978-1-60732-277-1 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-60732-278-8 (ebook)1. Indians of Central America—Honduras—Antiquities. 2. Indians of Central America—Hon-duras—Rites and ceremonies. 3. Indians of Central America—Social networks—Honduras. 4. Marriage—Honduras—History—To 1500. 5. Figurines—Honduras—History—To 1500. 6. Material culture—Honduras—History—To 1500. 7. Community life—Honduras—History—To 1500. 8. Social archaeology—Honduras. 9. Excavations (Archaeology)—Honduras. 10. Hondu-ras—Antiquities. I. Joyce, Rosemary A., 1956– II. Lopiparo, Jeanne. III. Title. F1505.H46 2014 972.83'01—dc23 2013033575

23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cover illustration: Figurine from Campo Dos. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (183201.000); photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

Contents

List of Figures vii

List of Tables xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1. Working with Clay: Honduran Figurine Traditions 11

Chapter 2. Copán: Making Kin 23

Chapter 3. Tenampua: Conflict and Competition 39

Chapter 4. Campo Dos: Wealth and Influence 57

Chapter 5. Currusté: Family and Ancestors 77

Chapter 6. Travesía: Difference and Identity 99

Chapter 7. Cerro Palenque: Hosting and Power 137

Epilogue 159

References Cited 171

Index 195

Figures

0.1. Honduran archaeological sites discussed in the text 5

1.1. Early Formative figurine 121.2. Playa de los Muertos group figurine 131.3. Río Pelo group figurine 141.4. La Mora group figurine 151.5. Ulúa tradition figurine showing common

whistle orientation 171.6. Multipart whistle figurine variants 191.7. Fine paste figurine, man in bird costume,

Campo Dos 212.1. Marriage figurine from Copán showing a man

and woman 242.2. Map of the Sepulturas neighborhood of Copán 262.3. Plan of Group 9N-8 at Copán 272.4. Proportions of Ulúa Polychromes and

nonlocal Honduran figurines in households at Copán 33

3.1. Map of Tenampua 403.2. Couple figurine from Tenampua 453.3. Tenampua Polychrome vessels from a cache at

Copán 524.1. Figurine from Campo Dos showing a man

and woman 584.2. Map of Campo Dos 624.3. Detail of ceramic workshop area at Campo Dos 684.4. Map of central plains of the lower Ulúa Valley

showing sites discussed in text 74

figuresviii

5.1. Map showing towns where a more influential family invested in building plazas, ballcourts, or other architectural settings where residents of villages in the hinterlands closest to each town might have come for ceremonies 79

5.2. Map of platforms that supported buildings at Currusté. 82

5.3. Plan of excavations behind western mound, North Plaza, Currusté 83

5.4. “La Venus de Currusté” 845.5. Hand from large figure holding bundle of long

bones, Currusté 855.6. Plan of excavation area with human long bone

bundles, Currusté 865.7. Marriage figurine mold from Currusté 895.8. Ulúa tradition figurine showing theme of

kneeling woman 915.9. Large fragment of figure from censer lid from

Naranjo Chino 965.10. Ulúa Polychrome vase representing scene

with ritual bundle 985.11. Ulúa Polychrome vase representing standing

figures next to tied bundles 986.1. Human pair figurine from Lagartijo in the

collection of the Peabody Museum 1006.2. Map of central Ulúa Valley showing Travesía

hinterland and sites with figurine production along the Quebrada Chasnigua 101

6.3. Human pair figurine from Travesía 1036.4. Human pair figurine acquired in San Pedro

Sula 1036.5. Human pair figurine attributed to the Río

Ulúa. Note headdress with three peaks worn by figure on right 103

6.6. Figurine with puffy turban from Campo Dos 103

figures ix

6.7. Figurine from Travesía showing a single figure wearing cape or huipil 106

6.8. Map of Travesía 1076.9. Stone sculpture from Cerro Palenque in style

shared with Travesía, likely an ornament from the roof of a building 108

6.10. Ceramic effigy of Ulúa Marble vase, Campo Dos 110

6.11. Map of major axes of Travesía projected on the landscape, showing orientation to solstice sunrise and mountain on south 113

6.12. Figurine from Campo Dos depicting two Crested Bobwhites 122

6.13. Figurine from Travesía depicting an owl 1236.14. Figurine from Travesía depicting a monkey 1236.15. Figurine from La Lima depicting a feline 1236.16. Mold for a vulture head, Ulúa River Valley 1236.17. Ulúa Polychrome vase representing a dancer

with an owl head on back of belt 1246.18. Ulúa Polychrome bowl representing a monkey,

a depiction common at Travesía 1246.19. Ulúa Polychrome cylinder representing a feline 1256.20. Ulúa Polychrome vase with lug head

representing a bird, possibly a vulture 1256.21. Ulúa Polychrome vase representing a waterbird 1266.22. Ulúa Marble vase with feline handle 1266.23. Ulúa Marble vase with bird handle 1266.24. Figurine from Campo Dos depicting a dog

body with a human head 1266.25. Figurine from Travesía depicting a dog with a

bird on its back 1286.26. Figurine from Travesía depicting a dog with a

smaller dog on its back 128

figuresx

6.27. Fragment of figurine from Travesía depicting a woman holding a child 128

6.28. Playa de los Muertos group figurine from Travesía depicting a woman holding a child 130

6.29. Figurine from Travesía depicting a pair of monkeys 131

7.1. Map of central Cerro Palenque, ca. AD 850–1000 139

7.2. The Great Plaza, ballcourt, and associated residential compound at Cerro Palenque 140

7.3. Objects from cache in residential group near Cerro Palenque ballcourt containing Spondylus shell and fragment of green marble vessel 143

7.4. Fragments of ceramic effigy figure wearing bird costume, from censer excavated at Cerro Palenque 149

7.5. Plan of Cerro Palenque Group 1 showing location of pair of cached figurines 150

7.6. Male figurine from Group 1 cache Cerro Palenque 151

7.7. Female figurine from Group 1 cache Cerro Palenque 151

7.8. Fragment of figurine headband with profile bird head from Cerro Palenque 153

7.9. Figurine depicting a woman holding a pot, Ulúa River Valley 155

7.10. Fragments of figurines and molds depicting a woman holding a pot from CR-381 155

8.1. Jade belt mask found in Comayagua, with inscription referring to Palenque 164

8.2. Ulúa tradition figurine showing a mask suspen-ded from a belt, excavated at Campo Dos 165

8.3. Ulúa Polychrome vase representing pairs of crossed human figures 168

Tables2.1. Copán burials associated with figurines 302.2. Ulúa Polychrome rim sherds in Copán

residential compounds 322.3. Copán marriage figurines 373.1. Ulúa Polychromes from excavations at Copán 505.1. Figural censers in Ulúa Valley sites 945.2. Figural censer images from the lower Ulúa

Valley 976.1. Chronology of G. B. Gordon’s excavations in

the Ulúa Valley 1026.2. Crests identified on human double figurines 1046.3. Sites with molds and fragments of ceramic

effigies of Ulúa Marble vases 1116.4. Figurines from Travesía excavated by Erich

Wittkugel 1196.5. Imagery of figurines from Travesía 120

AcknowledgmentsWe would like to acknowledge the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia for permission to use data from excavations conducted under their authority. The staff of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), Smithsonian Institution, graciously facili-tated research visits by Julia Hendon and Rosemary Joyce at the Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Maryland, especially Pat Nietfeld, collections man-ager for the NMAI. While Joyce was assistant cura-tor at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, she recorded figurines in that collection, with the assistance of collections managers Victoria Swerdlow and Una McDowell and the encouragement of the senior curator, Prof. Gordon Willey. Joyce also would like to acknowl-edge Prof. Dr. Viola König, museum director, and Dr. Maria Gaida, curator of Mesoamerican Collections of the Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin, for facilitating research on the Wittkugel collection. Hendon’s appre-ciation of the musical properties of Honduran whistles was greatly improved through the generosity of David Banegas, technician at the Museo de Antropología e Historia de San Pedro Sula. All three authors would like to acknowledge the careful conservation of mate-rial from Currusté carried out by Doris Sandoval, con-servator, and Sr. Banegas and to thank them and Teresa Campos de Pastor, museum director, for their willing-ness to show us their work in progress.

In Honduras, fieldwork at Cerro Palenque was sup-ported by the Jefe del Centro Regional del Norte of IHAH, the late Juan Alberto Durón. Lic. Durón also facilitated the original excavations at Campo Dos. His successor, Aldo Zelaya, provided logistical support for

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSxiv

work at Currusté. The original work at Cerro Palenque and Campo Dos in the 1980s and 1990s was part of projects directed or codirected by Prof. John S. Henderson of Cornell University. Fieldwork and data collection at Copán took place under the auspices of the Proyecto Arqueológico Copán Fase II, directed by the late William T. Sanders, professor emeritus at the Pennsylvania State University.

Funding for research at these sites came from a variety of sources: grants from the National Science Foundation (BNS-8319347 and BCS-0207114), the H. John Heinz III Fund (Heinz Family Foundation), the American Asso-ciation of University Women Educational Foundation, and a Presidential Research Fellowship from Gettysburg College to Julia Hendon; from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research to Jeanne Lopiparo; a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship and an Organization of American States Trainee-ship Grant to Rosemary Joyce; and grants from the Stahl Endowment of the Archaeological Research Facility, University of California, Berkeley; the Research and Professional Development Fund of Gettysburg College; and the John G. Owens Fund of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. While the support of these institutions and programs is greatly appreciated, we take full responsibility for the ideas and information in this book. Any errors are our own.

1

DOI: 10.5876_9781607322788.c000

IntroductionThis book has multiple goals. First, it demonstrates how an analysis drawing on contemporary theories of materiality can enhance our understanding of broad social processes from a dedicated, detailed study of small things. This is a point that is familiar from other archaeological studies in areas as far removed as the recent history of the United States (Beaudry 2006) and ancient Egypt (Meskell 2004). In our case, the small things are three-dimensional fired clay figures, shaped into images of human beings and animals through a combination of modeling by hand and using molds, produced in Honduras before European contact. Some of these figurines are musical instruments. Their abun-dance and wide geographic distribution signal their significance to the ancient people who made and used them. We have chosen to concentrate on a particular theme, that of human double figurines representing two figures standing next to each other.

Second, we make an argument for returning to pre-viously excavated and curated collections to interpret them in conjunction with more recent excavation data. It has long been a principle of the code of ethics of the Society for American Archaeology (1996) that archaeologists should undertake work on such collec-tions, yet few such studies exist. We combine informa-tion from recently excavated samples of figurines with that derived from collections, now held by museums in Honduras, Europe, and the United States, deposited by early archaeologists and the systematic collectors often referred to as antiquarians. These two goals are global contributions to archaeology, and we hope they make this book interesting for readers not steeped in the spe-cifics of Central American archaeology.

INTRODUCTION2

Our study also has specific aims rooted in the local history of archaeological practice in Honduras. The arguments we make turn away from a tradition, initi-ated in the late nineteenth century, of explaining variation across prehispanic Honduras in terms of a gradient from civilization to barbarism, from states to chiefdoms, from Mesoamerica to an area so inchoate it could only be called the periphery or frontier of the Intermediate Area.

In this early archaeological approach, western Honduras—the zone where a few settlements are found that incorporate inscriptions in the Classic Maya script—is the source driving development throughout most of the rest of Honduras. Sites further east are compared, usually negatively, to these Classic Maya sites, especially the largest and longest studied, Copán. They are described as smaller, simpler, and derivative. The typically smaller size of settlements, and the division of the landscape into smaller territories occupied by a network of settlements sharing traditions of material culture, are viewed as problems to be explained: Why didn’t the rest of Honduras become as highly stratified socially as Copán? These arguments portray more economic inequality and greater dis-parities in power not just as normal but as almost more desirable than less economic inequality and lower differentials in power.

Material culture is viewed through the same normative lens. Ulúa Polychromes for example, are the main Classic period decorated serving, eating, and drink-ing ware in the lower Ulúa Valley, Lake Yojoa, and Comayagua Valley regions, where they develop out of earlier local traditions independently of Copán or the Maya heartland ( Joyce 1993a; see also Baudez and Becquelin 1973; Joyce 1985, 1987a, 1988a; Robinson 1989; Viel 1978, 1993). Ulúa Polychromes have been described as Mayoid, a term we reject because of its inappropriate implication of secondhand copying of an existing Maya tradition that somehow represented an aspirational ideal for Ulúa Polychrome producing and using societies, an assumption not borne out by the archaeological record in these areas (Hendon 2007, 2009, 2010; Hendon and Joyce 1993; Hendon, Joyce, and Sheptak 2009; Joyce 1986, 1993a; Joyce and Hendon 2000; Joyce, Hendon, and Lopiparo 2009a).

From the perspective of twenty-first-century social archaeology, these older perspectives entirely miss the point about the variability we can document in Honduras. We should take a region like this, where between AD 500 and 1000 a network of social relations linked settlements of a variety of sizes, as an inter-esting place to understand the diversity of ways that human beings can inhabit a landscape. We should not take for granted an older evolutionary assumption that human societies always become more complex. We should be critical of the implicit endorsement of complexity of this kind, which is better characterized as inequality. Consequently, because Honduras has a history of being studied as

INTRODUCTION 3

a site where a developed world met an underdeveloped one, one of the things we are impelled to do in this book is to take seriously the internal dynamics of each of these small-scale societies.

When we take Honduran societies east of Copán as the center of analysis, we realize that the comparative perspective has had two notable legacies, and again, we want to counter these here. The first is that Copán, as the supposed engine of political and economic relations in Honduras, comes to loom particularly large; other places and their particularities are swamped. Treating the archaeology of northern and central Honduras as Mayoid, putatively derived from Copán, impeded the recognition of practices that link areas of northern Honduras with Maya sites in Belize and the Guatemalan Petén and totally obscured relations of areas of central Honduras with Nicaragua and Costa Rica ( Joyce 1993a). In this tradition, Copán itself is treated as a token of a much bigger whole—of an ideal Classic Maya—for which it ironically serves as an example of peripheral-ity. From this perspective, even Copán is not truly Maya, and the rest of western and central Honduras is at best a bad Mayoid replica of peripheral Maya-ness.

These traditional archaeological analyses “mayanize” Honduras (Euraque 1998). Mayanization erases or covers up the histories of other indigenous groups that occupied Honduran territory. In the region we are most concerned with, this includes speakers of multiple Lenca languages and their immediate east-ern neighbors, speakers of Tol and Pech languages. Nineteenth- and twentieth- century nationalist approaches to archaeology are perpetuated when archaeolo-gists mayanize the Honduran past ( Joyce 2003a, 2008a). In fact, as we argue in this book, this approach forces scholars into a level of analysis of entire popula-tions joined only by language. This is a poor fit to the analytic levels at which we can see social action taking place: the household, the village, and the town. For this reason, it would not be enough simply to define bounded areas where presumed speakers of Care Lenca, Toquegua, Tol, and Pech bordered the Chorti Maya of Copán. Historical information in particular urges us to assume that people in at least some parts of prehispanic Honduras were multilingual, and that their self-identity existed at the level of the family and the town (Sheptak 2007). Our social analysis needs to be undertaken at these levels and without any hint of models equating language spoken, material traditions, and ethnic identity, mod-els that are clearly relics of nineteenth-century nation-building (Kuper 1999).

So in this book we undertake a social archaeology of western Honduras, not a culture history. Our account fits into the time-space frameworks that early twentieth-century archaeology established while it contests the bound-edness taken as evidence of peoples in culture historical models. Instead, we treat broader distributions of making and using similar things as evidence of

INTRODUCTION4

historical traditions reproduced over generations through practices by actors using material media in social relations between individuals, families, and com-munities (see also Pauketat 2001).

The earliest evidence of such a network of localized societies composed of households organized in villages from Honduras comes from the period roughly from 1500 to 900 BC. Earlier evidence of human habitation does exist (e.g., Rue, Webster, and Traverse 2002; Scheffler 2009), but it is with the more permanent villages that we see localized traditions of pottery develop at sites like Copán (Viel and Hall 1997; Hall and Viel 2004), Yarumela (Dixon et al. 1994), Los Naranjos (Baudez and Becquelin 1973), and Puerto Escondido ( Joyce and Henderson 2001). Raw material from obsidian sources located in southern Honduras and adjacent Guatemala, and others in northwest Honduras, was in use in these widely scattered villages, at first for flake tools produced in a bipo-lar industry and later for production of blades from prepared cores ( Joyce et al. 2004). The exchange of obsidian across the Honduran territory is a visible and durable sign of what probably were routes for the exchange of other raw and worked materials (such as shell) and cultivated plants like cacao. These early farming villages also produced the earliest evidence of figurines (Cummins 2006; Joyce 2003c, 2008c). Some figurines were used in burials, including in caves away from settlements (Henderson 1992). Toward the end of this period, a few places began to employ marble and jade as luxury goods (Garber et al. 1993; Joyce and Henderson 2002; Luke et al. 2003).

After 900 BC, Copán, Yarumela, Los Naranjos, and Puerto Escondido con-tinued to be occupied and many other villages appeared (figure 0.1). Where multiple villages exist in a region, as in northwest Honduras, preferences in vessel shape and finish and figurine manufacture are similar ( Joyce, Hendon, and Sheptak 2008), suggesting a close connection between networks of villages. The importation of obsidian from a diversity of sources continues as well. In a very few sites, notably Yarumela and Los Naranjos, monumental earthen plat-forms were constructed ( Joyce 2004, 2007a; Dixon et al. 1994). Measuring up to 20 meters tall and 100 meters on a side, these massive constructions co-occur with some stone sculpture—at Los Naranjos stylistically related to the Gulf Coast Olmec style ( Joyce and Henderson 2002). A few individuals are bur-ied with body ornaments made of jade, and in these areas, indications suggest that greater economic inequality was being linked to ideologies of difference to underwrite differential political power.

In Honduras, these developments of greater inequality generally seem to have been countered. Instead of ever-increasing stratification, what we see in the succeeding period, from 400 BC to AD 500, is the growth of small villages

INTRODUCTION 5

and towns—some quite prosperous—but with limited evidence of institution-alized social distinction or the conversion of wealth into power. Settlements occupied in Honduras during the beginning of this period used, produced, and also imported from other areas certain new vessel forms with resist decorative techniques and finish, called Usulutan resist, that find analogs from Chiapas in Mexico to El Salvador (Demarest and Sharer 1982, 1986; Goralski 2009). Yet there is little evidence for political integration of even small regions in Honduras.

The main site where there appears to be growing social inequality during this period is Copán, where inscriptions and monuments made between AD 250 and 400 suggest a few families or individuals were claiming sanctioned roles as a ruling group (Stuart 2005). Researchers suggest that some of these families drew on ties to towns and cities farther west in developing their politi-cal authority. Tombs of some of these early Copán nobles contain vessels that, while locally made, adopt preferences for form and finish typical of a network of sites emulating distant Teotihuacan, Mexico.

The period from AD 500 to 1000 is the best known archaeologically throughout Honduras. Archaeologists have traditionally used different styles of

Figure 0.1. Honduran archaeological sites discussed in the text. Drawing by Rosemary A. Joyce, used by permission.

INTRODUCTION6

polychrome (painted) pottery as guides to delimiting boundaries between cul-tural traditions during this time. In western Honduras, in an area reaching from Copán to the Naco Valley along the Chamelecón River, Copador Polychrome and Gualpopa Polychrome were most common (Beaudry 1984). From the lower Ulúa Valley on the Caribbean Coast to Lake Yojoa, the Comayagua basin, and beyond, variants of Ulúa Polychromes dominated ( Joyce 1993a, 1993b; Viel 1978). Because they are so varied, Ulúa Polychromes can be subdivided into groups made and used at different points between AD 500 and 1000.

The earliest, produced before AD 650, are Dedalos and Santa Rita classes, and they are also the most uniform across the entire area. By the time that the latest Ulúa Polychromes were developed in the late eighth century, there was enough diversity in regional preferences for vessel shape and design layout that these classes—Santana, Selva, Nebla, and Tenampua—can be assigned to specific regions of origin. Santana class was produced in the lower Ulúa Valley; Selva class is most common near Lake Yojoa; Nebla and Tenampua classes appear to be typical of the Comayagua Valley. In Comayagua, the latest versions of Ulúa Polychromes, developing after AD 750, are Tenampua Polychromes. They develop into Las Vegas Polychrome, a new tradition that continues until ca. AD 1200.

In most regions, abundant evidence of settlements dating to this period is found in the form of collapsed stone buildings or stone or earthen platforms that support buildings of stone or more perishable materials. There is a consid-erable range in size of the largest of these settlements. Most areas of western Honduras have large towns with between 100 and 300, and at most one town in a region with up to 600 buildings. The exception again is Copán. Most settle-ment in the Copán Valley is concentrated in a 1 square kilometer area, with neighborhoods of buildings and patios surrounding the religious and politi-cal heart of the settlement. This area contains over 1,000 structures along the river and includes two ballcourts used successively before and after AD 800 (Webster 1999, 16–21). In the hinterland, up to an additional 1,000 structures have been mapped (Fash and Long 1983). Because sites from this period are easily visible on the surface, many household archaeologists interested in the practices of everyday life have excavated them (Gonlin 1993, 2012; Hendon 1991, 2010). These studies provide rich evidence of the continued use of imported obsidian and locally produced pottery in households that were the center of social life and ritual practice.

Figurines and figural artifacts form part of household assemblages in a wide area, from Copán east to the lower Ulúa Valley and south to Comayagua. While most figurines are locally made, larger collections from individual sites often

INTRODUCTION 7

contain examples that originated elsewhere. The same is true for polychrome pottery. As noted earlier, distinct styles develop across Honduras, and house-hold assemblages at some sites include pots from other traditions. In every area, some households have more diverse possessions, and a few have large numbers of things from distant sources. Yet in most Honduran sites of this period, there are no obvious households living in much larger or more lavishly decorated buildings. The main exception, again, is Copán.

Our focus on human double figurines led us to identify six sites for discus-sion, each a place where one or more human pairs were represented in figurines: Copán, Tenampua, Campo Dos, Currusté, Travesía, and Cerro Palenque. One cluster was recovered at Copán, located in the highlands of western Honduras. Copán is the largest, and apparently most hierarchical, of the six settlements that we discuss in this book. Located in a 25-square-kilometer valley along the Copán River, a tributary of the Motagua River, Copán, as noted above, is com-posed of approximately 2,000 structures. The remaining sites we discuss are located further east, in two regions along the drainage of the Ulúa River. Far upriver, on its largest tributary, the Humuya or Comayagua River, is the upland basin of Comayagua. Covering an area of approximately 550 square kilometers, the Comayagua basin was occupied by 1000 BC (Dixon 1989, 1992; Dixon et al. 1994). During the period when central Copán saw a decline, ca. AD 800–1000, one town, Tenampua, dominated the basin from an elevated plateau, its few approaches blocked with massive walls. Remains of more than 500 buildings, including a ballcourt, were mapped here (Popenoe 1936). Tenampua was far larger than any earlier site in the Comayagua basin, most of which were located on the floodplain of the river.

The remaining sites that we discuss are located far downriver from Tenampua, along the Ulúa River Valley just before it flows into the Gulf of Honduras. The lower Ulúa Valley covers 2,400 square kilometers. More than 500 archaeologi-cal sites have been documented here, the earliest dating before 1500 BC. Many houses located along the Ulúa River and its major tributaries—the Humuya and Chamelecón—were buried by years of river flooding that left behind rich soils. Some villages in the central floodplain are still evident on the surface as large, low earthen platforms. Such earthen platforms supported the foundations of multiple buildings and work areas. Campo Dos is an example of a small site of this type (Lopiparo 1994). Located on an abandoned course of the Chamelecón River, it was made up of at least three platforms and also incorporated a stone ballcourt (Swain 1995).

A few sites in the central floodplain of the lower Ulúa Valley included clusters of stone buildings around formal courtyards. Travesía is the largest known; it

INTRODUCTION8

originally contained approximately 250 structures, including a ballcourt ( Joyce 1987a; Sheehy 1982; Robinson, Hasemann, and Veliz 1979; Sheehy and Veliz 1977; Stone 1941). Similar sites are found in zones of low hills that border the floodplain west of the Ulúa River. Currusté, north of the Chamelecón River, is one of these; Cerro Palenque, south of the Chamelecón River, at the union of the Ulúa and its smallest tributary, the Río Blanco, is another.

Currusté, like Travesía, was composed of about 250 buildings (Hasemann, van Gerpen, and Veliz 1977). It may have included a now-destroyed ballcourt. Cerro Palenque began as a smaller hilltop settlement, including five courtyards and about 30 structures dating before AD 800 ( Joyce 1988b, 1991). After that point, the site expanded along the adjacent ridges and became the single larg-est prehispanic settlement known in the lower Ulúa Valley, with more than 500 buildings, including a ballcourt and major plaza ( Joyce 1991; Hendon 2010).

Everyday practices that emerged after AD 500 in the lower Ulúa Valley were quite similar from one of these sites to another: Ulúa Polychrome pottery and figurines of similar construction and appearance were made and used in house compounds of comparable size, and even ritual practices were similar. After about AD 700, differences between sites in this region become more visible. Distinct pottery types with fine clay textures were made and used in specific sites or localized areas: Quitamay group, Tacamiche group, Lasaní Orange, Baracoa Fine Paste, and Blanco Grey.

Quitamay vessels, which reach a peak of popularity at Currusté, have yellow pastes with relatively fine and evenly distributed nonplastics (Beaudry-Corbett and Joyce 1993). Vessels are slipped solid red orange rather than adding red and black paint to orange pottery to create polychromes. Decoration is provided by pre-slip geometric grooving or, more commonly, post-slip geometric incising. Usually done while the pots were still soft enough for the clay in the incised areas to be displaced without forming rough edges, these incisions are often further softened by the final burnishing of the slipped vessels.

More widely distributed in an area stretching from Campo Dos to Cerro Palenque, including Travesía, are Tacamiche vessels. These are miniature ves-sels, effigies of everything from unslipped jars to carved marble vases (Beaudry-Corbett and Joyce 1993). Executed on a distinctive fine paste fired to pink to brown, with well sorted, uniform nonplastics added, Tacamiche group vessels are exceptionally varied in finish—some varieties slipped orange, others left unslipped, and a very few white slipped. Tacamiche vessels can have mold-impressed panels and added red or black paints. Some have post-fire blue paint. In paste, slip, and paint, Tacamiche vessels are very similar to some contempo-rary figurines made in the same area.

INTRODUCTION 9

Lasaní Orange appears to have been made at Cerro Palenque, where it was defined originally ( Joyce 1988a, 1993c). These are mold-made bowls, with thick walls made of an almost chalky light yellow paste, with no nonplastics visible without magnification. Bowl interiors are covered with an orange or reddish-orange slip, with a glossy finish not well bonded to the body.

Baracoa Fine Paste vessels are extremely thin walled, have no added nonplas-tics, and are fired normally to a tan or sometimes orange brown color ( Joyce 1988a, 1993c). With new shapes, including a tripod support dish and periform vases, Baracoa Fine Paste is clearly related to the western Maya Altar Fine Orange group ( Joyce 1987b). Compositional analysis confirms that Baracoa Fine Paste is made from local clays (Lopiparo and Hendon 2009). The group is an important component of the assemblage at Cerro Palenque after AD 850, but examples are found in many other sites in the lower Ulúa Valley, including Travesía (Sheehy 1982).

Blanco Grey shares the same dish shape as Baracoa Fine Paste, but ves-sels have a dark brown paste with abundant, well-sorted nonplastics ( Joyce 1988a, 1993c; Lopiparo, Joyce, and Hendon 2005). Examples are found in the Cuyumapa Valley, east of the lower Ulúa Valley, where the same paste is used for a wider range of vessels, suggesting the type originated there. Blanco Grey was originally defined based on samples from Cerro Palenque, where it was probably present as a result of exchanges with the Cuyumapa region. It also dates after AD 850.

These fine paste ceramic groups are particularly important to us for two rea-sons. First, they allow us to trace patterns of interaction at a fine scale within the lower Ulúa Valley. Second, in many cases they share technology with figurines made at the same time or in the same sites. They direct our attention to aspects of figurines we might not otherwise consider.

The recovery of figurines in modern archaeological research at Copán, Currusté, and Cerro Palenque conducted since the 1970s allows us to consider the contexts of use and discard of figurines in fine detail. At the other sites—Tenampua, Campo Dos, and Travesía—figurines depicting human pairs were recovered in research before 1950. In these cases, the fine detail of contexts of recovery in more recent studies may be missing, but often there are larger sam-ples of artifacts than more modern research typically recovers. Understanding the contexts involved at Campo Dos and Travesía is enhanced by results from modern research that produced evidence of the small-scale production of fired clay vessels and artifacts and their use and disposal (Lopiparo 1994; Joyce 1987a).

Our emphasis throughout each chapter is on providing an understanding of the ways that similar practices of figurine production, use, and disposal at

INTRODUCTION10

these sites served to create social relations, and at the same time, how variation in these practices within and between sites testifies to social differences among a network of connected yet independent settlements. Each chapter illuminates most strongly one aspect of the practices involved. At Copán, where we start, human double figurines were used in practices surrounding death and burial, moments when social networks were refashioned as the living became ances-tors and juniors became elders. Considering the practices that took place at Tenampua, a site long regarded as significant for its defensive features, allows us to explore how independent towns in prehispanic Honduras engaged in com-petition and conflict through social alliances.

At Campo Dos we encounter our first evidence for production of fired clay artifacts as a critical social resource. Campo Dos forms part of a network of towns and small villages in the lower Ulúa Valley that, while not politically united, were linked by common ritual and daily practices. Currusté, a larger town in this network, provides substantial evidence of the kinds of events in which families and individuals in the largest towns commemorated their ances-tors and links with others. At Travesía, some families drew on other practices to begin to create more hierarchical distinction than is seen in contemporary towns and villages. Here we examine how the use of figurines and the social relations that they were used to effect were transformed by the introduction of other social relations and material practices.

Cerro Palenque, where we end our discussion, begins as a small settlement contemporary with the other Ulúa Valley towns discussed, and likely with a strong historical tie to Travesía. After AD 800, it grows to an unprecedented size, and one family gains greater prominence through practices that mix tradi-tion and innovation, including continued use of figurines to commemorate in material form the social relations that bound residents together. Here our focus on paired human figures as subjects of figurines provides us one last, subtly dif-ferent example that may be testimony to a different logic for establishing and commemorating social relations.

The story we have to tell begins at Copán with an object excavated in the 1980s. Likely made in the eighth century, it was this object that drew our origi-nal attention to figurines depicting human pairs, and it is by detailed attention to the figurine itself and the context where it was recovered that we are able to begin to sketch out how figurines created material social relations in prehis-panic Honduras.

11

DOI: 10.5876_9781607322788.c001

1Working with ClayHonduran Figurine TraditionsFigurine production in Honduras goes back well into

the period of early village life, with examples at Copán (Cummins 2006) and in the lower Ulúa Valley ( Joyce 2003c, 2007b) dating before 1000 BC. These earliest figurines (figure 1.1) are hand modeled, each a unique work. They include both humans and animal figures, some hollow and constructed like ceramic vessels, others solid. Likely due to constraints on firing solid ceramic objects, the larger examples of both humans and animals are hollow. Where sufficient details are preserved, the human subjects of these earliest figurine makers appear to portray women.

These very early figurines are still quite rare; at Puerto Escondido, only seven fragments were counted in con-texts yielding 3,100 sherds (a ratio of one figurine frag-ment per 443 sherds). Around 900 BC, some figurine makers in the lower Ulúa Valley began to produce much larger numbers of smaller hand-modeled figu-rines, many with highly detailed heads and bodies (fig-ure 1.2). Labeled Playa de los Muertos-style figurines, after one of the first sites where they were reported, located on the Ulúa River (figure 0.1), they show dis-tinctive techniques of manufacture, with a solid core surrounded by finer clay built up in layers and then excised, grooved, punctated, incised, and modeled to form features ( Joyce 2003c, 2007b). While contem-porary figurines are recorded from Copán (Cummins 2006), Los Naranjos (Baudez and Becquelin 1973), and Yarumela ( Joesink-Mandeville 2001), many of these appear from their paste composition and style to have originated in the lower Ulúa Valley area. As with earlier figurines, the Playa de los Muertos repertoire includes both animals and humans. Most of the human figurines

WORKING WITH CLAY 12

are either explicitly female or likely female, based on such features as dress and body proportions. A subset of human figurines, and all known animal figurines, are smaller in size, most pierced for suspension. Some larger hollow fragments of both human and animal figurines are found, probably representing portions of hollow effigy bottles.

Production of typical Playa de los Muertos figurines continues at least to the period from 500 to 150 BC. In most of the former range of production, however, ceramic figurines cease to be made in the following centuries. A major exception is in a zone centered on Río Pelo, a site at the eastern edge of the lower Ulúa Valley. There, large numbers of hand-modeled figurines that clearly develop out of the Playa de los Muertos tradition were excavated in salvage projects by the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia. Described in 2002 by Rosemary A. Joyce, Río Pelo-style figurines (figure 1.3) are uniformly

Figure 1.1. Early Formative figurine. Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.


smaller in size than the norm for Playa de los Muertos figurines. They are made of a distinctive orange paste that, while used earlier, comes to dominate figurine production. The female forms represented now have exaggerated thighs and buttocks. Details of the head are simplified and most garments are no longer shown. One new garment is depicted multiple times: a feline skin apron. To date, no animal figurines have been identified in the Río Pelo assemblage. A statistically calculated weighted average of radiocarbon dates from the site indi-cates these figurines most likely date from the first century AD ( Joyce, Hendon, and Sheptak 2008). While most known examples are from the Río Pelo site itself, one figurine body of the Río Pelo tradition was excavated at San Juan de Camalote, in association with similar dated remains (Fox 1994, figure 45a).

Figure 1.2. Playa de los Muertos group figurine. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (18739.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.


At least in fired clay, we have no evidence of figurine production from Honduras for the next four centuries. When figurine production resumes in the lower Ulúa Valley, it is with a distinctive set of figurines that has been labeled La Mora group ( Joyce 1993d). These are distinguished by a manner of construction more closely related to the manufacture of painted polychrome vases than to the simple mold-made figurines that come later, or even the much earlier hand-modeled figurines. La Mora group figurines (figure 1.4) have uniform thin walls. They can be quite large, although there is a wide range of sizes. The front features are produced in molds, but the entire figu-rine is then assembled by slab construction, like a vessel, with hand-modeled

Figure 1.3. Río Pelo group figurine. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (183753.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.


bottom, sides, and back. A firing hole is normally present in the back of the head or shoulder area. The resemblance to vessel construction extends in some instances to finishing techniques. It is not unusual for these figurines to have well-burnished surfaces, especially the face. Post-fire pigments are commonly added, including white, red, and a distinctive blue. There are no known male figurines in the La Mora group, but a few fragments in museum collections suggest there were some large animal effigies produced in the same manner, with features suggesting felines or canines.

It seems likely that molds for both the La Mora figurines and the later molded figurines were produced by making a carved image in a perishable material, covering it with clay, and then firing the mold. Possible candidates

Figure 1.4. La Mora group figurine. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (18319.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.


for the perishable material include wax (used in Costa Rica and Panama at about the same time for metal casting); resins like copal, from which figu-rines were made elsewhere, including at Chichen Itza (Coggins 1992) and Tenochtitlan (Klein and Lona 2009); or even wood, like the ethnographically observed balsa wood images made by the San Blas Kuna (Severi 2002; Sherzer 1983; see also Prufer, Wanyerka, and Shah 2003).

The fact that fired clay molds used for figurines after AD 500 must have been made with a perishable modeled template reminds us that the appar-ent break in figurine production is actually only a break in the continuity of fired clay figurine production. More perishable images may have continued in production, and could even have been valued for their capacity to decay, as is the case with the wood images made by the Kuna to contain spirits invoked in ceremonies that are dangerous to have in the community (Sherzer 1983).

Discussions of the discontinuity in fired clay figurine production com-monly ask why figurine production stopped. If perishable images continued to be made during the centuries when we recover no fired clay figurines, it raises a different question about this chronological gap: What motivated renewed production in this material? La Mora figurines are a revival of earlier themes and an ancestral technology, deliberately echoing features of Playa de los Muertos figurines. They share with these figurines an emphasis on unclothed female bodies in kneeling or seated poses. Their makers would have been familiar with the earlier tradition: fragments of hand-modeled Playa de los Muertos figurines were curated and incorporated in Late Classic construc-tion in at least seven sites in the lower Ulúa Valley, including Currusté and Travesía ( Joyce 2002; Stone 1941).

At least one fragment of a La Mora group figurine (incorrectly identified as male) was collected at Copán (Willey et al. 1994, figure 143a). There seems not to have been a parallel revival of figurine production at Copán, or in any of the other centers of earlier figurine production at this time. Figurine use appears across much of Honduras by the eighth century, with production of Ulúa tradition mold-made figurines attested by one mold at Copán (Hendon 1984) and large samples of molds from the lower Ulúa Valley (Lopiparo and Hendon 2009; Lopiparo 1994, 2003) and the Naco Valley (Douglass 2002, chapter 5; Schortman, Urban, and Ausec 2001, table 2.1).

The more widely consumed Ulúa tradition mold-made figurines are some-what smaller than the largest La Mora figurines, overlapping with the small end of the range of La Mora figurine size. This is likely a technical limita-tion: where La Mora figurines are composites of mold-made imagery and hand-modeled bottoms, sides, and back, Ulúa tradition figurines (figure 1.5)


are more simply composed of a mold-made front and a hand-modeled back. Unlike La Mora figurines, Ulúa tradition mold-made figurines are often (but not always) musical instruments.

The front of mold-made figurines, which in the lower Ulúa Valley date to the seventh and eighth centuries AD, is produced with molds that are themselves carefully made artifacts. The details visible in the molds did not always suc-cessfully survive extraction of the figurine from the mold. Careful study shows that many Ulúa tradition figurines had features retouched before firing: noses replaced with applied clay triangles; lips or eyes outlined with low ridges of applied clay; and details reemphasized by shallow grooving while the clay was

Figure 1.5. Ulúa tradition figurine showing common whistle orientation. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (183781.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.


still soft. In a few cases, entire features, such as arms, were added as appliqué, producing a multilayered effect that is quite striking in what would otherwise be a relatively flat plane.

Ulúa tradition figurines that are musical instruments incorporate carefully constructed sound chambers (usually spherical) and mouthpieces, formed by a combination of hand modeling and molding. The most common means of assembling Ulúa tradition figurine whistles is to place the whistle chamber on the lower back, with the mouthpiece at the base in the back and fingering holes on the back (figure 1.5). Holding the figurine to play the whistle then “masks” the face with the image on the front. More rarely, the whistle is incorporated in the head, either with the mouthpiece at the nape of the neck or on the top of the head. In the former case, the figural image would simply have been shifted down the player’s face. In the latter case, the figural image would have been along the top of the instrument, invisible while it was being played. This rarer placement of the whistle mouthpiece probably owes much to contemporary figural flutes, which are made with single, double, and multiple flute bodies. Commonly, the ends of such flutes have applied images of birds, human faces with puffed up cheeks, or other animal imagery.

The images impressed by mold on Ulúa tradition figurines are varied but fall into several distinct classes. A variety of animal images and human images, distinguishable on the basis of costume as male (with loincloth) and female (with skirt and exposed breasts), are found. Jeanne Lopiparo (2003, 210–15) dis-tinguishes between an infrequent group of unique figurines, which she argues portray supernatural beings, and the more common figurines she described as “stylized,” the subject of our study. Stylized Ulúa tradition human figurines wear earspools, necklaces, and often bracelets. They wear headdresses that Tercero (1996) grouped into two categories: turbans (covering all but bangs of hair) and headbands (showing straight hair on the crown of the head and extending below the headband). Our analyses show that specific headbands and turbans occur in different frequencies at different sites (Lopiparo 2003; Lopiparo and Hendon 2009). The related animal figurines produced in the Ulúa tradition often have anthropomorphic features such as earspools, bracelets, and necklaces but do not wear headdresses.

In the lower Ulúa Valley, elaboration of figurine whistles leads in the eighth century to the development of a final group of objects that combine a distinct manner of construction with distinctive imagery. These “socketed” figurines are composed of a series of globular sound chambers (at least three and up to five in recorded examples). Where these join, they have been cut away to form the diagnostic socket. Three variants can be described.


The first sets two sound chambers next to each other as a body and tops them off with a centrally located third sphere forming a head (figure 1.6a). A mold-made face is attached to the top ball on this triangle. Abbreviated appendages on the base give this figurine stability. The mouthpiece is normally in the top of the head. Fingering holes are located centrally on the front surface of the two balls making up the body. All known examples appear to either represent birds (usually an owl) or have a human face and a distinctive peaked hat. The latter, with the two round balls making up the body, give the impression of the upper body of an adult woman.

The second approach to assembling a figurine from multiple globular sound chambers places balls above one another in a vertical axis to form the body and head of a standing anthropomorphic figure (figure 1.6b). An additional ball is placed on the back, with the mouthpiece on top, giving the impression of a jar or laden pack carried by the figure. Only the face is mold made on these figurines. Small stubby legs and a third support on the bottom ball give the figure balance. Applique arms, loincloth, necklace, and pendant are common, and the majority of these figurines appear to represent males, based on the costume. The mold-made faces are much smaller than on the Ulúa tradition mold-made figurines. They include aged and youthful human faces, animal masks, and animal faces.

A final group of figurines are assembled from three balls set in a line, two forming the body of an animal and the third slightly elevated to form the basis for the head (figure 1.6c). Four applique legs support this figurine in horizontal

Figure 1.6a–c. Multipart whistle figurine variants. A: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (183887.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission. B: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (183865.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission. C: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (183912.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.


orientation. The head has an open mouth that is the mouthpiece for the instru-ment. Many of these are hand-modeled dogs, with applique rings forming eyes and applique triangles forming ears. A smaller number replace the dog face with a mold-made animal or human face. The assembly of these figurines is more like the second group described above than the first, and one assembly error recorded by us has an extra ball attached to the base near the rear legs of the dog, with the extra ball modeled like the pack on the backs of the standing anthropomorphic figurines.

These socketed figurines are clearly closely allied to Ulúa tradition mold-made figurines. They overlap chronologically and are found in the same sites. They would have required substantial skill to assemble. Compared to the Ulúa tradition figurines with which they are contemporary, they follow a very distinct set of procedures and probably should be thought of as products of a different community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998), even within the small towns where they were made and used.

The same is true of the final distinct figurine group that we can identify. These are fine paste figurines (figure 1.7) made in the ninth century, known from only a few sites, most in the lower Ulúa Valley. In the early ninth century, this region of Honduras witnessed the development of new serving wares that replaced the polychrome painted pottery still in use in neighboring areas of the country. The new Baracoa Fine Paste ceramics ( Joyce 1987b, 1988a, 1993c; Lopiparo, Joyce, and Hendon 2005) closely adhere to design and shape characteristics of the Altar Fine Orange ceramics of the Pasion River Valley. They substitute a clay body without added nonplastics; earlier clay bodies had substantial proportions of nonplastics used as temper. Along with this change came the production of vessels with much thinner walls, most likely formed by using clay slurries in molds to build up thin layers of clay that would simply not hold together if formed by hand. Likely basins for settling clays to remove the finest portion for such production have been documented as part of apparent ceramic workshops in the lower Ulúa Valley (e.g., Lopiparo 1994; 2004). The clays used differ in fired color as well as texture, with a much brighter orange color common.

A small group of figurines was made as part of this new production (figure 1.7). These have bright orange paste ranging to yellowish buff (instead of pinker pastes); have no nonplastics visible with the naked eye other than shiny grains from mica (a natural inclusion in clays, especially in the northern part of the Ulúa Valley); and may reveal layering under low magnification. Most distinc-tive, the cross section of these mold-made figurines is uniform in thickness, unlike that of Ulúa tradition figurines made by pressing a prepared slab of tem-pered clay into a mold.


Perhaps as a consequence of a different technique involving a wetter clay body that would have shrunk more due to the lack of added nonplastics, these fine paste figurines were smaller, with faces one-half to two-thirds the size of the common Ulúa tradition figurines. This, plus the fragility resulting from their uniform thin walls, in most cases impedes our ability to reconstruct their full appearance, although one unique deposit provided two complete, although badly fragmented, examples ( Joyce 1991; see chapter 6). All the recorded exam-ples of fine paste mold-made figurines from Honduras appear to depict human figures, with details overlapping with those of Ulúa tradition figurines. The two complete figurines known were not whistles but instead had solid backs with a large hole for firing in the back of the head, a detail seen on other partial figu-rines of this fine paste group.

Figure 1.7. Fine paste figurine, man in bird costume, Campo Dos. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (183830.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.


Honduran fine paste figurines were produced beginning in the ninth century, in sites that survived into the tenth, and in some cases, early eleventh centuries. After this, no fired clay figurines are known from Honduras; the social condi-tions that demanded their production had changed. In a fundamental sense, we argue that the chain of tradition of fired clay figurines that began with the La Mora revival of an ancient technology and imagery in the seventh century, and was elaborated into a diverse group of figurines and figural instruments in the eighth and ninth centuries, shaped a cultural tradition that bound together a network of local places and the people living in them. This network of people, places, and things is the focus of this book.

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DOI: 10.5876_9781607322788.c002

2CopánMaking KinThey buried the child at home, carrying out a complex

ritual that began by placing two objects on the pavement near a stone-fronted platform. One of these objects was a miniature Ulúa Polychrome ceramic vessel in the shape of a shallow bowl. The second was a whistle, also made from clay, representing a couple, a woman and a man (figure 2.1). Both objects were set close to the wall running north-south that had increased the size of this platform and may have been built as part of the prepa-ration of the area for burial.

After the child’s mourners covered these objects with a shallow layer of dirt, they put the body in the ground, curled up on its side with the head to the east. A second miniature jar with handles, also deco-rated in the Ulúa Polychrome style, was set next to the body. Another thin layer of dirt, at fifteen centimeters less than half the depth of the previous thirty-nine- centimeter layer, covered the grave. Another jar, this time of locally made Copador Polychrome, was put in place over the first. Finally, a deeper layer of fill hid all this complexity—the evidence of people’s intentions and specific actions—as new architecture was built over the grave.

The child’s burial and its associated objects remained undisturbed until their excavation in the 1980s by archaeologists working for the Proyecto Arqueológico Copán Fase II. The excavators labeled the grave Burial 17–5, the whistle Feature 38, its companion bowl Feature 39, the Ulúa jar placed with the body Feature 34, and the final Copador jar Feature 31 (Gerstle and Webster 1990, 110–13, 164, 181, figures 93 and E4, plates E5, R 13, and R16; see also Gerstle 1988, 145–46, 197–98; Hendon 1987, 498–99, 535–45).

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Feature 38, the figurine-whistle, depicts two human individuals standing side by side with their bodies pressed so closely together that their inner arms are hidden (figure 2.1). Their earspools are shown stacked one on top of the other, perhaps to reiterate just how close they are. The figure on the viewer’s left is obviously female, as indicated by her breasts, and the one on the right male, as indicated by his lack thereof. Their clothing also signals their gender. The woman wears a long garment that covers her from just below the breasts to her ankles. It has a decorated lower border but is otherwise plain. The man wears a wide belt with a row of indentations that doubles as a loincloth. Their facial features are similar. The lips of both are parted, but only the man’s teeth are visible. Both have identical wide bracelets and round ear ornaments but differ-ent necklaces. Hers is a series of flat, square beads, roughly the same size, while

Figure 2.1. Marriage figurine from Copán showing a man and woman. Photograph courtesy of Julia A. Hendon, used by permission.

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his has only two such beads suspended from a cord. The male figure reaches across his body to lay his left hand on top of his companion’s right hand and wrist. His hand covers hers without actually grasping it. The position of her arm echoes his. She seems to be reaching toward him as much as he reaches toward her.

Each has an elaborate headdress and hairstyle. The woman’s hair has been cut evenly with great precision to just above her ears and with shorter bangs across the forehead. A wide band binds most of the hair close to her head except for one carefully arranged lock that has been pulled out to hang down at the right side of her head. The band itself is decorated with a zigzag line framed by small dots above and below. The man’s headdress is somewhat harder to describe pre-cisely, although visually it is easily differentiated from other headdresses. There is a horizontal band made up of two rows of square plaques, similar to those of the necklaces. Below this his hair has been cut into short bangs that follow the curve of his forehead. A feather rises up from the middle of the band. Behind this is a lumpy head covering that may be folded cloth. One piece projects up at an angle to the right of the feather. The end of this piece has a pattern of three lines and eight dots.

The child’s skeleton indicates that he or she was about three to four years old at death (Rebecca Storey, personal communication, 2006). The child in this burial was better nourished and had suffered fewer problems in growth and development during its short life than most other Copán children (Storey 1992, 1997). Because of the age at which the child died, we cannot say whether it was a boy or a girl.

Home for this child was an imposing residential compound located east of the Main Group, the political and ritual heart of the ancient kingdom of Copán and the seat of the ruling families of the Copán polity (figure 2.2). A paved road led to the child’s neighborhood, known to archaeologists as the Sepulturas zone (Hendon 2012a). The residents of the compounds in this neighborhood rebuilt their houses over generations, sometimes incorporating inscriptions and imag-ery not unlike that of the Main Group (Hendon 1992; see also Baudez 1989). Craftwork carried out in the household compounds of these noble families, the practices of provisioning their daily life, and rituals marking life events, were carried on independent of central control (Hendon 2010). The child lived in one of the oldest and biggest compounds in the Sepulturas neighborhood, today called Group 9N-8. This compound consists of several patio groups, sets of buildings arranged around a central paved courtyard. Over time, the patio groups in this compound grew and were connected to one another by shared buildings and staircases, walkways, and alleys (figure 2.3).

COPáN26

At the southern end of Group 9N-8 is the most elaborate set of buildings—Patio A—which was inhabited by people who celebrated their status and ties to the royal family with carved stone monuments and hieroglyphic texts. A less grandiose trio of patios—E, F, and M—lies to the west at a lower elevation than the platform supporting Patio A and its immediate northern neighbor, Patio B. Patio B is flanked by Patios C, to the west; H, to the east; and J (not labeled on the map), to the north, all at ground level rather than raised up by an artificial foundation. Patio D, where the child was buried, is in the northeastern corner of Group 9N-8. Patio I lies to its north and Patio K, mostly destroyed by the action of the Copán River after the city was abandoned, is to the east (Hendon 1991, 2000, 2003a, 2009, 2010).

The people who lived together in these residential patios and larger agglom-erations, such as Group 9N-8, shared more than just propinquity. They were

Figure 2.2. Map of the Sepulturas neighborhood of Copán. Drawing by Julia A. Hendon, used by permission.

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members of groups that can be described as social houses. Enduring corporate groups like this were common in Mesoamerica before the Spanish conquest and were an important locus of identity in Honduras (Chance 2000; Fung 1995; Gillespie 2000a, 2000b, 2000c; Hendon 2002, 2007, 2009, 2010; Joyce 2000c, 2007a; Lopiparo 2003, 2007; Monaghan 1995; Sheptak 2007).

Social houses depend on their ability to establish and perpetuate connections between people, places (especially physical houses), and things. The incorpora-tion of new members into a social house can come about in several different ways, which is what makes this kind of social formation particularly flexible. Social houses differ from lineages, since lineages, if viewed as a set of rules, emphasize descent through a particular genealogical line above all others. Social houses may employ descent from previous members as an important way of determining membership, and they often use the language of kinship to express

Figure 2.3. Plan of Group 9N-8 at Copán. Drawing by Julia A. Hendon, used by permission.

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solidarity. In addition, they may use marriage, adoption, capture, and geographic location as possible factors allowing affiliation.

At the heart of a social house is a common investment in an estate, an invest-ment made visible and tangible through practice. Shared participation in ritualized and day-to-day events and interactions binds members together and allows them to reiterate their claim of belonging. The estate of a social house includes rights to carry out certain ceremonies; produce particular items, such as ceremonial regalia; lay claim to land, water, labor, or other resources; and occupy certain roles in the political system. The estate also, of course, includes material wealth embodied in things, like the decorated imported serving ware and figurine-whistles found at Copán. Burying members of one’s family at home, whether under the floor of the patio or inside the foundation platforms of buildings, was another way of per-petuating the social house by allowing the living to keep their dead relatives close by as they transformed into ancestors (Gillespie 2001; Hendon 2003c; Joyce 2001).

The most enduring part of a social house’s estate is the buildings it maintains. The area around the Main Group is thickly settled with the residential com-pounds of the wealthier Copanec social houses. In addition to the Sepulturas area to the east, archaeologists have identified two other clusters of residences of wealthier social houses, labeled the Bosque to the west and Cementerios to the south. In Cementerios the sixteenth Copán ruler and his royal house lived in buildings we call Group 10L-2 (Fash and Long 1983; Andrews and Bill 2005). As one moves farther out into the valley and foothills, the density and scale of the patio groups goes down, although there are some sizable compounds located some distance from the inner ring of settlement (Ashmore 1991; Fash 1983; Freter 1988; Gonlin 1993; Leventhal 1979; Maca 2002). The houses them-selves, the way people are buried, the health of the population, the distribution of highly valued resources, and the deployment of sculpture and hieroglyphic texts are the ways that social difference—both within and between social houses—are materialized.

The layering of the three deposits described at the beginning of this chap-ter—the figurine depicting a human couple and the Ulúa Polychrome bowl, the child’s grave with an Ulúa Polychrome jar next to the body, and the Copador jar—resulted from a sequence of actions by members of the Patio D social house that created a spatially structured deposit with Burial 17–5 as its central component. Although the objects in the bottom and top layers are not in the grave itself, they are associated with it through their positioning as part of the same sequence of actions that created the burial.

Excavations in the Copán Valley have recovered many burials. Although no comprehensive inventory has yet been published, a review of 258 burials

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containing 287 individuals from Group 9N-8 and two other Sepulturas com-pounds, Groups 9M-22 and 9M-24, makes clear that figurines and whistles were rarely placed in graves. Just three individuals are listed as having been buried with figurines (Diamanti 1991, 195–226, table 3.24). We can add two more cases of probable associations, where the excavators reported figurine fragments in the fill of the grave. We would also include Burial 17–5 and the couple figu-rine placed below it, since we see the sequence of deposits as being part of the same ritual event. Excavation of Group 10L-2, Ruler 16’s compound south of the Main Group, discovered several burials, including one that contained a figurine- whistle and three ceramic vessels, two in the local Surlo style and one an imported Ulúa Polychrome jar (Bill 1997, 385–86; Doonan 1996, 189–90, fig-ure 77m). The whistle depicts a female in the style of La Mora figurines manu-factured in the lower Ulúa Valley ( Joyce 1993d). Table 2.1 describes these burials.

Overall, then, most people were buried without any figurine-whistles. Other discussions of burials reinforce this conclusion (Fash 1983; Gonlin 1993; Longyear 1952; Viel and Cheek 1983; Whittington 1989, table 5.4, appendix A). The social houses to which these seven individuals (six children and one whose age has not been reported) belonged considered figurine-whistles—items of house property—meaningful enough to include in their graves. What the burial information from Sepulturas and other parts of the Copán Valley dem-onstrates is that figurines were not primarily funerary offerings. Most figurines at Copán were excavated in pieces from trash deposits, activity areas, or caches (Diamanti 2000; Gerstle 1988; Gerstle and Webster 1990; Hendon 1984, 1991, 2003b; Hendon, Fash, and Aguilar Palma 1990; Willey et al. 1994). Even the royal family used figurines in its private residence (Doonan 1996). The rural sec-tor of Copán society, living away from the center of the city and more focused on farming, less commonly used figurines (Gonlin 1993). Their abundance in household contexts near the center of the city shows that they were material media for social practices carried out by the residents of these compounds as part of domestic life and special events celebrated at home. Both daily practices and special events would have reinforced house identity and were vital to pro-cesses of social differentiation.

Other items that were used for special events celebrated within the house were found in the same deposits, including incense burners, decorated table-ware, and ornaments made of carved bone or shell. Their regular occurrence and abundance indicate that people living in the densely settled zone around Copán’s Main Group were active participants in the celebration of important religious, social, and familial ceremonies and events, such as births, marriages, marking an individual’s passage through the life course, and healing sickness,

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Table 2.1 Copán burials associated with figurines

Location DescriptionGr. 9N-8 Patio A Burial 8–7: in a stone-lined chamber below the patio floor and

the stairs of Str. 9N-83. Two whistles. One, near the body, is an intact kneeling monkey wearing a shell collar. The other, a potbellied man dressed in a quilted garment, was found outside the chamber, but the excavators consider it part of the burial offerings. A jade bead and four bone beads found in the fill of the chamber.

Gr. 9N-8 Patio D Burial 17–5: part of a sequenced structured deposit in the exten-sion of Platform N next to Str. 9N-63. Marriage figurine-whistle and Ulúa Polychrome vessel deposited first, fill added, then body and another Ulúa Polychrome vessel, then more fill and a Copador jar with frogs’ heads.

Gr. 9N-8 Patio D Burials 12 and 12A: double burial in a roughly built cobblestone tomb located between Str. 9N-111 and 9N-61A. Figurine frag-ments and a jade bead recovered from the fill, with at least one fragment lying next to the bodies.

Gr. 9N-8 Patio D Burial 17–32: no formal chamber, but the body was surrounded by stones. Located below the stairs of Str. 9N-111. Seven whole or partial figurines, including an owl, a dog, and part of a marriage figurine. A miniature bottle also included in the grave.

Gr. 9N-8 Patio H Burial 22–1: shallow grave below the patio floor near Str. 9N-110A and 9N-64. Figurine fragment found in the grave fill.

Gr. 9M-22 Patio B Burial 9–14: near Str. 9M-191-West. Two bird whistles, one with traces of yellow paint on its beak and blue paint on its back.

Gr. 10L-2 Patio B Burial 86–1: inside bench of Room 1 of Str. 10L-86. Although a full description has not yet been published, the burial contained two Surlo bowls and a small two-handled Ulúa Polychrome jar.

Sources: Bill (1997, 385–86); Diamanti (1991, table 3.24); Doonan (1996, figure 77m); Gerstle (n.d.); Gerstle and Webster (1990, 57, 111–13, 163–64, 176, 178, 181, 184, 193, plates R13, R16, E5, E13, figures E4, E12, E32); Joyce (1993a, 1993d); Operation 22 Burial Appendix (n.d.); Webster, Fash, and Abrams (1986, 192–93, 228, figure 29); Whittington (1989, appendix A).

as well as in festivals sponsored by the royal family, such as ballgames (Hendon 2003a). The objects used were clearly of major importance at Copán. Here we want to explore this question: What can the study of such objects in context tell us? And how should such an investigation take shape?

Intact figurines, and especially the human couple connected to Burial 17–5, have been regularly included in exhibitions and books on Copán and, more generally, the Maya (see Eggebrecht, Eggebrecht, and Grube 1994; Schmidt,

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de la Garza, and Nalda 1998). There is a certain irony in this close identifica-tion between object, site, and culture, since the figurines associated with the six burials, like many of those found in middens, were not made at Copán. Crafted in molds, their style and raw material match those of Ulúa tradition figurines manufactured by people living east of Copán. The couple figurine is made out of light orange–colored clay that has a very dense and uniform fine-grained texture with silvery metallic flecks throughout. While this paste is quite common in the Copán figurine sample, it does not match any of the clays used to manufacture ceramics or figurines locally (Beaudry 1984; Hendon 1984; Willey et al. 1994). The Ulúa tradition figurines from Copán, many of which were designed to be musical instruments, form part of the greater Honduran tradition of figural artifacts discussed in chapter 1 and that has deep roots in the valleys formed by the Chamelecón, Ulúa, and Comayagua Rivers and the area around Lake Yojoa.

Within the same region, Ulúa Polychrome pottery, another important import into the Copán Valley, was produced. This pottery, discussed at greater length in subsequent chapters, is one manifestation of a well-developed and diversified Honduran tradition of painted ceramics the distribution of which overlaps to a great extent that of mold-made figurine-whistles used between AD 600 and 1000.

At Copán, Ulúa Polychrome pottery is found in trash deposits and other household contexts in both the densely settled core around the Main Group and in large and small rural settlements, indicating its use as tableware for feasts and other special events throughout the valley and at all levels of society (Diamanti 1991; Fash 1983; Gonlin 1993; Hendon 1987, 2009, 2010). This pattern mirrors the widespread distribution and use of these ceramics in their home areas ( Joyce 1993a). This kind of pottery has also been found in some burials—of adults and children, men and women—at sites in the foothills of the Copán Valley and close to the Main Group, including Patios B, D, F, and K of Group 9N-8 and Patio B of Group 9M-22 in Sepulturas and the royal residence, Group 10L-2 (Bill 1997; Diamanti 1991, 2000; Fash 1983; Gerstle and Webster 1990; Longyear 1952; Maca 2002; Viel and Cheek 1983). The use of these vessels in burials is a particularly Copán practice that does not match burial practices in the regions where Ulúa Polychromes were made.

Some studies have singled out Patio D of Group 9N-8, where the complete couple figurine was found, as having a greater proportion of Ulúa Polychrome pottery and have suggested that the occupants of this group were a multigen-erational enclave of immigrants from northern or central Honduras (Fash 2001, 2005; Gerstle 1987, 1988; Sanders 1989). The presence of this pottery or of

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imported figurines in some Patio D burials has been seen as supporting this interpretation, despite the practice’s divergence from those of the supposed place of origin of these immigrants and the fact that such burial offerings are not limited to this patio at Copán.

In fact, the presence of Ulúa tradition pottery in all contexts is not signifi-cantly higher in Patio D than elsewhere in Sepulturas (Hendon 1991, 2009). The impression of more pottery in trash deposits and other contexts is a factor of sample size. The excavations in this crowded residential patio recovered more artifacts overall. If one calculates what percentage of all ceramics recovered from Group 9N-8 are Ulúa Polychromes from Patio D, the result is large because Patio D’s excavations yielded more ceramics overall than any other patio group. A better measure of patterns of consumption is to determine how much of the pottery found in each patio are Ulúa Polychromes. This helps control for the difference in the quantity of materials recovered by different excavators, often working for different periods of time. Such an approach provides a useful, if imperfect, way to measure the acquisition and consumption of imported pot-tery and figurines. Table 2.2 shows this information, based on the number of rim sherds from each patio, and calculates what percentage was classified as Ulúa

Table 2.2 Ulúa Polychrome rim sherds in Copán residential compounds

Patio

Number of Ulúa Polychrome rim sherds

from each patioTotal number of rim

sherds from each patioPercent Ulúa Polychromes

9N-8-A 78 3,282 2.389N-8-B 48 946 5.079N-8-C 31 1,986 1.569N-8-D 222 10,049 2.219N-8-E 12 1,794 0.679N-8-F 17 1,539 1.109N-8-H 120 5,116 2.359N-8-K 49 2,543 1.939N-8-M 0 132 0.009M-22-A 175 5,805 3.019M-22-B 101 12,271 0.829M-24 44 5,203 0.84

Source: Gerstle (1988, table 5–5); Hendon (2009, table 2).

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Polychromes. Patio B of Group 9N-8 emerges as the location with the most Ulúa Polychromes, followed by Group 9M-22’s Patio A. Back in Group 9N-8, Patios A, D, H, and K are roughly equivalent to one another while Patios C, E, and F of this same group, Patio B of Group 9M-22, and Group 9M-24 have the lowest percentages of these imported materials (figure 2.4a). The same is true of imported figurines made in the general Honduran style (figure 2.4b).

Research on the biological relatedness of the Copán population also fails to support the idea that the residents of Patio D made up a separate reproductive population or had signs of a separate origin. Megan L. Rhoads (2002) examined the distribution of genetically inherited dental traits using a sample of skeletal remains recovered from many different parts of the valley. Her analysis identi-fied two biological lineages in the Copán Valley that passed on distinctive traits of their teeth. Members of both lineages were present in all residential groups in her study, including all the patios of Group 9N-8 and other residences in Sepulturas. The Late Classic population of the Copán Valley emerges in her study as biologically homogenous. Furthermore, her comparison to skeletons from the lower Ulúa Valley demonstrates that the Copán population was dis-tinct from people living in this Ulúa Polychrome–producing area. Her results, when coupled with the distribution of imported ceramics and figurines, suggest that a more nuanced explanation of social relations between the Copán Valley

Figure 2.4a–b. Proportions of Ulúa Polychromes and nonlocal Honduran figurines in households at Copan. A: Ulúa Polychrome rim sherds in each patio in Sepulturas as a percentage of the total number of sherds from that patio. Based on information provided in Gerstle (1988), table 5-5. B: Imported Honduran tradition figurines in each Sepulturas residential compound as a percentage of all figurines from that patio. Based on information provided in Gerstle (1988), tables 5-17 and 5-19.

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and societies in other part of Honduras is needed than can be provided by the idea of a foreign enclave reproducing itself over generations.

Our study considers these social relations through a focus on one particu-lar material practice: the use of figurine-whistles depicting human pairs, either couples—a female and a male—or doubles, in which two identical figures are joined together. The couple whistle found below the child’s grave in Patio D provides our entrée into an exploration of the meaning of such objects to people at Copán and settlements to the east.

The couple figurine associated with Burial 17–5 provides a good starting point because it is unbroken and in good condition. Archaeologists working at Copán in the early 1980s, when Burial 17–5 was found, dubbed the couple whistle the “marriage figurine.” Its inclusion in several major exhibits reflects the fact that it is enormously appealing to modern eyes. While its appeal and the nickname of “marriage figurine” are both manifestations of contemporary reactions to the object, we argue that the interest it evokes and the sense of a close social bond it suggests were also part of why the people living in Patio D valued it and considered it appropriate to include in the complicated burial constructed for the dead child.

Our argument will emerge over the course of this and subsequent chapters. Here we begin with the way that the marriage figurine attracts the eye and engages the mind. It exemplifies what Alfred Gell (1992, 1998) described as the ability of certain kinds of objects to enchant people who make, interact, view, and think about them. Gell called this quality cognitive stickiness and attributed it in part to the design complexity and intricacy of such objects. The marriage figurine appeals to several senses through the visual complexity of its design, the ins and outs of its shape coupled with the smoothness of its surface, and the musical note that it produces when played (see also Howes 1991; MacGregor 1999). The mouthpiece for whistles like this one is at the back and base of the figure. To play it, one would hold it upright in front of the face. The height of the marriage figurine, like many whistles, is such that it covers most of the features of the musician, acting as a kind of mask that gives the effect of a hybrid composed of a full-sized human and a miniaturized human or animal (Hendon 2010). Its cognitive stickiness is further enhanced by its small-scale representation of the details of human dress and posture. Miniaturization draws people in, often distorting their sense of time and spa-tial relations (Bailey 2005).

Enchanting objects, as they become part of meaningful social practices, become person-like in their own right through the ways that people inter-act with them and with others through them. The figurine-whistles found at

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Copán and in the other places we discuss in this book slip easily into this role. They are quintessential person-like objects, most obviously because they look like people, have a humanlike orientation and gaze, and are three-dimensional representations (Bailey 2005; Schlosser 1978; Todes 2001). Even animal figu-rines are anthropomorphized by their upright stance or how they are decorated. Monkeys, in particular, frequently wear necklaces or earspools (figure 1.5; cf. Gordon 1898, figure 14). One child’s burial, Burial 8–7, contained such a whistle (table 2.1). Such characteristics, given the solipsism of our species, inevitably command attention. To fully grasp their significance, one has to go beyond acknowledging that these objects have an iconic quality because they look like a person. The marriage figurine and others of its kind are treated like people in ways that we can detect archaeologically because they participate in important ritualized events that play a crucial role in the development of individual and group social identities.

A semiotic approach is central to our argument. Archaeological interest in a semiotic approach grounded in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce is now more than a decade old (Preucel 2006). As Robert W. Preucel and Alexander A. Bauer (2001) explain, Peircean semiotics, in contrast with the Saussurean approach long used in archaeology, emphasizes the active construal of meaning and thus is compatible with agent-centered or practice-based perspectives that archaeologists increasingly draw on. In this view, a sign does not have an inher-ent meaning that it carries like a vehicle carries a passenger. Meaning is made, not simply read out; it is made historically, at specific points in time, by specific human agents, in relation to preceding agents, moments of time, things, and meanings. The meanings that accrue to the figurines develop because they are semiotic indexes that afford people ways to allude to and recall important kinds of social connections and distribute the signs of these connections through time and across space. The ability to use objects in this way also distributes social identities temporally and spatially, contributing to social memory and relations with strangers near and far (Hendon 2010; Joyce 2003b, 2007b, 2008b; see Gell 1998; Keane 2005; Knappett 2005; Küchler 2002; and Preucel 2006 for further discussions of the semiotic interpretation of objects).

It is easy to fall into the trap of treating this marriage figurine as a unique object. It is unbroken and was found in a special deposit connected with a burial. These are both factors that predispose archaeologists and museums to treat objects as worthy of special attention. Even when a site is carefully exca-vated, the objects associated with burials are usually described in more detail than those from other kinds of contexts or those that are broken. As a unique object, however, the marriage figurine would not be particularly informative

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about the kinds of social practices and connections we are interested in. At best, it might suggest something about the individual child with whom it is associated. Fortunately, however, it is not unique. Five other figurine-whistles depicting this same couple have been found in Sepulturas residences (table 2.3). None is intact, but all preserve enough detail to establish their membership in this thematic group.

One comes from Patio D, making two from this area. The top part of the figurine, consisting of the male and female heads, was found in a second burial, Burial 17–32. This grave was made for a two- to three-year-old child who had not been as healthy during life as the one of Burial 17–5 (Rebecca Storey, per-sonal communication, 2006). Burial 17–32 contained a small clay bottle and seven figurines, two intact (an owl and a howling dog sitting on its haunches) and the rest broken. The marriage figurine is one of the broken ones. Although clearly a marriage figurine, this example is not identical to the first and was defi-nitely not made in the same mold, as it is larger. The women’s headdresses and hairstyles are the same but the expression on the two faces is subtly different, having to do with the modeling of the eyes. There is only one earspool between the two heads. The lowest part of the man’s headdress is decorated with small punctuations and his hair is not visible. Although the topmost part of his head-dress is broken off, the feather rising from the same sort of band is evident, and it is this element that we consider distinctive for the male half of the marriage figurine. The figurine, when whole, would have been larger than the complete one, with an estimated height of 13 centimeters.

Two much smaller pieces have been found that were part of other examples of the man’s headdress. One comes from a trash deposit located on the west side of Str. 9N-60N. The entrance to this building faced onto Patio I, although the west side is adjacent to Patio J. The second fragment was found during the excavation of Patio J, although we do not know exactly where it was dug up. Given the fact that this patio is bordered by the backs or sides of buildings that are part of Patios B, C, D, and I, it is possible that it came from a deposit more properly associated with one of those residential compounds. Despite this lack of specificity in its provenience, it clearly came from Group 9N-8.

The final two examples were found by excavations in Sepulturas directed by Gordon R. Willey and Richard M. Leventhal in the 1970s (Willey et al. 1994, figures 138b, 140). One is a head of the male figure with the band and feather headdress, and it lacks precise provenience. The other is a body of the female figure, wearing the same style of dress and jewelry as the others. The hand of her male companion is visible as it covers her wrist. This example came from a medium-sized residential group with two patios, known as CV-20, that is

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located northwest of Group 9N-8, closer to the paved walkway that connects the Sepulturas area to the Main Group (Willey and Leventhal 1979). Although more specific information on where in CV-20 the figurine was found has not yet been published, a review of the burials from the group does not mention it (Whittington 1989), suggesting that it was not found in a funerary context. It might be tempting to assume that the man’s head and the woman’s body came from one figurine, but the sizes of the head and the body are not in proportion to one another.

In total, then, we have evidence for the presence of six different mold-made figurine-whistles imported to Copán that depict a male-female couple. Despite sharing a well-defined set of features centering on clothing, headdress, hair treatment, and jewelry, they were not mass produced from the same mold. All are from places where people lived, having been found in at least two different residential compounds—Groups 9N-8 and CV-20—located in the eastern area of dense settlement near the Main Group. For those with more precise prove-nience information, two are from burials of children, two are from non-funerary contexts, and one is probably from a non-funerary context.

As person-like objects, figurines have the capacity to represent and stand in for the kinds of identities and relationships that are most significant in the context of the event. They also have a cycle of existence that can be readily

Table 2.3 Copán marriage figurines

Figurine ProvenienceIntact male-female pair (11.6 cm high) Below a child’s burial from Gr. 9N-8 Patio

D in the extension of Platform N (Burial 17–5)

Male and female conjoined heads (6.7 cm high)

Child’s burial from Patio D below the stairs of Str. 9N-111 (Burial 17–32)

Feather from male headdress (2.4 cm high) Gr. 9N-8 Patio J, context unknown, could be related to Patios B, C, D, I, or J

Feather from male headdress (2.7 cm high) Gr. 9N-8, in a trash deposit west of Str. 9N-60N that is part of Patio I, but western side abuts Patio J

Male head with two stacked earspools (4.8 cm high)

Sepulturas area, no additional provenience information available

Female body with her hand held by her partner (5.1 cm high)

CV-20 Op. No. 4(C) Level 1

Source: Gerstle and Webster (1990, 57, 111–13, 163–64, 176, 178, 181, 184, 193 plates R13, R16, E5, E13, figures E4, E12, E32); Hendon (1984); Willey et al. (1994, 202–3, figures 138b, 140).

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mapped onto the human one (Hendon 2010). Like children, they come into being at a specific point through the creative efforts of socially responsible beings (Monaghan 1995). They participate in the kinds of ritualized practices that help establish and maintain this social responsibility, exemplifying “a local theory of production: a set of ideas about how people create and maintain the conditions of their existence” (Monaghan 1998, 48, emphasis in original; see also Astor-Aguilera 2010). They move from one group to another as gifts, trade items, or possessions. Their existence can be ended or, better said, transformed through breakage or burial.

Once broken, they may be divided up among participants in the event and their pieces separated from one another. Even when left intact, figurine-whistles are eminently portable objects that can be circulated, discarded, handed down, or hidden away. At least three of these processes can be discerned for the Copán marriage figurines. They circulated across western Honduras, they were discarded in trash deposits, and they were hidden in the graves of two young children—which may also be a kind of handing down across generations. Whether whole or in pieces, their mobility and transferability not only reinforce their person-like status—people were regularly transferred between social houses through mar-riage—but also make them focal points around which memory coalesced.

Social memory is an intersubjective process that incorporates objects, places, and other aspects of the material world into the selective remembering and forgetting of events, relationships, and emotions that create and reproduce a group’s history. Copán social houses represent communities of memory for whom such material traces and the contexts in which they were deployed would have been crucial to the efforts to perpetuate their identity over generations (Hendon 2010, 2012b). This kind of distributed personhood (Gell 1998, 1999) is made even more significant by the fact that figurine-whistles are objects that can be broken and yet not destroyed. They are thus partible (Strathern 1988): capable of being detached from the whole and yet still representative of a per-son, an event, or a group.

The greater abundance of figurines in the larger, wealthier residential com-pounds suggests that the ability of small clay figures to signal social relations and distribute those connections was more important to these social houses living near the Main Group. The repetition of the marriage figurine motif and its association with two children’s burials in the Copán Valley may be a sign of the commemoration of a particular kind of social connection between particular social houses and individuals. To explore this further, we now turn to the site of Tenampua, in the Comayagua Valley, where a nearly identical marriage figurine was found.

39

DOI: 10.5876_9781607322788.c003

3TenampuaConflict and CompetitionIn 1957 pioneering Honduran archaeologist Doris Z.

Stone published a photograph of a figurine very similar to the one from Copán (Stone 1957, figure 56D). Stone described it as “a mold-made figurine of a man and a woman [that] came from Tenampua” (Stone 1957, 53). This laconic statement is all we know about the figurine’s provenience, but it is enough, when taken in conjunction with the figurine itself, to prompt our argument that the Copán marriage figurines came from Tenampua and that they commemorate particularly close social bonds between two culturally and geographically distinct groups, bonds forged through marriage and embodied in the children of those unions, including the two bur-ied in Patio D of Group 9N-8 at Copán.

The SiTe of TenampuaArchaeologists have known of Tenampua since the

mid-nineteenth century (Squier 1853, 1869). Samuel K. Lothrop mapped the site in 1917 (Lothrop 1927), show-ing that the hilltop, protected by a system of walls, con-tained the remains of over 500 buildings, and his map, although unpublished until 1957, was available to other researchers. The earliest archaeologists to visit the site treated the group of buildings near the ballcourt as the most important (e.g., Squier 1853, 6–7; Lothrop 1927, 23–26, plate 3; Yde 1938, 19–21, figure 5). Here, within a walled enclosure, was a group of three platforms, one a tall stepped platform. Located immediately outside the walled enclosure was a pair of parallel mounds forming a ballcourt (figure 3.1).

The main mound in the walled enclosure attracted the greatest attention from professional archaeologists

TENAMPUA40

and local residents alike. From a published description of informal excavations in the 1950s (Stone 1957, 50–56) that incorporated results of earlier research (Popenoe 1936), it is clear that the central enclosure’s largest building contained multiple rooms, and we can recognize at least four building phases. Each ren-ovation of the rooms included creating a formal floor with a stone founda-tion, mud plaster, and fine finish coat of lime stucco. In the final stage, either the summit was left as an open-air platform or the remains of a building had entirely collapsed and eroded away. As part of the processes of renovation, the builders burned resin and deposited whole pottery vessels and other objects as dedication offerings.

The main evidence for the ritual burning of resins is the broken remains of specialized pottery vessels—what archaeologist call censers. Stone (1957, 53) reported sherds from what can today be recognized as diverse kinds of resin-burning vessels—types she called “Raised Nubbin” (Stone 1957, 40) and “Polychrome Alligator” (today called Tenampua subclass Zarza; Viel 1978;

Figure 3.1. Map of Tenampua. Originally published in Dorothy Hughes Popenoe (1936), “The Ruins of Tenampua, Honduras.” Smithsonian Report for 1935, figure 1.

TENAMPUA 41

Stone 1957, figure 5a)—and vessel forms she described as “strainers and incense pots with long handles” (Stone 1957, figure 24).

Raised Nubbin and Tenampua subclass Zarza vessels are open cylindrical pots or bowls that would sit on a surface. They are usually heavily blackened on the interior, showing that they contained burning materials. Tenampua sub-class Zarza vessels have a distinctive set of three supports made by twisting two pieces of clay together and forming them into an open loop. These unique feet not only separated the heated vessel from any floor it might have stood on, but they provided a way to pick up and handle the vessel without coming into contact with the heated body of the pot. The low open bowls with long tubular handles that Stone called “incense pots with long handles” are today referred to as ladle censers. The interior of the shallow bowl of these vessels is again usu-ally highly burned. The long tubular handle removes the heated bowl from the hand of the person who would have been holding this vessel while it was in use. Ladle censers have holes pierced in the base of the shallow bowl so that in use, hot ashes would have fallen through onto surfaces below.

Vessels of these types were described by Stone (1957, 53) as making up the “majority of the sherds encountered in this excavation,” broken and discarded in the rooms making up this structure. Pieces were found mixed in fill, above the floors of rooms. Stone (1957, 51) notes that the floors of these rooms “in spots showed evidence of burned offerings,” likely burned patches from expo-sure to the censers and the burned resins they contained. She describes both burned sherds and “burnt substances” in the fill between floors and filling in these rooms.

From this evidence, we can see that the people of Tenampua burned resin in specialized pots, broke them, and filled in the rooms of this building in a series of events. Sometimes they placed whole objects on the floors of the rooms being filled in before the ritual burning and filling. Each new floor would have been used for some period before it, in turn, was taken out of use and replaced in a similar ritual of placing objects on the floor, burning incense, and depositing the burned material and broken censers in a fill covering the old floor and acting as a base for a new one.

A thorny oyster (Spondylus) shell was plastered onto the earliest floor identi-fied, in a corridor leading from a doorway in the eastern wall of the building. At approximately the same time, a polychrome vase with a ring base, white background slip, and band of profile heads was placed intact on the floor of a room to the north of this corridor. Because this vase can be recognized today as a Tenampua class Ulúa Polychrome, we can confirm that the first remodeling of this building was no earlier than the second half of the eighth century AD.

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After these objects and the fill containing burned material and sherds from incense-burning vessels were put in place, a new floor was installed. After some period of use of the new floor, a group of at least three other Tenampua class Ulúa Polychrome vessels were placed on the second floor of the northern room before it was filled again in the same fashion. The identification of vessels in both of these episodes as Tenampua class Polychromes suggests that not very much time had passed between these events, since such vessels were likely made over the course of about one century.

The sequence of remodeling, the inclusion of imported shell and polychrome pots as offerings, the construction of a walled compound and proximity to the ballcourt all make it seem likely that this location was important in the ritual life of the people of Tenampua. Yet despite the wealth of information recorded about the deliberate placement of offerings during the use and remodeling of these rooms, no figurines or figurine fragments were described from this deposit. To understand the likely context for the marriage figurine from Tenampua, we have to look to other parts of the site.

For Dorothy Hughes Popenoe (1936), the most important area at Tenampua was a cluster of courtyards on the southern edge of the site where stairways and ramps connected a low patio to a higher one on the north. Both the lower and upper patios were in turn connected with a ridgetop group overlooking the valley below. The cliff side below this southern group was littered with debris suggestive of everyday life: obsidian chips, bifaces made from flint and obsidian, broken potsherds, and the remains of grinding stones, which Popenoe found in large numbers on the surface of this group as well. The upper patio on the north side of this area supported a single tall platform mound, equal in size to that of the central enclosure. The lower patio included a group of smaller mounds, well within the known size range for residences in the Comayagua area (Benyo 1986; Dixon 1989). More such mounds to the north and west are the remains of locales where Tenampua’s residents lived in spatially discrete clusters of houses.

The Central Enclosure, the ballcourt, and the large patios to the south stud-ied by Popenoe represent places where people could congregate for social and ritual events. But only the last of these seems to have formed part of a house-hold, the site of everyday life and social action. The southern group is an analog of the places where figurines were used at the other sites we discuss in this book: a residential compound. Additionally, it is one of the largest residential compounds at Tenampua. It is located strategically overlooking the valley floor and is connected by paved walkways to the ballcourt. It can be closely compared

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in these characteristics to the main residential compound at Cerro Palenque, which we discuss in chapter 7.

If any family at Tenampua was allied closely with a major family at Copán, it should have been a family of significant distinction, one living in a residential compound like this. While we cannot know where the Tenampua figurine was found within the site, we can use this compound, investigated by Popenoe, as a model for the residence of a wealthy and influential family of sufficient status to have contracted and maintained social relations with similar families in more distant places, including Copán but also likely extending far in other directions.

Boyd Dixon (1989) showed that Tenampua was the largest settlement in the history of the Comayagua Valley. Previous settlement was focused on the main river courses, with the largest settlements located in the approximate center of the arable land. Dixon argues that Tenampua was settled at a strategic pass into the Choluteca Valley, a corridor south to El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Tenampua’s distinctive polychromes have been found in an area reach-ing far into El Salvador and Nicaragua. Carved metates or ceremonial seats in Central American style, with bird heads and “flying panels” of carved open-work, were depicted on Tenampua Polychromes and recovered in excavations in a mound group to the east of the southern group (Popenoe 1936, figure 4). Dixon argues that Tenampua’s position on a pass to the Choluteca Valley would have allowed Tenampua to control the flow of raw material from the Guiñope obsidian source in southern Honduras, known to have been heavily used in the Sulaco Valley in interior Honduras (Sheets et al. 1990) and Nicaragua (Braswell, Salgado González, and Glascock 1997).

Dixon (1989, 264) estimates that when Tenampua rose to its peak in the ninth century, it contained as many structures as all the villages of the Comayagua Valley during the immediately preceding period. This led him to conclude that most of the population of the valley relocated to this fortified, defensible spot in reaction to military conflict. The imagery of Tenampua Polychromes pro-vides some support for this. Unique among all the Ulúa Polychromes known, Tenampua Polychromes often represent men holding spears and shields. What remains puzzling is who was the antagonist against which Tenampua was forti-fied and the site armed?

Tenampua’s hegemony over the Comayagua Valley was not uncontested; in the traditional center of settlement on the main river course, the site of Las Vegas was a sizable town of over 100 buildings at the end of the ninth century (Dixon 1989, 265; figure 1.6). Las Vegas appears to have grown in size from a smaller settlement of about 60 buildings (Dixon 1989, 266, figure 5). By the ninth century,

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no other settlement of any size existed in the northern valley near Las Vegas, although scattered finds show that there were some residents, perhaps individual farmers, in this area (Dixon 1989). Even after Tenampua was abandoned, Las Vegas persisted as a regional center, with workshops making objects of imported obsidian and local chert, and as the center for production of a new style of painted pottery, Las Vegas Polychrome, found as far north as the archaeological site of Tula, in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico (Diehl, Lomas, and Wynn 1974).

It is in the context of a possible conflict in the Comayagua Valley, between a northern centralizing power at Las Vegas and a southern one at Tenampua, that the Tenampua marriage figurine was used and preserved. Both settle-ments had ties to distant partners. In the case of Tenampua, one of those part-ners was clearly Copán, and one apparent mechanism of alliance with Copán was intermarriage.

The Tenampua marriage figurineThe figurine recovered at Tenampua (figure 3.2) shows almost identical

imagery to the examples from Copán, although wear around the perimeter has removed some of the detail. The earspools on the side where the two figures adjoin are shown as a stacked pair; the man’s hand covers the woman’s, extend-ing across to her body to do so. At the same time, it is clear that yet another mold was used to make this figurine, as it does not match exactly any of the Copán examples.

The man wears a necklace of two beads on a string, as do the men in examples from Copán. The woman in the Tenampua figurine wears some kind of necklace, but it does not seem to be made up of the flat square beads seen in the Copán examples. Her breasts appear above a long garment tucked directly underneath. Both wear wrist cuffs made of long beads. The man wears a belt with dots that looks very much like the square plaques of the Copán man’s belt. Although the lower edge is worn, a raised ridge corresponding to the hem fringe of the woman’s garment on the better preserved Copán example is partly preserved. An area with punctated dots covers the right leg of the man. A similar area of decoration can be seen on the whole figurine from Copán.

The headdresses of the two figures closely match those of the Copán figu-rines, although the upstanding feather on the man’s headdress is missing due to wear on the edge of the figurine. The two strands of hair on the sides of the woman’s headdress are missing for the same reason. The two bands of square plaques that form the man’s headband are preserved, as is the distinctive head-band of the woman, with its continuous wavy line with dots above and below.

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At Copán, the woman’s headdress is not obviously meaningful, having no local precedent. At Tenampua, in contrast, the headdress design would have been instantly recognizable to local viewers as the same design that is found traced in white paint on a black background on the interior of Tenampua Polychromes and executed on the exterior of many of these vessels as well (fig-ure 3.3). This design, in fact, is so characteristic of Tenampua class Polychromes that it has been called the “Tenampua motif ” (Glass 1966; Viel 1978).

We can think of the differential recognition of this motif at Tenampua and Copán in terms of the relative “legibility” of the figurine, drawing on the eth-noarchaeological work of Brenda J. Bowser (2000) in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Legibility, or the ability to recognize a meaningful reference even in a sim-ple design, is dependent on living in a community and being familiar with its

Figure 3.2. Couple figurine from Tenampua. © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (Peabody ID# 2004.24.19573).

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culture and history. The wavy dotted line would have been legible for people at Tenampua as proper to the locality, an association reinforced by its repeated use on polychrome pottery made there.

It may be that the design, which in the most carefully drawn examples is a continuous stepped terrace, refers to mountains, with the internal dot, some-times elaborated as a circle, suggesting a cave in the mountains. Tenampua is distinguished by its placement on a highland mesa high above the valley floor. There are several caves accessible from the mesa surface about which local people maintained legends into the twentieth century (Popenoe 1936, 570–71). Regardless of whether or not the design carries such specific representational meaning, it is likely that the design in the woman’s headdress would also have been legible at Copán, by association there with distinctive Tenampua class Ulúa Polychromes that were prized highly enough to be included in some burials, as indicative of a specific foreign place or people. As people at Copán engaged with these enchanting objects, they reiterated connections between themselves and the residents of a large and distant settlement.

The Tenampua Band and The SemioTicS of ulúa polychromeS

Ulúa Polychromes are a highly diverse group of painted vases, bowls, dishes and plates, and small two-handled jars (Viel 1978; Joyce, unpublished manu-script). Stylistic differences and paste diversity demonstrate that Ulúa Poly-chromes were not centrally made and traded out into the wide area where they were used. Instead, they were made in many workshops within the main geo-graphic area of production. Yet at the same time, potters in these widely dis-persed workshops produced pots that follow very uniform standards of motif placement, combinations, and vessel shape. Nebla and Tenampua classes appear to be typical of the Comayagua Valley. Tenampua class persists longer than any other Ulúa Polychrome subclass. It may grow out of Nebla or may partly over-lap with it (Viel 1978; Joyce 1991, 1993a, 1993b).

The uniformity in form and design of Ulúa Polychromes recalls the unifor-mity produced by figurine makers in the same areas through the use of molds (Lopiparo 2006a; Lopiparo and Hendon 2009). From a semiotic perspective (see chapter 2), the reproduction of essentially identical imagery can be seen as a way for those in producing and consuming communities to reiterate a com-mon identification. Viewed in this way, these painted pots were deliberately produced to be highly legible across a wide area. They acted as indexes in the sense defined by Peirce.

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When a viewer at Copán associated the dotted wavy line on the head-dress of the woman in the marriage figurine with her original town, that sign was temporarily and fluidly fixed as a referent to Tenampua. At Tenampua, repeated associations with the hilltop settlement of this motif on polychrome pots through multiple, repeated acts of interpretation by viewers, forged and reforged the identification of Tenampua—the place and this sign. This histori-cal process of making meaning is something archaeologists are well situated to trace, with our deeper time frame and evidence of repeated practices (Hendon 2010; Joyce 2004, 2007a, 2008b, 2011).

Richard Parmentier (1997) uses archaeological analysis to exemplify the dif-ferent ways signs can make meaning from a Peircean perspective. He argues that the ability to recognize an object’s overall configuration as a sign of group identity can allow us to treat even an entire object as an index, pointing toward the group that produced it. This is clearly what archaeologists do when we group objects and call them “Ulúa Polychromes” or “Ulúa tradition figurines” to indicate manufacture and use in a specific geographic area. This way of mak-ing meaning is potentially like one of the ways the original communities that made and used these objects interpreted—made meaning from—such things. In traditions like those of Classic Honduras, where many different producers maintained a common appearance of objects, the producers can be understood as reproducing an index of their common identification each time they worked to reproduce similar appearances.

One of the most useful things about Peircean perspectives is that signs are productive in multiple ways at once. So it would be more accurate to say that Ulúa Polychromes served indexically than to say they were indexes. Ulúa Polychrome vessels also incorporate a variety of representational motifs that are recognizable, even today, as images of humans and animals. Such naturalistic imagery is iconic—making meaning by resemblance—and, in our view, linking to highly specific mythic figures, places, and ritual performances ( Joyce, unpub-lished manuscript). The people who interpreted Ulúa Polychromes in practice understood both their iconic connections and their indexical ones.

The iconic content that Ulúa Polychromes convey is relatively uniform and thus contributes less to communicating different meanings (in the way assumed in Saussurean symbolic analysis) and more to indexing common knowledge within a cultural tradition. The difference introduced by the depiction of a water bird at Lake Yojoa and a monkey in the lower Ulúa Valley, on otherwise simi-lar bowls produced at about the same time, indexes locality while the overall shapes, colors, and design composition simultaneously index a wider sphere of identification.

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Variation in what appear to us to be relatively minor details, such as different ways to delineate the stepped terraces typical of Tenampua Polychromes, is also indexical, in this case, of highly localized communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998) that produced and used these objects. Legibility, from this perspective, is another way of understanding the capacity of mem-bers of a community of practice to make similar interpretations when faced with similar signs. While there may have been more than one workshop in the Tenampua settlement painting the Tenampua motif in identifiably different ways, by virtue of participating in the wider community of practice that was constituted through everyday action at Tenampua, each would have under-stood the connection between the terrace motif and the mesa-top site.

All of these ways of making meaning depended on the manner in which interpreters encountered the objects in practice. Within the area where they were produced, Ulúa Polychromes are commonly found fragmented in house-hold trash, including trash from events where figurines and figural musical instruments were also used and discarded. The composition of ceramic assem-blages in this area, in which Ulúa Polychromes are the majority bowl, vase, and dish types, demonstrates that they were used for everyday meals as well as feasts on special occasions. Where we have precise data on the proportions of vessel forms, it is common for household assemblages to have more diversity of forms, with bowls most common. More rarely, assemblages have larger num-bers of cylinders and dishes, with bowls underrepresented. This recalls Julia A. Hendon’s (1991, 2009) observation that at Copán, cylinders and dishes were sta-tistically more common in association with highest status residences and sites of household ritual than areas of everyday food preparation and consumption.

The use of pottery as dedicatory offerings during the renovation of build-ings was amply documented at Tenampua, even with the limited research done there. This is not unique to that site; a cache of five Ulúa Polychrome pots, dat-ing to AD 700–750, was excavated at Yarumela, a site on the Comayagua Valley floor ( Joesink-Mandeville 1997, 11–12, figures 8–12). Similar patterns of caching complete Ulúa Polychromes and, later, Baracoa Fine Paste vessels, in architec-tural fill have been reported from sites in the Ulúa Valley, in the Department of Santa Barbara, and on Lake Yojoa as well (Ashmore et al. 1987; Baudez and Becquelin 1973, 98; Joyce 1985, 215, 449; Strong, Kidder, and Paul 1938, 92–98; Yde 1938, 67–68).

Within the main Ulúa Polychrome–producing area, archaeologists have doc-umented very few examples of incorporation of whole pots in burials during the period from AD 500 to 1000. Los Naranjos (Baudez and Becquelin 1973, 89–98), where whole vessels were used in architectural caches, is one site with

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examples of polychrome painted pots in burials. All of these were found in a single platform, Structure 6 in Group 5. Almost all the vessels in the ten buri-als here can be dated after AD 900, including multiple Las Vegas Polychrome vases. One burial contained fragments of an Ulúa Polychrome bowl, used as the lid on a jar, and one of the three caches here contained a highly eroded incurved rim bowl whose monkey designs and colors allow us to identify it as an Ulúa Polychrome made late in the history of this painted pottery. Published drawings showing the locations of the burials and architectural caches there allow us to reconstruct the sequence of these deposits (Baudez and Becquelin 1973, figures 42–46). The cache and burial with Ulúa Polychromes mark the earliest episode of burial here in what otherwise was a continuous sequence of burials securely dating after AD 900. At Los Naranjos we see a change in practices at around AD 900 toward the use of pottery in burials as well as architectural caches.

As we noted in the previous chapter, Ulúa Polychromes are also found at Copán, outside the zone of their production, in trash deposits in both urban and rural residences. While locally made polychromes are more common, Ulúa Polychrome vessels were used in socially important ceremonies, including buri-als (Hendon 2010). The use of Ulúa Polychromes in burials and architectural caches throughout the noble residential zones of the Copán Valley reflects dis-tinctly Copánec ideas about the meaning and use of these objects.

The excavators of these pots at Copán did not always have the means to identify the precise class or subclass within more than 45 distinct varieties that developed over the history of production of Ulúa Polychromes (Viel 1978; Joyce 1993a, 1993b). Based on the assignments to class or subclass made by the excavator or that can be made by us using published illustrations or our own examination of vessels in curation facilities, it is clear that Ulúa Polychromes were prized at Copán from the earliest stages of their development to the lat-est, testimony to ongoing social relations over many generations (table 3.1).

Conformity to a very stylized set of motifs and design structure in the earli-est stages of Ulúa Polychrome development makes it difficult to differentiate the likely production area of vessels of the Dedalos and Santa Rita classes, so that we cannot say with certainty what region in Honduras was the source of the earliest examples of Ulúa Polychromes to reach Copán. By the time that Ulúa Polychromes differentiated regionally, however, Copán was receiving ves-sels originating in the Lake Yojoa or Comayagua area.

This includes a remarkable cache of Tenampua class Ulúa Polychromes curated in the National Museum of the American Indian of the Smithsonian Institution, originally part of the Heye Foundation collection (figure 3.3).

Table 3.1 Ulúa Polychromes from excavations at Copán

Class/subclass Source DatesDedalos: Chac Viel and Cheek 1983, S-17, e AD 550–650Dedalos: Chac Viel 1993, figure 80a, b AD 550–650Santa Rita: Mellizo Longyear 1952, figure 80a AD 600–650Santa Rita: Diamante Whittington 1989, 12–15, figure 24 AD 600–700Santa Rita: Diamante Whittington 1989, 20–21, figure 41 AD 600–700Santa Rita: Paloma Viel and Cheek 1983, S-26, c AD 650–700Santa Rita: Winged Figure Longyear 1952, figure 101o, figure 117g AD 650–750Yojoa: Corral Longyear 1952, figure 104g AD 650–750Yojoa: Pantano Peabody Museum collections AD 650–750Yojoa: Pantano Viel and Cheek 1983, S-20, c AD 650–750Yojoa: Singe Accroupi Longyear 1952, figure 80d AD 650–750Manzanillo: Farolillo? Viel 1993, figure 79h AD 750–850Selva: Concerto Longyear 1952, figure 80b AD 750–850Selva: Concerto Peabody Museum collections AD 750–850Selva: Troubador Viel 1993, figure 79g AD 750–850Selva: Troubador Longyear 1952, figure 109h AD 750–850Nebla: Picadilly Longyear 1952, figure 101p, figure 117c AD 750–850Nebla: Picadilly Viel 1993, figure 80e AD 750–850Nebla: Picadilly Longyear 1952, 36 (no illus) AD 750–850Nebla: Picadilly Longyear 1952, figure 80c AD 750–850Nebla: Sphinx B Longyear 1952, figure 101q, figure 105a AD 750–850Nebla: Picadilly Longyear 1952, figure 101r, figure 110c AD 750–850Tenampua: Mariposa National Museum of the American Indian AD 850–950Tenampua National Museum of the American Indian AD 850–950Tenampua National Museum of the American Indian AD 850–950Tenampua: Mariposa National Museum of the American Indian AD 850–950Tenampua: Mariposa National Museum of the American Indian AD 850–950Tenampua National Museum of the American Indian AD 850–950Tenampua National Museum of the American Indian AD 850–950Tenampua: Mariposa National Museum of the American Indian AD 850–950Tenampua: Mariposa National Museum of the American Indian AD 850–950

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Correspondence from the Heye Foundation indicates that this group of vessels was found in a stone chamber tomb eroding out along the river in the Copán Valley (Dockstader 1972). The nine vessels collected from this tomb include a pair of rectangular dishes with four feet, one small cylindrical vase (figure 3.3a), three bowls (figure 3.3b), one ladle censer with a handle in the shape of a feline paw (figure 3.3c), and a pair of jars with two handles (figure 3.3d). Forms rela-tively uncommon in everyday household debris in the Copán Valley include the censer, cylinder vase, and dishes. The cylinder and dishes would have been used to formalize presentation of food in feasting, the censer to hold aromatic resins burned to differentiate special events from everyday meals.

The Copán tomb’s contents can be compared with the cache of vessels from the main platform at Tenampua described earlier, which contained a tripod dish and two cylinder vases buried in earth containing fragments of many broken ladle censers as well as examples of spiked cylindrical censers of the Tenampua Polychrome subclass Zarza. The difference between these two con-texts suggests that the events in which these vessels were used involved differ-ent sequences of actions. Bowls and small jars with two handles, forms used to serve food in the Ulúa Polychrome–producing area and found as serving ware in households at Copán, were present in the remains of the funerary ritual at Copán but absent from the building dedication offerings at Tenampua. At the same time, both contexts yielded open dishes, likely used to present food offer-ings, and censers, used to burn resin as part of the event. While distinct, the ritual actions at these two sites overlapped to a very great extent. The main dis-tinction here is between ceremonies oriented toward a dead person and those related to renovating a building, with forms appropriate for the consumption of food found only in the person-centered context.

While they are not uncommon at Copán, nor restricted to one area, Ulúa Polychromes are not the everyday fancy pottery used for food service at the site (Hendon 2010, 101). Copán’s equally distinctive local polychrome, Copador, was made in many workshops and used everywhere, including in rural houses. Copador is rarer in the Ulúa Polychrome–producing area of Honduras than Ulúa Polychromes are at Copán. Copador Polychrome is reported from Lake Yojoa (Baudez and Becquelin 1973, 294–95) and in Comayagua (Stone 1957, 42)—the sources of identifiable Ulúa Polychromes used at Copán—in very low numbers, with no complete vessels known.

Ulúa and Copador Polychromes can be used to trace social relations mediated by meals in which visitors participated, either bringing with them gift vessels or taking away vessels as mementos. On this basis, visitors to Copán carried with them more gifts of pottery than did the return visitors, who may have brought

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other kinds of gifts to leave in the Ulúa Polychrome–producing areas, perhaps woven textiles, jade, obsidian, or minerals like hematite or cinnabar.

reconSTrucTing Social pracTiceS aT TenampuaWe opened the previous chapter with a description of the kind of events

that resulted in one marriage figurine being deposited at Copán. Our advan-tage in drawing on the concerted efforts of recent researchers at Copán was a level of certainty that assures us that something like that scene was played out.

Figure 3.3a–d. Tenampua Polychrome vessels from a cache at Copán. A: cylinder vase. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (244307.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission. B: dish. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (244308.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission. C: ladle censer. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (244302.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission. D: jar. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (244305.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

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Tenampua, although equal in importance in the archaeology of Comayagua, has had a more difficult research history, with most excavations unreported and many informal. By paying close attention to the small amount of data from that site that allow us to understand ritual practices there, and the wider regional context for the kinds of artifacts used and disposed of in everyday life and spe-cial events, we are nonetheless in a position to suggest the kind of circumstances in which the marriage figurine from Tenampua was likely used.

Particularly intriguing, and the inspiration for our original interest in this figurine, is the near-identity with figurines from Copán. But equally in need of understanding is the wear that was so pronounced that the figurine, although complete, had lost significant iconography from the edge. This kind of wear results from handling, and not from a single event. These aspects of the mate-riality of the piece lead us to conclude that the Tenampua figurine was main-tained as an heirloom, perhaps held by one family in a multigenerational alli-ance with their distant partners in Copán.

At Copán we know the precise excavation context of the first marriage figurine and others. While we lack even a hint of intra-site provenience at Tenampua, multiple lines of evidence support our inference that the figurine likely was used within a household compound, precisely as the Copán figurines were. Because of the critical significance of such an external alliance to the family that suc-ceeded in forging and maintaining it, we assume the allied family at Tenampua would have been prominent and thus lived in a visibly distinguished location. The Southern Group, identified as the core of dwelling at the site by Dorothy Hughes Popenoe (1936), is the best candidate for the residence of an especially powerful family based on the architectural plan and construction features, the size of the space, and the number of buildings.

Wherever the family who possessed this heirloom resided, the status they claimed at Tenampua is evident in the figurine itself: the iconic design of Tenampua on the woman’s personal headdress. Outside of Tenampua, at Copán, this headdress would have been interpretable as indicating an origin at Tenampua. Within Tenampua, used by a daughter of one family, it would have constituted a claim to represent the entire community.

Objects like this were not commonly buried with the dead in the region of production of Ulúa Polychromes and Ulúa-style figurines. They were some-times used and buried, complete or broken, during the ceremonies accom-panying the rebuilding of houses. But the idea that the wear on this figurine was a consequence of its handling as an heirloom leads us to think of this as a piece brought out from storage, displayed and circulated within the social group, and witnessed by members of the community and visitors:

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The people assembled in the courtyard of the Southern Group included kin, neighbors, and visitors from distant cities. For most of those present, this was a time for feasting and dancing. For the host family, it was an anxious time. The latest marriage with the noble family from distant Copán would secure their alliance for another generation. But times were changing; the noble visi-tors brought less to the feast, and other families on the plateau had new allies and were challenging the generations-long precedence of the residents of the Southern Group.

The people of the plateau were proud of the command they exercised over the residents of villages in the valley below. These feasts were important oppor-tunities to demonstrate the reach of their alliances and rehearse the reasons for the respect they demanded. Where once the farmers maintained independence by controlling their harvests, for the past three generations, the families on the hill had received deference for their claims of ancestral ownership and their demonstrated service as intermediaries with the ancestors, not to mention their provision of exotic goods from far away.

It was time to remind the people of all of this. The elder held the carefully preserved image that showed the original couple that joined the families of the plateau and the City of the Bat. It was worn from previous displays when, in each new generation, a daughter of the house was promised to a son of the nobility of the distant city. Here one could see the blurring from handling, as the figurine circulated among those present while the story of the two families was told. Here, in the headdress of the daughter, was the sign of the plateau itself: the mountains running in unbroken lines, with the cave inside where the ancestors resided.

Two connecTed SiTeS or a neTwork of houSeSWe could conclude our account at this point, having linked the marriage

figurines from Copán and Tenampua together as evidence of historical connec-tions between two distinct places, each the most important in its own region. Yet the implications of this analysis extend beyond these two sites and the pos-sibility that a leading family at Tenampua sought to bolster its prestige by an alliance with Copán nobility. The materials that testify to that connection—figurines and pottery vessels—were created for pragmatic purposes: used for presenting food, burning resin, and prompting social memory, they were prod-ucts of already existing traditions of production by communities of practice that extended across the entire Honduran landscape, binding residents of houses in neighboring and distant communities (Hendon 2010). Taking this broader

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view, an anomaly emerges that requires more attention: the privileged position accorded Copán in this alliance is not one it uniformly has in the network of Honduran social relations.

Some families at Copán were socially linked to others in Comayagua and Yojoa, but apparently not to people living in the lower Ulúa Valley. Not only are the Travesía and Santana class Ulúa Polychromes typical of the lower Ulúa Valley absent from or rare at Copán, to date, research by Rosemary A. Joyce has identified only two sherds of Copador Polychrome from the lower Ulúa Valley. Neither the ruling family nor any of the nobility at Copán apparently owned a carved Ulúa Marble vase, the product of the most intensive and exclusive craft tradition in the lower Ulúa Valley (Luke 2002).

Yet the lower Ulúa Valley was home to many wealthy communities, producers of cacao, communities with which the people of Comayagua had their own links. Like the ties between Tenampua and Copán, alliances between Comayagua and the lower Ulúa Valley can be traced through exchanges of pottery and mold-made figurines, examples of which ended up in household trash throughout the lower Ulúa Valley. Among the figurines disposed of in the Ulúa Valley are other examples on which a man and woman stand side-by-side, commemorat-ing other alliances fostered by marriage and celebrated through feasting and ceremonies. Two examples form the topic of our next two chapters: one long known from a site called Farm Two or Campo Dos and another only recently excavated at a settlement called Currusté.

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DOI: 10.5876_9781607322788.c004

4Campo DosWealth and InfluenceNestled on a shelf in the Cultural Resource Center

of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Suitland, Maryland, is a mold-made figu-rine depicting side-by-side standing male and female figures (figure 4.1a). While the general subject is the same as that of marriage figurines from Copán and Tenampua, this is not a product of the same mold, nor does it commemorate the same alliance.

Once again, a female is depicted on the viewer’s left, a male on the viewer’s right. His loincloth, with a single fold depicted, is simpler than the elaborate belt of the man on the Copán and Tenampua figurines. He wears a necklace with a single bead and earspools. His head-dress features a fringe of cropped bangs in front and one long strand of hair pulled through a circular ring at the crest and draping down the left side of his head to the level of his ear. Otherwise his head is unorna-mented. Vertical bars of black paint on his forehead and solid black paint on his upper body contrast with traces of red pigment on his legs and the inside of his open mouth, which displays a row of teeth along the upper jaw (figure 4.1b).

The woman to his right wears a skirt draped from her waist, showing a triangular fold. Like the Copán marriage figurine, her chest displays two carefully marked breasts, which are covered by a separate upper garment with a triangular outline. A string of beads around her neck, multiple strands of beads on each wrist, and a pair of earspools form a remarkable con-trast with his simpler jewelry. Her hair is covered by a cap, like that of her male companion, which allows a single strand of hair to fall from the crown of her head to her right ear. Traces of bright orange pigment cover

Figure 4.1a–b. Figurine from Campo Dos showing a man and woman. A: entire figurine. B: close-up showing details of faces and heads. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (183201.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

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her face, neck, and right arm while her skirt and upper garment show traces of the same black pigment as the male figure. Like him, her mouth is open and the teeth of her upper jaw are carefully delineated (figure 4.1b). The two central incisors are shown with the outer corners cut out, forming a T-shape when seen from the front. This contrasts markedly with the absence of any sign of modification of the teeth so carefully represented in the open mouth of the male figure.

Linking the two figures together are two representational details. While each figure has a separately modeled earspool on the outside edge of the figu-rine, there is only one earspool shown in the middle, where the left ear of the female and the right ear of the male would have been juxtaposed. Visually it is impossible to assign this third earspool to one and only one of the repre-sented figures. It seems too far forward for the ear of the man and too high up to be the ear of the woman. Like the stacked earspools on the Copán and Tenampua marriage figurines, this is a visual compromise with the intention to show a closely entwined couple while still presenting their regalia.

The second connecting device differentiates this figurine from the Copán and Tenampua examples. Those showed the man’s arm extending across the woman’s body, his left hand clasping her right wrist. Here instead, the wom-an’s left arm extends across the man’s body, with his left hand touching hers just below the wrist. The construction is awkward: in fact, close examina-tion shows that the woman’s left arm is applied as a separate piece, attached to the upper chest. Apparently it was critical for this gesture to be clearly represented.

The female figure has more detail overall than the male figure and a much more elaborate set of jewelry. This contrasts with the Copán and Tenampua figurines, in which both figures wear wrist ornaments, necklaces, earspools, and clothing with ornamentation. The headdresses on the NMAI figurine, while not identical, are much more similar to each other than those on the Copán and Tenampua figurines. Generically, the depiction of a lock of hair at one side of the headdress links both the male and female on this figurine to the females on the Copán figurines (the Tenampua one is too worn along the edge for this detail to be preserved). But there is nothing on either male or female figure like the headband that links the Copán and Tenampua women to each other, and to the historical site of Tenampua.

One final detail differentiates the male and female figures on the NMAI figurine. Like the human images on the Copán and Tenampua figurines, the eyes of the female image were created by placing ridges of clay to form a raised oval outline. The depressed slit in the middle of this structure suggests the

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recessed eye itself; the female image on the NMAI figurine does not seem to contain the kind of punctation that indicates pupils of the eyes on the Copán and Tenampua figurines. While this detail may represent cursory craftwork, or even erosion, the eyes of the male on the NMAI figurine are shaped in quite a contrasting way. The height of the applique ridges is lower, and they are formed more carefully to an almond shape. Incision is used to outline the interior edge of this eye boundary. The well-defined eye not only has a shal-low round mark—less a punctation than a groove—for the pupil: on the man’s right eye, it is clear that black pigment has been used to outline the bounding ridges and was also applied in a bar in the center of the eye, forming a more realistic dark pupil. The overall effect is that we are looking at figures created according to very different norms of representation of key facial features: the male looks at us with a focused gaze while the female’s eye is less defined and therefore less focused.

originSThe couple figurine described was first published in Mary Butler’s (1935)

pathbreaking article on Maya mold-made figurines. Then located in the Heye Foundation Museum of the American Indian (MAI), it is now curated at the NMAI of the Smithsonian Institution. While Butler’s article did not indicate a precise provenience, museum records provide both the specific site and the excavator’s name. The figurine is one of 418 objects accessioned into the Heye Foundation in 1932, excavated by Gregory Mason earlier that year at a site known today as Campo Dos.

Mason was a journalist who began collaborating with museums in the late 1920s. He eventually followed his passion for archaeology and obtained a PhD in 1938, writing about Colombian archaeology. The only published account of his work in Honduras is a chapter in a popular book he wrote (Mason 1940, 123–37). His 1932 foray to Honduras was centered around La Lima, the town that then was and now remains the headquarters of United Fruit Company in Honduras. Mason describes the land owned by the company between the Chamelecón and Ulúa Rivers as “covered with mounds. Many are burial mounds and are gener-ally small. Others are large, flat mounds which served to support buildings long since fallen” (124).

Mason amassed a large collection for the MAI by a combination of purchase and excavation. Although his book is not specific about which site he is describ-ing, his account of excavating in the Ulúa Valley would be familiar to anyone who has worked there:

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Digging in the river banks, we found a lot of human bones, but nothing resem-bling graves, which seem to be rather scarce in this region, although they are common enough in other parts of the Maya territory. We worked mostly in what seemed to have been a large cemetery, where the bodies had been placed in the free ground with broken pottery around them. We also found a few beautifully made small axheads of a black variety of jadeite, and a few knives and spearheads of obsidian, or volcanic glass. Touching the polished axeheads or the smooth facets of the spearheads was like meeting a great artist. (131)

Mason referred to the site where the marriage figurine was found as “United Fruit Company Farm 2.” Farm 2, located east of the town of La Lima, south of a golf course constructed by the United Fruit Company, was the site of addi-tional excavations in 1935 by Jens Yde, as part of a project sponsored jointly by the Middle American Research Institute and the National Museum of Denmark (Yde 1938, 61–65). Yde explicitly mentions finding molds for figu-rines and even a mold for a pottery stamp in his excavations here.

These archaeological remains are known today by the Spanish equivalent of Farm Two, Campo Dos. Under that name, the archaeological remains on the land were recorded as site CR-132 (Department of Cortes site 132), mapped by Rosemary A. Joyce in 1981, and resulted in two senior theses about the excavated areas (figure 4.2). Excavations there in 1993 were carried out by a joint Harvard University-Cornell University project codirected by Joyce and John S. Henderson (Swain 1995; Lopiparo 1994). As a result of this history of research, we are in a good position to describe the settlement in which this figurine was used and deposited, even though Mason’s recording did not specify the precise location where it was recovered.

Campo Dos is one of a series of sites located along abandoned courses originally created by the Ulúa and Chamelecón Rivers, today occupied by smaller streams (Pope 1985). The place we call Campo Dos had a long history of occupation by relatively well-to-do people. Mason’s Campo Dos collection in the NMAI contains at least 32 whole or partial vessels dating between 900 and 400 BC, many of them effigy bottles typical of burials, along with over 100 distinctive Playa de los Muertos group hand-modeled figurines. Six other objects—two hollow figurine heads and a group of stamps—probably date even earlier, to the period from 1100 to 900 BC. One sample of pottery Yde obtained came from a depth of 4 meters, stratigraphically separated from later Classic materials that he also recovered. Joyce reviewed Yde’s cataloged collection from this locality in the National Museum of Denmark in 2010 and found that it also includes Playa de los Muertos group figurine fragments

Figure 4.2. Map of Campo Dos. Drawing by Rosemary A. Joyce, after Swain 1993. Used by permission.

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and ceramics, as well as jade pendants, evidence of a degree of wealth at this early date.

Archaeologists often treat figurines of different traditions primarily as evi-dence for occupation of sites at different points in time. The long history of figurine making at Campo Dos offers us an opportunity to reflect on what this practice might have meant historically to the people of the region. The early tradition of hand-modeled figurine making in the Ulúa Valley began before 1000 BC, depicting humans and, less commonly, animals. Early human images include careful delineation of signs of old age like facial wrinkles, sunken cheeks, and missing teeth. After 900 BC, depictions of elderly figures continue but are joined by a wider range of ages, from infants, held in arms or lying on their backs as independent subjects, through young women and older adults ( Joyce 2003c, 2007b). The figurines made between 900 and 400 BC have the greatest level of detail, down to individual tresses, cloth bands and braided cordage, and jewelry.

Figurines like these have been recovered occasionally in burials but are not present in the majority of early burials documented by archaeologists ( Joyce, Hendon and Sheptak 2008). Instead, most archaeologically documented examples, whether fragmented or complete, come from middens adjacent to households. The midden deposits from which they come also include sherds from vessels crafted with great care, or even the pieces of entire vessels, as well as faunal remains that suggest these were remains of special meals—feasts. While sample sizes are small in any single archaeological context, there are differences from one context to another in the selection of specific images. These patterns suggest that figurines were used in ceremonies, possibly related to passages in the lives of individual women, that were celebrated with feasts hosted by specific families ( Joyce 2008c).

In these early villages, social ties created by marriages, ritual sponsorship of children, and common commemoration of the dead were critical to the success of families. Although the villages show little marked difference in house size, subtle distinctions in the use of architectural materials such as stone, plas-ter, and rammed earth at the well-studied village of Puerto Escondido can be correlated with other indications of differences in access to raw and exotic materials ( Joyce 2007a). Wealthier households sponsored the creation of jew-elry, initially from imported marine shell and later from imported jade. It was wealthier houses that provided the means to host the substantial feasts the traces of which we find along with the first examples of small-scale human representations, recording the kinds of people whose life events we understand were being marked.

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There is an apparent break in historical continuity from early villages where figurines were employed in such social relations to the societies that developed later in the same places and produced new, mold-made figurines, including the NMAI marriage figurine. When these later figurines begin to be made, they echo characteristics of much earlier examples, including presentation of nude but richly ornamented women and infants as primary subjects ( Joyce 1993d). Pieces of earlier hand-modeled figurines were selectively buried in new build-ings in a number of sites in the lower Ulúa Valley, suggesting that there was a sense of historical connection to earlier societies. Making figurines should not be taken for granted; in the Ulúa Valley, the practice itself would have invoked deep histories for social distinction.

campo doS in The claSSic ulúa ValleyFrom these early beginnings, the area that today is known as Campo Dos

remained a preferred place for human settlement for many generations. In part, this may have been due to the advantages to an agricultural society of the annual renewal of the soils from the flooding of a major tropical river. The Quebrada Chasnigua occupies a former channel of the Chamelecón River that was aban-doned around AD 450, when the Chamelecón established a course parallel to the Ulúa River, ending its history as a tributary of the Ulúa (Pope 1985). Thus, in the generational memory of families living at the site in the eighth century, when the NMAI marriage figurine most likely was created, Campo Dos had been on the main river course of the valley. Canoe travel down the Chamelecón, into the Ulúa, and out into the Gulf of Honduras would have been the first stages of journeys north to the lowlands of Belize and Yucatan or east along the coasts of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica.

When the marriage figurine was made and used, Campo Dos was still near the center of river traffic, in the zone of the most fertile soils in the valley. Crops cultivated here might have included groves of cacao trees, the basis for long-distance trade in the sixteenth century via the Caribbean with distant Maya cities of Belize and the Yucatan Peninsula (Henderson 1977); locals consumed the plant beginning before 1150 BC and continuting after 200 BC at Puerto Escondido, a short distance to the west from the Campo Dos area ( Joyce and Henderson 2007).

An aerial photo survey of the central floodplain shaped by the Ulúa and Chamelecón Rivers shows an almost continuous distribution of settlement along the watercourses (Sheptak 1982). Nothing like the concentric, bounded community of central Copán or the mesa-top of Tenampua can easily be

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delimited. CR-132—the Campo Dos archaeological site—was defined in con-trast with its nearest neighbors, CR-103 (west) and CR-80 (east) by a heuristic measure: a gap of 100 meters between surface-visible platforms. Rather than think of these as separate sites, it is best to imagine the house compounds of farmers distributed all along the waterways, with denser clusters at different points the result of historical patterns of growth over time.

CR-132 consisted of a group of at least 10 large, low earthen platforms, along with a ballcourt located on the southern edge of the site (figure 4.2). (Construction of a road truncated the northern end of one of these platforms, and there may have been other platforms in the area destroyed during road construction.) Earthen platforms like these, found throughout the central floodplain, accumu-lated over time, as buildings in household clusters were renovated and elevated above the floodplain. There is sometimes evidence of a formal boundary on such platforms, defined by loosely placed stones. One of the platforms at Campo Dos reportedly had a stone-edged face (Yde 1938, 62–63). This, plus a pattern of juxtaposition of platforms and borrow pits, shows that platforms like this were not entirely natural or accidental accretions but products of construction projects undertaken to raise house compounds above the floodwaters.

Excavation in deep levels of similar features throughout this central valley area demonstrates that in the earliest periods of occupation, living surfaces were often covered by floodplain soils ( Joyce 1987a, 2007a). We understand these earthen platforms as places with long histories of occupation. During their early periods of use, residents experienced disruption from flooding. Sometime between AD 200 and 400, residents living in the central flood-plain adopted a practice of raising earthen platforms to support houses located above the flooding.

This is also about the time that, in locations farther away from the riverbank, residents began to build stone platforms that similarly raised buildings above ground level, even where no risk of flooding existed ( Joyce 1991, 24–25). While we do not know what events led to this innovation across the valley, the change in the way people inhabited space justifies talking about the centuries that fol-lowed as a new historical period, even though it is clear that the population continued to develop in place, and notwithstanding substantial evidence for the continuity of practices in daily life.

At many such places, including Campo Dos, the period between AD 250 and 400 is marked by innovations in ceramic technology associated with the emergence of polychrome figural painting traditions described in the intro-duction. The new polychrome pottery assemblages in use after this feature dif-ferent proportions of serving vessel shapes than in the immediately preceding

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centuries. Instead of an array of deep bowls with feet and closed jars, serving vessels in new traditions like the Ulúa Polychrome emphasized cylindrical vases and bowls, with footed dishes relatively uncommon. We might think of this in terms of new emphases on drinking, with vases as beakers and bowls as cups, or on individualization of servings, with bowls taking the place of larger-volume footed dishes. We cannot act as if these transformations in the most intimate of social acts—eating and drinking—were inconsequential.

As with the earlier residents at this location, the Early Classic population of Campo Dos enjoyed some degree of material wealth, sufficient to support inno-vative craft specialists. That some part of that wealth came from long-distance trade through the Gulf of Honduras is suggested by their possession of what were, historically, extremely rare commodities in the Ulúa Valley: display dishes from early lowland Maya towns (Epstein 1959). Mason recovered two Ixcanrio Orange Polychrome dishes, a type thought to have been made around AD 250 in Belize or adjacent Guatemala (Reese-Taylor and Walker 2002, 106–8). The examples of similar dishes that we have recorded in museums and on our exca-vations come from four sites along the banks of the Chamelecón and Ulúa Rivers. No other site yielded more than one sherd of such a bowl.

In the centuries that followed, some families at Campo Dos patronized pot-ters creating the new, local Ulúa Polychrome style. The dishes, bowls, and vases made include examples of the earliest in this tradition, Dedalos and Santa Rita classes. Sulaco tradition ceramics from further east were also present at Campo Dos at this time, suggesting that some families had wide networks of con-nections resulting in the exchange of commodities contained in vessels or the presentation of vessels as gifts.

Cylindrical vases, dishes, and bowls found at Campo Dos that belong to Ulúa Polychrome groups made from AD 650 to 850 show a continuity in household prac-tices of food serving through the vessel shapes reproduced and used. They include vessels with features typical of the lower Ulúa Valley, and others likely made near Lake Yojoa, showing that some residents of Campo Dos continued to participate in longer distance exchange within northern Honduras. Contemporary painted pottery imported from other areas of Honduras is also found, including Gualpopa Polychrome, likely from the Naco Valley to the west; Sulaco Polychrome from the Sulaco Valley to the southeast; Cancique Polychrome, whose center of produc-tion is uncertain but probably toward the Comayagua Valley; and Selin complex pottery from northeastern Honduras. A sherd from a lowland Maya polychrome vase points to continued exchange with Belize or Guatemala. Vases were com-mon forms for the vessels imported from distant locations, which may be due to a preference for this form as a presented gift.

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Campo Dos was a small village, but residents were prosperous enough to wear jade and shell jewelry, examples of which are included in the Gregory Mason collection at the NMAI. Fragments of Ulúa Marble vases, the most precious and rarest luxury produced in the lower Ulúa Valley (Luke 2002), were also recovered in Mason’s excavations. While obsidian was used to make a full range of household tools, Mason also excavated an obsidian mirror, another badge of status, at the site.

craf T producTion and riTual aT campo doSPottery production was a particularly important craft practiced at Campo

Dos. Mason’s collection included 64 mold-made figurines, 76 mold-made fig-ural whistles, and 85 heads from mold-made figurines. Subjects included humans, monkeys, birds, a crocodile, and other animals. This mold-made ceramic industry also produced flat stamps depicting monkeys, frogs, and hands, of which Mason recovered 26 examples. Fortunately, our more recent excavations shed light on ceramic production at Campo Dos and allow us to link the manufacture of the NMAI marriage figurine to local social, political, and economic relations.

Excavations in 1993 documented an area on one platform (figure 4.3) where clay processing and firing of features, disposal of large numbers of uniform products, and other evidence showed that production of mold-made artifacts was taking place (Lopiparo 1994, 2004). The excavated area here covered 24 by 24 meters, in which 73 excavation units of 2 by 2 meters were used to expose half of the latest intact occupation surface. Two identified structures, hearths, pits, and refuse deposits were delineated, with the two structures located on opposite sides of an open area devoid of artifacts and features, interpreted as a patio space. Based on the diagnostic pottery types found here, the residents who created these features lived in this area around AD 850, about the time that resi-dents of the lower Ulúa Valley were beginning to shift from using polychrome painted pottery to using new fine paste vessels.

Multiple lines of evidence support the definition of an area on the southwest part of this platform as a likely site where figurines and small ceramic ves-sels were being created. High concentrations of obsidian blades and ground stone artifacts were found in this area. An area of very fine clay surrounded three shallow clay basins, possibly the remains of drying and storage of clay and the slaking and levigation of dried clay. A well-defined refuse heap rest-ing on the occupation surface contained a very high proportion of Tacamiche group vessels, normally relatively rare. A large midden adjacent to this area, which yielded materials representing all the activities expected in a residential

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compound, contained fragments of molds for the production of these small Tacamiche dishes. Cylindrical, subsurface firing pits, with abundant evidence of burning, are of sufficient size to allow the firing of such vessels.

Also abundant in this area were fragments of figurines and fragments of molds to produce figurines. These were made of the same distinctive paste as that used for the Tacamiche vessel molds, evidence of shared practices of clay processing in a community of practice. The same firing features that were ade-quate for firing Tacamiche vessels were large enough to accommodate the firing of these figurines.

Many of the objects that were made in this workshop would have been small vessels, effigies of larger vases and jars used in everyday life and feasting. The production of nonutilitarian objects, like these vessels and figurines, in large

Figure 4.3. Detail of ceramic workshop area at Campo Dos. Drawing by Rosemary A. Joyce, after Lopiparo 1994. Used by permission.

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numbers at contemporary sites, Jeanne Lopiparo (2003, 28–30, 273–82) argues, represents the kind of “ritual mode of production” described by Katherine A. Spielmann (2002), in which significant labor is invested in producing objects not for economic needs but to serve social ends in ceremonies. At Campo Dos, our excavations also helped us understand some of the social ceremonies whose impact might have been heightened by the use of these locally made figurines and vessels along with the luxuries found by earlier excavators—marble vases, jade, shell, and obsidian ornaments.

In many ways Campo Dos was a typical small but prosperous agricultural vil-lage of the lower Ulúa Valley, where centralization of power in a single hierarchy was not as pronounced as at Copán. More formalized plazas surrounded by major architecture existed in some places, and one of these, CR-136, was located not far east of Campo Dos but equally close to a number of other clusters of large platforms (Sheptak 1982). This may have served as a kind of community center for the area as a whole, not unlike the central enclosure at Tenampua. Yet at the same time, and in a much more pronounced fashion than at Tenampua, the one ballcourt in the Quebrada Chasnigua area was located in close associa-tion with a particular residential compound—in this case, at Campo Dos itself.

Excavation of 12 units 2 by 2 meters square identified traces of three episodes of use of the location of the ballcourt at Campo Dos (Swain 1995, figure 17). The first occupation in this area took place before AD 750, based on the presence in the architectural fill of a diagnostic plain vessel type. Traces of two surfaces, each associated with a round burned clay feature, likely a hearth, precede the first identified construction of ballcourt benches. The second of these surfaces showed traces of a highly eroded plaster coating. Burials were identified in association with each of these earlier surfaces and include both adults and children. Eleanor E. Swain (1995) argues that these features represent episodes when the ballcourt area was already special and interprets the second set of burials as dedicatory offerings in two stages of the remodeling of the ballcourt here. For us, these fea-tures, particularly the burned-clay hearths, more strongly suggest residential use.

If we are right, the area at Campo Dos later occupied by the ballcourt was originally a residential space for a family that buried adults and children adja-cent to their houses. These burials were undisturbed when the area was con-verted to a ballcourt, with plastered stone benches and a plaster playing alley measuring about 33 meters long and 10 meters wide. In this interpretation, the Campo Dos ballcourt was initially used around AD 750 and may have contin-ued to be in use after AD 850.

The ballcourt at Campo Dos was located close to the earthen platform with evidence of pottery production. The family that patronized the production of

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the presentation pots and figurines was likely to have witnessed games or may even themselves have sponsored games and the gatherings that would have accompanied them. Ballcourts physically capture the idea of combining two elements that are opposed: two teams, often assumed to be from different com-munities or factions, brought together in a game that in the end links them in a hierarchy defined by who won.

Despite the vast differences in scale between Copán, Tenampua, and Campo Dos, the playing alleys of the ballcourts at each are close to the same size, and they share a common plan. Variation in ballcourt layouts, size, and architectural details is generally understood to reflect slightly different ball games played over the three-millennia-long history of ball game playing in Central America. So the coincidence of size and plan at Copán, Tenampua, and Campo Dos suggests that players in any one of these courts would have been comfortable in another, that the rules and bodily habits involved in all three cases were similar.

At Tenampua, Dorothy Hughes Popenoe (1936, 568) noted that a paved walk-way led directly north to the ballcourt from the southern residential group. With this detail, Popenoe introduced the possibility that at some time, the southern residential group was closely related to the activities in the ballcourt. The same is true of Campo Dos. And while the ballcourt at Copán is often described as a public space, it is also physically located adjacent to the residential compound of the ruling family.

Ballcourts undoubtedly signify the playing of ball games. But ball games were occasions for a wider range of social events, including dances, gambling, feasting, and community ceremonies (Hill and Clark 2001; Fox 1996; Hendon 2010). In the Ulúa Valley and neighboring Cuyumapa Valley, ballcourts were oriented to points on the horizon that were locally significant ( Joyce, Hendon, and Lopiparo 2009a). Ballcourts in the Cuyumapa Valley were oriented toward summer or winter sunrise and probably hosted games at different points in the annual cycle. Ballcourts in the Ulúa Valley were oriented toward Montaña de Santa Barbara, a major mountain on the southern edge of the valley, an orienta-tion shared by household burials. These shared orientations link ball games to community-level rituals of seasonal renewal and ceremonies for the conversion of family members into ancestors.

The Campo Dos ballcourt reinforces the connection of ballcourts in the Ulúa Valley to ancestors because it is literally built over an earlier house compound and the burials that had been placed there. While the association of burial ritu-als with ballcourts is easiest to see archaeologically because burials leave such obtrusive material remains, cyclical gatherings in commemoration of commu-nity ancestors would also have been potential times to reinforce social relations

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through new marriages. We can imagine the use of the marriage figurine from Campo Dos in such a social situation.

The festivities preceding the ball game between local youths and visitors had been going on for several days. The kitchens of the village were hard put to keep up with the hunger of all the visitors. Luckily, the potters had made so many of the bowls impressed in molds with rows of designs, slipped orange and polished, that there was no shortage.

As was common, some families took advantage of the ball game festival to make their own arrangements—family to family—for fostering children and for new marriages. A wealthy family from the village had succeeded in renewing the generations-long exchange they made with the leading family of the larger town to the east. This boy’s family was so pleased at the renewed alliance that they had made a new whistle to commemorate the ties between their families. The representation of the new couple was displayed like a mask over the musician’s face, inviting everyone present to recognize the pair. The filed teeth of the bride distinguished her as a particular beauty, even though this was not a practice com-mon at Chasnigua. For some viewers, the T-shape of her filed teeth meant more: a reference to the breath that animated the body during life and left after death when the person joined the ancestral dead.

idenTiT y, localiT y, and diSTincTionJeanne Lopiparo (2003, 192–209, tables 5.2, 5.3, 5.4) proposed that head-

dress variability in Ulúa tradition figurines likely represented a level of iden-tity, whether of family or village, that was critical in the context of life cycle rituals and the ceremonies through which they were celebrated—events where figurines were used. Working from her excavated materials, she revised and expanded a previous inventory of head treatments on figurines from the central Ulúa Valley (Tercero 1996). She found that there were notable variations in proportions of headdress types in the different sites she excavated. The com-mon pattern is for a site to show a greater occurrence of specific headdress types, such as turbans or headbands of varying thickness or decorative ele-ments. But the same site will also have other headdress types represented. The largest settlement she studied, CR-80, Campo Dos’s eastern neighbor, had the highest diversity of headdress types. We suggest this reflects the fact that the town sponsored ceremonies that attracted visitors from many of the surround-ing villages who brought along figurines with different headdresses ( Joyce, Hendon, and Lopiparo 2009b).

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The headdresses on the marriage figurine from Campo Dos are complete, so relating them to a typology based on fragments has to be undertaken with due consideration of different elements that might not always have been pre-served in fragments. Most comparable to the Campo Dos marriage figurine are examples Lopiparo (2003, appendix A) coded as her type AP002. Class “AP” is distinguished by a pair of locks at either side of the head. Identifying the Campo Dos figurine with this class requires us to understand that the left side of the woman’s headdress and the right side of the man’s are incompletely represented. Since no examples exist of asymmetric locks of hair at one side of the head on freestanding single figurines, this seems like a reasonable assump-tion. Subclass AP002 has only a simple band around the head, below the level on which the locks of hair are depicted. All of the other subclasses in this group have details in the headband.

Arguing against identification with this group is the fact that as defined, it is a hair treatment, with the hair always being shown as narrow, parallel incised or grooved lines. Yet on closer examination, the head of the male figurine in particular does show lines of this sort just below the band depicted at the base of the lock of hair rising on the extreme left. Faint parallel lines depicting hair are also preserved on the left side of the woman’s headdress. While most of the woman’s headdress is finished with parallel, horizontal smoothing marks, this small detail suggests that this is a simplification of a common way to represent dressed hair rather than an indication of a hat or helmet. Similarly, in addition to the clear depiction of incised lines near the tie for the lock of hair, there are other sets of parallel lines on the man’s head, above the apparent clipped bangs.

Figurines with headdresses related to the Campo Dos example came from excavations at Campo Pineda (CR-103), a residential site located west of Campo Dos along the same watercourse—the Quebrada Chasnigua—and in lower frequency from CR-80, the largest of the three sites Lopiparo (2003, table 5.2A) compared, located east of Campo Dos, also on the Quebrada Chasnigua. They were absent from CR-381, the only one of the four sites Lopiparo studied that is not directly on the Quebrada Chasnigua. While the sample size of the most discrete headdress subclasses was too small to permit statistical analy-sis, when they were grouped together in broad headdress categories, Lopiparo (2003, tables 5.3, 5.4) found significant concentrations of certain styles of head-dress with specific sites. Headdresses with thin headbands, which encompass the AP class, made up 48 percent of her sample overall. But at Campo Pineda they were 79 percent of the assemblage, compared to only 8 percent at CR-381.

There were no exclusive associations of broad headdress types with a certain site, nor should we expect there to be. If, as we argue, figurines are the products

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of ceremonies in which networks of kin and non-kin, local and nonlocal, came together at significant moments, then we would expect some number of objects to be brought from other places. Moreover, if, as seems demographically likely, residents of neighboring villages formed a network of intermarrying families, some people would have moved from one town to another with marriage. There is no reason to assume that moving involved giving up identification with one’s house of origin. Based on the high concentration of this headdress in the vicin-ity of Campo Pineda, we might consider the headdress used by both the male and female on the NMAI marriage figurine as evidence of a local origin for both spouses, in households along the Quebrada Chasnigua.

Rather than simply talk about objects like the varied headdresses as emblems of identity or markers of individuality, we suggest that they be thought of as like crests in North American Northwest Coast societies. Among the Tlingit (Kan 1989), Kwakiutl ( Jacknis 2002; Suttles 1991), Tsimshian (Anderson 2004), and Haida (Hart 2005), a crest is an immaterial piece of property, owned by a family ( Joyce, Hendon, and Lopiparo 2009b). It can be embodied in durable or perishable media, sung about, and be the subject of stories. Visual representa-tions of crests can be very naturalistic or quite schematic and still be identifiable (legible) to people in these small-scale societies. Crests are politically impor-tant because they are “signs in history” and “signs of history” (Parmentier 1987), things that connect people to histories and through those connections justify claims of authority and control. From this perspective, both the man and the woman being married were likely from a local family, establishing claims by the use of this particular crest. Yet that does not mean that the figurine offers no indication of difference between the two.

The overall level of ornamentation of the woman’s costume, compared to the man with whom she is joined, is the first hint that in this case, the woman is being represented as more important or of higher status. It is the woman’s arm that, however awkwardly, extends across the man’s body. The difference in eye treatment suggests that we are expected to differentiate between these two figures. A review of images of figurines from Campo Dos excavated in 1993 suggests that the male figure’s careful eye treatment is normal there, so that this feature would make the image of the woman stand out in a local event. The mouths of the man and woman, each carefully depicted as open so that her filed teeth and his unaltered ones can be recognized, provide a final bodily sign that in this alliance, the woman’s family was socially more prominent.

Dental modification has been attested in human remains recovered along the Ulúa River, for example, at Las Flores Bolsa (figure 4.4), a few kilometers to the north (Blom, Grosjean, and Cummins 1934). In a modern study of dental

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modifications that included a large sample from Copán, Vera Tiesler (2005) described two patterns that are similar to the one represented on the woman in the figurine from Campo Dos. Tiesler’s “Pattern C” involved removing the lower corners of each incisor, both upper and lower, creating an alternation of relatively pointed teeth and gaps. Because the Campo Dos marriage figurine only shows two central incisors, Pattern C remains a possible identification. However, equally possible is what Tiesler called “Pattern Ik.” In this pattern, only the central incisors, top and bottom, have opposite corners removed. Neighboring teeth are filed in a continuous diagonal emphasizing the T-shape created at the center of the mouth. In the absence of the depiction of neigh-boring teeth on the Campo Dos figurine, it is impossible to choose between these two identifications. As the dentition on the male figure shows, it was

Figure 4.4. Map of central plains of the lower Ulúa Valley showing sites discussed in text. Drawing by Rosemary A. Joyce, used by permission.

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quite possible for the person crafting the Campo Dos figurine to depict a full set of teeth. So either the artist intended to create an ambiguous impression or the only teeth relevant to recognize the woman’s dental modification were the central incisors. That suggests this is an example of Pattern Ik, widely dis-tributed across the Maya area and identified with the breath that animates the human body.

Tiesler (2005) suggests that the adoption of different practices of dental modification, carried out on adults, should be seen as a bodily sign of affilia-tion with a specific social group. At Copán, her analysis suggests a distinction between residents in the center, who adopted Pattern Ik (central T-shaped) or circular pits ornamented with encrustations of minerals like jade, and residents in the periphery of the site, who preferred the jagged teeth created by Pattern C. At Copán, both males and females exhibited dental modification (Tiesler 2005; Rhoads 2002). We cannot assume that dental modification in the lower Ulúa Valley conformed to the patterns seen at Copán. What the Copán study does help us see is that dental modification, resulting from treatments of the living body during maturation, is a reflection of social norms formed by one’s peers. The deliberate differentiation of the male and female figures on the Campo Dos figurine reemphasizes the fact that they represent different social groups, even within the local society of which they were both part.

This figurine presented viewers at the event where it was displayed at Campo Dos with a series of redundant signs of distinction between a man and a woman otherwise shown as of the same group. We see this figurine as a testament to a historical event that mediated relations between families of different ranks from houses along the Quebrada Chasnigua. Campo Dos was not the largest of the sites along the Quebrada Chasnigua, but it was also not the smallest or simplest. The long history of occupation, the evidence of wealth, and the hosting of ball games that would have attracted people from a wide area and allowed families to foster prestige suggest that the woman in this figurine is as likely to have been from the local family as the male shown with fewer signs of distinction. What we do not have, because the original context was not documented in fine detail, is secure knowledge of the events that took place when this figurine was used. Another site in the lower Ulúa Valley excavated more recently—Currusté—provides us with the kind of detail we could only infer for Campo Dos.

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DOI: 10.5876_9781607322788.c005

5CurrustéFamily and AncestorsUnlike Tenampua or Copán, Campo Dos was a vil-

lage, part of a landscape of evenly spaced hamlets along the rivers in the Ulúa Valley. Each of these clusters of houses was an in-gathering place on special occa-sions—we suggest in particular events in the lives of family members—that neighbors and kin would have attended. We can trace the most distant visitors to these places by the origins of the pottery we recover archaeologically, showing us that even a relatively mod-est riverbank village like Campo Dos was in contact with people over a very wide territory. Closer to home, larger towns, evenly spaced in the lower Ulúa Valley, may have served as gathering places for visitors drawn for events on other occasions. Currusté, one of the few such towns to have been excavated extensively in recent decades, produced evidence of another marriage figurine, distinct from those documented at Copán, Tenampua, or Campo Dos.

place and Space in The lower ulúa Valley

More than 500 archaeological sites have been reg-istered through systematic survey in the lower Ulúa Valley. While not all were well preserved, a sufficient number could be mapped and provide a basis to under-stand spatial organization, especially during the Late Classic period, when surface surveys suggest all visible sites were occupied. While many of the settlements consisted of small villages composed of a few house-hold compounds like Campo Dos, another category of sites can be recognized as towns with differently orga-nized spatial settings for the activities of residents and, quite likely, of visitors from wider hinterlands.

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These larger Classic towns are identified by the presence of at least one rectilinear plaza measuring 50 meters or more on a side, surrounded by stone platforms larger than those of normal residences, with base dimensions rang-ing from approximately 10 by 10 meters to either 20 by 20 meters or 10 by 30 meters ( Joyce and Sheptak 1983). Two different sizes of towns were distin-guished, based on the scale of their largest plaza. A group of smaller towns had plazas that ranged from 50 to 100 meters on a side while large towns had plazas over 100 meters on a side, reaching 150 meters on a side in a number of cases. In general, towns with smaller plazas had fewer nearby residences as well, up to about 80, while towns with larger plazas had more than 100 residences, up to about 250 in the largest Late Classic cases. (Cerro Palenque, the subject of chapter 7, was a small town in the Late Classic that grew to occupy a unique position as the only large settlement in the valley in its final Terminal Classic phase, far surpassing the size of large towns of the Late Classic in the size of its plaza and the number of residences.) These unique architectural spaces—plazas and surrounding mounds—distinguish towns from villages as places that could have fostered larger gatherings. Many towns possessed a ballcourt, suggesting that one of the events that saw gatherings in towns would have been ball games.

Each large town was located in a small territory of its own, forming a chain of towns along the major waterways and on each side of the valley. Jeanne Lopiparo (2006b, 2009a) constructed a map of the likely territories of the larger towns in the Late Classic period, using assumptions from nearest-neighbors models (figure 5.1). The procedure is simple: the distance between any two sites of equal rank is calculated and divided in two, on the assumption that each site exercised influence in the half of the area closest to it, with its influence drop-ping off when the distance to a neighboring site became shorter. Drawing a line between a pair of sites at precisely half the distance between them suggests a possible boundary for the influence each exercised. When each pair of neigh-boring towns of the same rank are treated this way, the lines between them can be extended and terminated where they would cross a similar line defining a possible limit of influence between another pair. The resulting polygons roughly indicate the immediate hinterland of each of the larger towns.

Campo Dos falls within a hinterland around CR-136 that also encompasses CR-80 to the east and Campo Pineda (CR-103) to the west. To the south, the hinterland around Classic Travesía, recognized as the likely center of marble vase production in the Late Classic (Luke and Tykot 2007), borders the ter-ritory of the Quebrada Chasnigua. Travesía’s likely area of influence includes settlement along the Quebrada Mantecales, which runs in what was once a course of the Ulúa River. The territory of Travesía encompasses both banks of

Figure 5.1. Map showing towns where a more influential family invested in building plazas, ballcourts, or other architectural settings where residents of villages in the hinterlands closest to each town might have come for ceremonies. Drawing by Jeanne Lopiparo, used by permission.

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the Ulúa River as well as a zone of hills to the west that included one of the identified marble quarries in the valley.

The Quebrada Chasnigua hinterland covered both banks of the former course of the Chamelecón River, up to and including the point where it entered the Ulúa, but not the east bank of the Ulúa itself. The east bank of the Ulúa north of Travesía’s territory would have fallen in the territories of large towns located along terraces at the base of the mountains on the eastern edge of the valley.

This procedure identified the segment of the Chamelecón River upriver from Campo Dos as the hinterland of the Rio Blanco site, surveyed and mapped but never excavated. Like Travesía to the south and the Quebrada Camalote site to the northeast, Rio Blanco’s central plaza includes a ballcourt. Populations of neighboring towns might have participated in ball games held in some sort of cycle, perhaps one in which Travesía claimed sponsorship on the winter solstice (see chapter 6).

The final territory neighboring the Quebrada Chasnigua hinterland where Campo Dos is located lies to the north and west. Here the site of Currusté developed on the lower reaches of a river that today is channelized but would otherwise end in the marshes of Laguna Jucutuma. This small river probably was a tributary of the Ulúa River before AD 450 (Pope 1985). Shortly before then, a major set of geologic events changed the lower courses occupied by the Ulúa (moving it further east) and the Chamelecón, which came to occupy the abandoned Ulúa channel, leaving its old course near Campo Dos to be reoc-cupied by the Quebrada Chasnigua. Classic Currusté was the last large town on the lower reaches of the Chamelecón River, which from this point on flowed to the sea through low-lying fields with groups of residential platforms until the braided river courses merged into mangrove swamps.

curruSTéResidents in the area of Currusté would have gone from occupying a territory

on a tributary to the Ulúa River—a position equivalent to that of Campo Dos further south—to dominating a territory on a river that took a separate, parallel course to the Caribbean Sea. It may not be a coincidence that not long after this geological event, the people of Currusté began making serving vessels that stand out wherever they are found in the Ulúa Valley because of their style and that bear closest comparison to bowls from the Belize River Valley, far to the north across the Gulf of Honduras (Sheptak 1987).

In contrast with the contemporary Ulúa Polychromes that were made and used along the Quebrada Chasnigua, the Quitamay group is almost entirely

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made up of flaring dishes or bowls. Whether this implies a difference in food preferences or simply different ways of serving the same foods, it would have made feasts at Currusté very different from otherwise similar events at Campo Dos. Yet at the same time, recent excavations suggest that both sites participated in a suite of common practices, mediated by other kinds of ceramics, which were likely part of life cycle rituals and celebrations of annual seasonal cycles as well.

Currusté was surveyed and mapped in the 1970s (figure 5.2). Almost 200 small residential mounds form clusters extending throughout a pocket valley along the Rio Blanco and in the hillsides facing this pocket. On the riverbank, a series of plazas forms a loose rectangle surrounded by more than a dozen large, tall platforms of cobblestones. The highly eroded remains of two low, parallel platforms on the northwest side of the main plaza, oriented roughly to the southeast, may be all that remains of a ballcourt. Like other large towns in the valley, some low platforms at Currusté supported unaltered standing stone monuments.

Initial excavations undertaken in 1977 were designed to establish a basic his-tory of occupation at the site (Hasemann, van Gerpen, and Veliz 1977). They showed that residence continued from about AD 650 to after 850. This means Currusté was contemporary with the Classic period villages along the Quebrada Chasnigua, and indeed, excavation at Campo Dos in the 1990s produced exam-ples of the distinctive Quitamay group of pottery that originated at Currusté. A few sherds of this pottery were even found in refuse from the late occupation at Cerro Palenque, further to the south (AD 850–1050).

Currusté was clearly part of a network of circulation between sites along the central river courses in the Ulúa Valley. Common understandings of relations between the dead, the living, and supernatural forces can be identified as one of the forces integrating this network of sites (Lopiparo 2006b). Using the map of the main plazas at Currusté produced in the 1970s, Lopiparo (2003, 2006b, 2007) showed that the plaza of Currusté shared a southern orientation toward a major mountain—Montaña de Santa Barbara—with the main plazas of Cerro Palenque and Travesía. Burials at villages along the Quebrada Chasnigua were oriented either toward the same remarkable point on the landscape or per-pendicularly toward the sunrise and sunset on the horizons at the solstices (Lopiparo 2003). With a history of using mountain caves as final resting places for the bones of the dead, the people of prehispanic Honduras may have viewed sites like Montaña de Santa Barbara as sacred—realms of the ancestral dead or other supernatural beings ( Joyce, Hendon, and Lopiparo 2009a).

As noted in chapter 4, Lopiparo (2003, 2007) suggests that the integration of otherwise independent sites in the lower Ulúa Valley is best understood as

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developing out of a ritual economy. Local production of pottery serving vessels at places like Currusté would have provisioned families hosting visitors partici-pating in meals commemorating special events. Other materials recovered sug-gest that the events that were the reason for visits to Currusté included rituals, some commemorating influential family members after their death. In many events in the large towns in the Ulúa Valley, the shared experience of consump-tion through massive feasts was paired with the destruction of the vessels used in those events. In much the same way that figurines and perishable structures were “consumed” as part of the renewal of houses (Lopiparo 2003, 2006a, 2006b, 2007; Lopiparo and Hendon 2009), the vessels used for the food eaten during

Figure 5.2. Map of platforms that supported buildings at Currusté. Larger platforms created spaces around large plazas where ceremonies might have taken place. Smaller platforms on the periphery of these plazas supported houses. Drawing by Jeanne Lopiparo, used by permission.

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ritual events were also consumed—removed from everyday use in a single event, creating a more memorable occasion.

The remains of such memorable consumption in rituals at Currusté have been found as massive structured deposits. They appear to have resulted from a series of large-scale events in specific areas of the town. Behind the western mound of the North Plaza (figure 5.3), Lopiparo (2008, 2009b) excavated an enormous ceramic midden that was unusual in its high proportion of locally made, fine paste plates and in the large percentages of broken whole vessels, suggesting that many were deposited at or near the place where they were used. She was able to distinguish multiple depositional episodes, suggesting that peri-odic events happened in the same place over time.

But not just collective sustenance was shared in these feasts. As Lopiparo and her team followed this deposit around the mound to the western entrance to the plaza, they found a semicircle of six figural ceramic censers, which appeared to have been smashed in the place where they were used. This type of censer combines a hollow, three-dimensional anthropomorphic or zoomorphic figure that is usually about 2 to 3 feet tall, standing on a lid, with an underlying pot in

Figure 5.3. Plan of excavations behind western mound, North Plaza, Currusté. Drawing by Jeanne Lopiparo, used by permission.

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which there are signs of burned material. While the smashed remains of these vessels were intermingled over an area of more than 10 square meters, Lopiparo and her team were able in the field to recognize connections between several large fragments of a woman’s torso, which has been painstakingly restored over the last two years by Doris Sandoval and David Banegas of the Museo de Antropología e Historia de San Pedro Sula (figure 5.4).

One of the most interesting aspects of this figure is that her arm is above her head, with cords wrapped around her torso, shoulders, and arm, as if she were carrying some form of burden on her head or back. Upon further recon-struction, more details have emerged about this remarkable example of ceramic sculpture—very publicly christened “La Venus de Currusté” by the former Honduran Minister of Culture, Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle. At a meter and a half

Figure 5.4. “La Venus de Currusté.” Photograph by Jeanne Lopiparo, used by permission.

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tall, she clearly was also “writ large” compared to the vast majority of figural artifacts found throughout the valley. One wonders how many witnessed her ritual use and interment from the massive open plaza below.

Also found with these large ceramic bodies was a modeled hand from another figural censer, grasping a tied bundle, recognized as a representation of human long bones (figure 5.5). Many archaeologists have argued that secondary burial treatments are practices for the creation and care of ancestors (McAnany 1995). The curation of long bones represented by this fragment is a particularly strik-ing example of a metonym, not just for the ancestors but for those who carry the burden of maintaining, renewing, and reproducing the group.

Beneath this deposit, the remains of feasting and incense burning writ large, Lopiparo actually discovered remains of multiple human long bone bundles, which had been interred right below the surface where the festivities took place (figure 5.6). In case there were any lingering doubts about the connections between bodies, bones, burials, and birth, the meticulous work of the conserva-tion team revealed that La Venus de Currusté does, in fact, appear to be preg-nant (figure 5.4).

The very public context of this celebration of lineage and the continuity of the social house suggests that these events were as much about the performance of both political and social reproduction. In the large-scale gathering and feed-ing of guests, the alliances among families that formed the basis of intergenera-tional continuity were embodied in ceramic media, both large and small.

Figure 5.5. Hand from large figure holding bundle of long bones, Currusté. Drawing by Jeanne Lopiparo, used by permission.

Figure 5.6. Plan of excavation area with human long bone bundles, Currusté. Drawing by Jeanne Lopiparo, used by permission.

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The curruSTé marriage figurineIn sites along the Quebrada Chasnigua like Campo Dos, local ceramic work-

shops represented by molds, firing facilities, and clay preparation areas produced objects used for social ceremonies and rituals such as figurines, figural musical instruments, masks, and pendants (Lopiparo 1994, 2003). Figurines and molds for their production were also recovered in excavations at Currusté in the 1970s. But reports did not provide details on the imagery that would allow comparison with well-documented localized production at other sites. Due to subsequent curation problems, the previously excavated materials no longer have secure provenience. New excavations were undertaken in 2007, 2008, and 2009 with the goal of obtaining data on the nature and distribution of objects like these at Currusté, for comparison with the previously documented patterns along the Quebrada Chasnigua (Lopiparo 2008, 2009b).

These excavations, in contrast to those of the initial researchers, exposed broad areas along the edges of cobblestone platforms and in the open spaces between them, where the bulk of evidence for activity areas is usually found. Excavations and extensive subsurface testing were carried out in both the mon-umental settings of the large plazas and the smaller-scale settings of the for-mal household patios and informal mound groups that surrounded them. Thus, excavations compared the places where public events, performances, and rituals would have taken place with everyday activities in the households of the inhab-itants of Currusté’s site core, as well as special-use areas associated with activi-ties in the Main Plaza. While there was evidence for dramatic large-scale rituals associated with the Main Plaza, household groups demonstrated similar burial and commemoration practices to those found in other sites in the central Ulúa Valley (Lopiparo 2003, 2008, 2009a, 2009b). These included burials with the shared valley-wide orientations found within or between low mounds, which were associated with smashed and sometimes burned vessels and fragments of figural ceramic artifacts (Lopiparo 2008, 2009b).

In one area just outside of a large household group southeast of the Main Plaza, Lopiparo and her team found one highly eroded yet still articulated burial, in close proximity to several deposits containing disarticulated fragments of human remains. It is not clear whether these came from burials that had been disturbed post-abandonment or if they also represent evidence of the kind of secondary burial practices indicated by the bone bundles found in the North Plaza. These human remains were found in an area with an unusually high con-centration of special ceramic artifacts, including many fragments of figurines, whistles, stamps, incense burners, and candeleros, small vessels of unslipped clay used in rituals to hold material that is often burned. The burials and ceramic

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deposits occurred in an area between several low mounds (less than 1 meter high), platforms with mixed earthen and cobble fill. In addition to the human remains and special ceramic artifacts, the team recovered evidence for a full range of domestic activities in this area, including groundstone, many lithics (obsidian prismatic blades and a chert point and flakes), large sherds of many different ceramic types, and faunal remains.

In this area, Lopiparo recovered artifacts associated with the preparation and consumption of food, as well as others suggesting craft production, including ceramic production. These included a chert core, a bone tool, a pointed stone tool, a ceramic needle, and two fragments of figurine molds—one of which was a large fragment of a mold for a figurine showing two people, side by side: another marriage figurine.

This large figurine mold shows a pair of human figures, male and female, standing side by side (figure 5.7). The preserved fragment of mold represents only part of the figurine; but the details are sufficient to confirm that this is not the same image as any of the other marriage figurines, although it is closest to the Campo Dos example. Most of the mold on the viewer’s right is preserved—the entire face and body of a man, down to the loincloth. Unfortunately, most of the headdress is missing. Of the figure on the viewer’s left, whose female sex is indicated by one clearly marked breast, only half of the face and body is preserved.

We have to imagine how the final figurine would have looked from this frag-ment of the figurine mold. The male figurine would have been on the viewer’s left, the female on the viewer’s right, reversing the positions of the Campo Dos male and female. The male wears a simple loincloth with a single fold in front, like the Campo Dos figurine. His necklace, with a central pendant, recalls the Campo Dos figurine. But unlike that figurine, the male on the Currusté figurine would have had wrist beads on his visible right arm.

The right earspool of the male figure is depicted, but the mold shows no sign of an earspool at the left side of his head (which means it also lacks an earspool at the right side of the head of the female figure). This is most likely a detail that would have been added as an applique once the main figures were pressed from this mold, in the large empty space the mold would have created between the faces of the two figures. The open mouth of the male figure on the mold has no internal details suggestive of teeth, but these would have been incised later as well; and the fact that his mouth gapes wide prompts us to assume teeth would have been delineated. The raised ridges around his eyes and a raised pupil are evident in the mold. Finally, tantalizing hints of his headdress are preserved above what would be the right shoulder of the figurine. A simple narrow band

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crossing the forehead of the mold would have created a fringe of bangs like on the Campo Dos figurine; but above this two shallow hemispherical pits indicate a possible row of beads or round-edged ornaments with central gouges. There is no indication in this mold of anything like the long tress of hair at the side of the ear on the Campo Dos male figure. Possibly this headdress can be com-pared to an example of headdress type AP007 from Campo Pineda (CR-103) excavated by Lopiparo (2003).

Less detail is preserved to suggest how the female figure would have looked. Nothing indicates an upper garment like that worn by the woman on the Campo Dos figurine, but folds at the belt are consistent with a skirt with the same kind of triangular flap at the top as seen on that figurine. Her necklace shows at least two round beads. Because the wrist of her right hand, drawn across the man’s body, is entirely covered by the fingers of the man’s right hand,

Figure 5.7. Marriage figurine mold from Currusté. Photograph by Jeanne Lopiparo, used by permission.

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no beads are visible there at all. Only the corner of her mouth is preserved, giv-ing no real sense of its position. Her right eye, however, was molded differently than those of the male figure: modest ridges, if any at all, for the edges and a punctation for the pupil. No details are shown on the plane that is preserved above her face to give any idea of her headdress.

reproducing imageSThis is the only example we have recorded of a mold for a marriage figu-

rine, and it bears emphasizing that it means such a figurine was produced at Currusté, not simply discarded there. To understand this example of the mar-riage theme—and by extension, the others represented only by figurines and not molds—we need to consider what we understand about figurine production in Classic Honduras.

The scarcity of molds for marriage figurines, and the absence of a figurine matching this mold, is not surprising. Despite the very large number of figurines and mold fragments we have excavated, it is rare to find matches between molds and their products. Some images, such as that of a kneeling woman holding an open bowl with its contents depicted as round pellets (figure 5.8), are repeated in a large series, which might lead us to think that molds were used to facilitate mass production of identical products. When examined closely, we do not find multiple products of the same mold but slightly different versions, varying in scale and details, of carefully reproduced images (Lopiparo 2003, 2006a, 2006b). We saw this with the Copán marriage figurine: at least five figurines with the same two characters in the same pose were deposited or discarded there, but they included larger and smaller versions with slightly different details, no two matching precisely.

Lopiparo (2006a) has argued that molds not used for mass production instead allow the production of controlled imagery by a broader population, regardless of the maker’s level of skill. The execution of molds, which for the most popular images exist in a variety of sizes, by more skilled artisans would have facilitated wider participation in the production of images of satisfactory quality and expected imagery. The apparently uneconomic nature of this kind of production—with molds made by skilled artisans used to produce few, or even single, objects—is the kind of craft production that Katherine A. Spielmann (2002) felt called for the definition of a new mode of ritual production, defining a ritual economy.

The idea that people at places like Currusté were motivated to invest more than the least required effort in making things to be used in ceremonies does

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help us think through life in these communities. Objects like these figurines were more than simply pragmatic tools just good enough for their purpose. Abundant indications suggest that many such things were used and discarded immediately after the event for which they were made. Their utility was not what was at issue, but their efficacy in conveying an image and contributing to the memorability of an event may well have been. The actual acts of crafting these objects appear to have been part of the performance, not just their use as musical instruments in dances or as prompts for the narration of histories and myths.

We can imagine the user of this figurine mold contributing his or her efforts to the larger community celebration whose testimony we see in the assemblage excavated at Currusté:

Figure 5.8. Ulúa tradition figurine showing theme of kneeling woman. Manchester Museum (0.5209). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

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As night came, the music surged around the people gathered in the open space in the midst of the platforms and the buildings on the platforms raised above the crowd. Different families moved forward, each with a ceramic sculpture to crown their vessel of burning resin. Some had brought images of the jaguar spirit that animated the founders of their houses. Others had shaped portraits of those recently dead, who would, with time, become ancestors. Each family stepped back as the smoke from the burning resins began to flow out of the eyes, nose, and mouth of these beings. A crowd of spirits and ancestors faced the plaza, where the dancers formed in rows.

Tonight was for remembering the dead. Dancers carried the bones of some of them, wrapped in cloth bundles, tied with knotted ropes. Some danced with the bones in boxes carried on their backs, suspended by ropes tied over their shoul-ders. They danced for the dead who could not do so themselves, as the burning resin restored the breath of life to their images.

At the corner of the plaza, one of the watchers cautiously removed the image of the son of the house and the woman he was now tied to from its carefully prepared mold. Tiny details remained to be finished with the obsidian blade or added as small pellets of clay. When the dances for the dead were complete in a few days, it would be time to celebrate the new bonds between families. The whistle she was making needed to be fired and ready for use then. Tomorrow she would set her fire here at the edge of the dance ground, for this and the other masks, flutes, and images necessary to commemorate this day, and fix it in the memory of all present.

riTual performance aT curruSTéThe rich assemblage Lopiparo (2008, 2009b) recovered from Currusté attests

to large-scale ceremonies whose thematic emphasis is suggested by the imagery of the objects used in them and discarded close by. Repeatedly, objects in this assemblage feature imagery of the female body, making the lives of women a visual theme that must have also been remarked on in ceremonies and speech. But imagery of long bones is also present as reminders of the stage in life initi-ated by the death of the body.

La Venus de Currusté, recovered in fragments, projects the larger scale of the events here most effectively in its contrasts and connections with figurines. This ceramic figure was over 4 feet tall as reconstructed, showing a standing woman. Her two breasts are carefully modeled as is her rounded belly, swelling below the navel in a recognizable depiction of pregnancy. She wears a long skirt that ends above her sandal-clad feet. Pouches are depicted at either side of her belt.

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Crossing between her breasts and passing below them are cords, which come over her shoulders from her back. There the cords support a rectangular box. Suspended from a cord around her neck is an object, draped as if it represents a flexible material, that resembles a mask showing one eye.

In this deposit, large fragments of at least five other modeled figures were recovered. As a group, these larger three-dimensional ceramic sculptures are typical of the Ulúa Valley. Vessels like this are made from pastes that are some-what coarse but have uniform smoothed and unslipped or lightly striated sur-faces. They range in color from brown to bright pink, and all but the thickest sherds seem to be oxidized through the entire body. Modeling is the typical surface treatment, with spikes, lugs in the shape of bird heads, bands impressed with finger impressions, and pellets applied to vessel walls. Many pieces are from recognizable vessel forms—basins or cylinders and out-flaring deep vases with pedestal supports. Other fragments come from effigy figures, recognizable only as eyes, ears, fingers, toes, or areas of the costume.

Excavations at Mantecales (CR-71) documented a complex history of depo-sition of a series of such effigies, confined within a stone enclosure ( Joyce with Pollard 2010). Mantecales is a small town within the proposed hinterland of the Chasnigua territory, located south of the Quebrada Chasnigua, not far from the boundary of the Travesía territory. At Mantecales, effigy figures were attached to the convex upper side of inverted basins that rested on wide flat rims. These inverted basins served as lids to be placed on top of vessels with cylindrical or flaring walls and pedestal bases. The interior base of such containers has evi-dence of heavy burning. Some areas of the effigy figures show fire clouding or smudging. Routinely, long tubes extend through the basin/lid and up into the effigy standing on it. These tubes would have conducted smoke from material burning in the vessels into the figures, issuing out from holes pierced through eyes, ears, or mouth, or conducted through other tubes to and out through modeled images of regalia, like the box carried by the Currusté female effigy on her back.

Together, the base vessels and lids formed incense burners, general containers for burning resin that could be reused and equipped with changing figural imag-ery by the use of different lids. In the sealed context excavated at Mantecales, the lids of multiple vessels were broken and deposited, but the supporting vessels used to burn resin were not recovered. Despite being a sealed context, neither the head of the only human figure included, nor those of multiple feline figures pres-ent, were recovered at Mantecales. At Currusté, conservators have been able to reconstruct much of the body of the female effigy, but despite careful excavation using modern methods, only fragments of her face have been recovered.

Table 5.1 Figural censers in Ulúa Valley sites

CR-1CR-32 CurrustéCR-35 TravesíaCR-40 La MoraCR-44 Cerro PalenqueCR-69CR-70CR-71 MantecalesCR-80CR-103 Campo PinedaCR-107CR-116CR-129CR-132 Campo DosCR-138CR-139CR-154CR-157 Cerro PalenqueCR-162CR-178CR-238CR-253BCR-271CR-274CR-328CR-329CR-356CR-359CR-365CR-370CR-372 Puerto Escondido

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While the evidence is better preserved, the practices seen at Mantecales were likely similar to those carried out in villages throughout the Ulúa Valley, where in survey and excavations since 1977, fragments of similar large ceramic effigies have been recovered in low frequencies (table 5.1; figure 5.9). Most recognizable figures in museums or from our own excavations are either felines or standing human figures. Each human effigy in a sample of 20 effigies that we have documented in detail has a slightly different costume, pose, and regalia (table 5.2). Elements of large effigy figures recovered in modern excavations at Mantecales, Currusté, and Cerro Palenque can be closely related to evidence of specific ritual actions from the surrounding excavated context.

The human effigy figure from Mantecales is a standing male with his left arm extended and a loosely cupped hand. Recovered in the same sealed deposit was a separate piece, in the same distinctive ceramic ware and finish, which depicts the kind of bag that contained pellets of resin for burning at the scale of the human figure. This ceramic “bag” was pierced for suspension, and we believe it was origi-nally suspended on a cord from the hand of the standing human figure. The entire deposit in which this figure was found was dedicated to the disposal of incense burning vessels of a wide range of shapes along with the burned residues from the rituals in which they were used.

At Cerro Palenque, Julia A. Hendon (2010, 2012c) describes an association between fragments of a bone bundle modeled in this distinctive ware and the recovery of a buried human long bone. She suggests that the bone bundle censer marks the beginning of a specially created construction fill that was put in place to provide a resting place for the human long bone and bring into being a new building (see chapter 7).

While the female effigy figure at Currusté was found in association with mod-eled bone representations, it is not certain what the backpack she carries originally contained. If it was the location of some of these long bone images, then the ritual action depicted is one of carrying the bundled bones, perhaps as part of a ritual in

Table 5.1—continuedSite number Site nameCR-380YR-35YR-73YR-110YR-125

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which a person, perhaps the woman portrayed, assisted in the production of a new ancestor from the bones of the dead.

One group of Ulúa Polychrome vases represents scenes that may be related (figure 5.10). These cylinder vases have features that suggest they probably were made and used in the Lake Yojoa area (Viel 1978). They show a single human figure facing a tall stack of imagery. At the top is a bird or animal, shown standing on a kind of drapery of some flexible material, possibly bark paper. At the base is a wrapped bundle tied completely round with ropes, about the size of a flexed body

Figure 5.9. Large fragment of figure from censer lid from Naranjo Chino. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (183214.000). Photo by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

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Table 5.2 Figural censer images from the lower Ulúa Valley

Site Description Museum numberCampo Dos human foot, bare NMAI 183993Cerro Palenque (CR-157) body of male in feathered costumeCerro Palenque (CR-157) bundle of long bones tied with ropeCurrusté body of female carrying backpackLa Lima human toes NMAI 182546La Lima parrot head from headdress NMAI 182530Mantecales body of male holding bagMantecales body of felineMantecales body of felineNaranjo Chino human head, shoulder, and arm hold-

ing hafted axeNMAI 183214

Puerto Escondido body of felinePuerto Escondido human torsoSanta Ana or Playa de los Muertos

corncob Copenhagen 0–7391

Santa Ana or Playa de los Muertos

human head Copenhagen 0–7390

Travesía human head, T-filed teeth Berlin IV Ca 22172Travesía bowl with three balls Berlin IV Ca 22243Travesía headdress fragment Berlin IV Ca 22245Travesía human face, nose bar, and T-filed teeth Berlin IV Ca 23225Ulúa Valley dog head NMAI 184046Ulúa Valley double knot from bundle Copenhagen 0–7457

seated upright. Other Ulúa Polychromes depict a seated flexed body in profile that may be a similar image of a dead body prepared for burial (figure 5.11).

Burials in the villages in the Chasnigua hinterland, including Campo Dos, shared an orientation with the plazas at sites like Cerro Palenque and Currusté, where large-scale effigy figures were deployed in rituals. Rituals in which the dead were commemorated—in which the bones of the deceased were handled, perhaps danced with, and in which the more recent dead were transformed into ancestors—formed part of a suite of ritual practices that was carried out in the villages and towns of the Ulúa Valley.

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But the people depicted as the active participants in these rituals, those who carry bone bundles and ritual tools, are not the dead or the ancestors. The woman from Currusté is shown as a pregnant adult. The men depicted at Mantecales and Naranjo Chino are shown as young adults. Other moments in lives are being celebrated here and are connected with the well-being and posi-tive regard of deceased ancestors.

Figure 5.10. Ulúa Polychrome vase representing scene with ritual bundle. Museo de Antropología e Historia de San Pedro Sula. Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

Figure 5.11. Ulúa Polychrome vase representing standing figures next to tied bundles. Museo de Antropología e Historia de San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

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DOI: 10.5876_9781607322788.c006

6TravesíaDifference and IdentityWhen we began this project, we identified sites to dis-

cuss strictly on the basis of the presence of marriage figurines: a single object depicting a human pair. In addition to the detailed examples we have discussed in the previous chapters from Copán, Tenampua, Campo Dos, and Currusté, our initial sample included a sche-matic version of the theme, originally illustrated by Mary Butler (1935, figure 6d), described by her simply as from the Ulúa Valley. This particular figurine shows two heads emerging from a single garment (figure 6.1). The drawing Butler provided indicates some dif-ferences between the right- and left-hand figures in headdress treatments. Yet since the distinctive clothing that is the most reliable indication of sex in Ulúa figu-rines—loincloths and skirts—is not delineated, it is not truly possible conclusively to identify this figurine as a male-female couple.

While Butler gives the provenience of this figurine only as “Ulúa Valley,” the Peabody Museum catalog number she provided, C1292, allows us to identify it as an object excavated in the 1890s by George Byron Gordon (1898, plate IXa) at a site called Lagartijo. This was the first of three localities where Gordon worked, in a contiguous zone along the banks of the Ulúa River, in the center of the Ulúa Valley (figure 6.2). At Lagartijo, Gordon collected more than 80 figurines and whistles, in deposits that associated pottery dem-onstrates spanned a period from around 800 BC to AD 850. He then moved on to Santana, an old oxbow of the Ulúa River, and Travesía, an adjacent locality. Here mounds representing collapsed buildings were visible on the surface (Sapper 1898; von den Steinen 1900). At Santana and Travesía, Gordon recovered collections of

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figurines and whistles equal in size to his collection from Lagartijo. At Santana, the accompanying pottery dated from as early as 800 BC to as late as AD 1000. At Travesía, Gordon’s excavation stopped at shallower depths, and accompany-ing pottery suggests dates from AD 650 to 1000 (table 6.1).

Gordon ignored the mounds visible on the surface at Travesía, sampling only buried deposits. Archival documents show that Gordon was led to his excava-tion locations by a prior investigator, Erich Wittkugel, who excavated in the mounds at Travesía starting in 1888 (Sapper 1898; von den Steinen 1900). His collection, curated today at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, includes 325 figurines from Travesía. Among them is a second example of a double human figurine remarkably similar to the one excavated by Gordon at the Lagartijo site.

Figure 6.1. Human pair figurine from Lagartijo in the collection of the Peabody Museum. Figure 6d from Mary Butler (1935) “A Study of Maya Mouldmade Figurines,” American Anthropologist n.s. 37.

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The Wittkugel human pair figurine from Travesía (figure 6.3) shares the dis-tinctive enveloping cloak that makes it impossible to identify the sex of either figure. The headdresses do distinguish between the two figures and can be iden-tified using the catalog of variants developed by Jeanne Lopiparo (2003). The right figure wears a turban with diagonal lines that were reemphasized by added grooving after the figurine was molded (AU002). The left figure wears a turban that has two diagonal grooves at right angles, with the resulting zones filled with round impressions giving the effect of a puffy material (AF003).

While double human figurines are rare, and several of those we discuss are known from only one example, the specific imagery from Travesía and Lagartijo

Figure 6.2. Map of central Ulúa Valley showing Travesía hinterland and sites with figurine production along the Quebrada Chasnigua. Drawing by Rosemary A. Joyce, used by permission.

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is also found in three other examples. Two are in the National Museum of the American Indian. Another is part of the collection made by a papal diplomat to Honduras, Federico Lunardi, now housed in Genoa (Sánchez Montañés 1981). None of these has clear site level provenience. The NMAI examples are reported to be from the city of San Pedro Sula (figure 6.4) and the Río Ulúa (figure 6.5), which places them in the lower Ulúa Valley, along with the Travesía and Lagartijo examples. The Lunardi example has no associated documenta-tion. Most of his known work took place in the Comayagua Valley, although he also reported on sites in the Cuyumapa River drainage east of the lower Ulúa Valley (Lunardi 1948).

The Travesía version of a double human figurine is almost as well represented archaeologically as the Copán/Tenampua couple, which is known from at least five examples found at Copán and one recovered at Tenampua. Yet there is a notable difference. All the examples of the Copán/Tenampua image show male and female figures that wear the same two headdresses, implying they represent the same social identities. The five examples of the version of a human pair known from Lagartijo and Travesía, despite being made in a much less careful fashion, wear a wider range of headdresses (table 6.2). The two most distinctive headdresses in this group, one repeated in two figurines, are also well repre-sented in single figurines from Travesía. Headdresses depicting one, two, or three triangular peaks with rings impressed below (figure 6.5) are rare outside of Travesía. The second distinctive headdress that occurs in this cluster of human pair figurines, depicting a puffy turban (figure 6.6), is found in many sites of the central Ulúa Valley in addition to being abundant at Travesía.

Whereas the male-female couple figurines we have discussed in previous chap-ters were exceptionally detailed, the Travesía area examples seem almost deliber-ately simplified, cloaking differences in body and costume. There are no differences

Table 6.1 Chronology of G. B. Gordon’s excavations in the Ulúa Valley

Dates

Lagartijo Playa de los

Muertos

Lagartijo Playa de los

Muertos, pit 2

Santana Gordon Exc. 1

Santana Gordon Exc. 2

“Travacillo” Gordon Exc. 3

AD 850–950 not present not present 6'–12' depths 6'–20' depths 2'–4' depthsAD 750–850 5'–20' depths 6'–18' depths not present not present 5'–12' depthsAD 650–750 not present not present 14'–26' depths not present 14'–20' depthsAD 550–650 21'–24' depths 20'–22' depths not present not present not present700–400 BC 26'–30' depths 23'–25' depths 28'–32' depths 30'–32' depths not present

Figure 6.3. Human pair figurine from Travesía. Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin (IV Ca 21939). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

Figure 6.4. Human pair figurine acquired in San Pedro Sula. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (182327.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

Figure 6.5. Human pair figurine attributed to the Río Ulúa. Note headdress with three peaks worn by figure on right. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (043955.000). Photograph by Julia A. Hendon, used by permission.

Figure 6.6. Figurine with puffy turban from Campo Dos. National Museum of the American Indian (183856.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

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in the depiction of the faces, earspools, or necklaces. The bodies are obscured by the placement of an enveloping garment, shared by the two figures. It is this last detail—the use of a single garment to enclose two bodies—that is the most striking difference from the other paired human figurines, with their carefully

Table 6.2 Crests identified on human double figurines

ProvenienceCollection and

Catalog NumberRight figure

headdress Left figure headdressCopán: Feature 38, above Burial 5

IHAH Copán 17–350

headband TenampuaAP008*

asymmetric with central featherBM002*

Copán: Burial 32, Offering G

IHAH Copán 17–1158

headband TenampuaAP008*

asymmetric with central featherBM002*

Copán: CV-20 IHAH Copán missing missingCopán IHAH Copán missing worn; central

featherBM002*Copán IHAH Copán21–257 missing central

featherBM002*Copán IHAH Copán17–136 missing central

featherBM002*Tenampua PM 2004.24.19573 headband

TenampuaAP008*worn

Campo Dos NMAI 183201 plain oval turban with ponytailAP002

plain oval turban with ponytailAP002

Currusté IHAH La Lima missing missingLagartijo PM 96–35–20/

C1292peaks with circleBW001

plain oval turbanAA003

Travesía Berlin IV Ca 21939 oval turban with diagonal slashesAU002

puffy turban with bandsAF003

Río Ulúa NMAI 043864 plain oval turbanAA003

three peaks with circlesBW003*

San Pedro Sula NMAI 182327 plain oval turbanAA003

oval turban with diagonal slashAU002

unknown Lunardi collection plain oval turbanAA003

plain oval turbanAA003

*Newly defined variant

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contrasted clothing. It suggests that rather than intending this figurine to be leg-ible as the joining of two distinct individuals of different sexes, the Travesía figu-rine is depicting one social person made up of two independent bodies.

Butler (1935) described the subject of the Lagartijo figurine as “two young men standing side by side,” identifying them with the male Hero Twins of Highland K’iche’ tradition. The claim that these figurines are male is impossible to reconcile with Ulúa figurine imagery. Indeed, even in the lowland Maya figu-rine corpus, the draping of the garment closely resembles what is usually iden-tified as a woman’s huipil (Ekholm 1979; Foncerrada de Molina 1988; Gallegos Gómora 2003).

The enveloping garment worn by the pair of humans is not common in Ulúa tradition figurines, yet a number showing one human figure wearing this gar-ment come from the Travesía area. Two examples exist in the Erich Wittkugel collection from Travesía (figure 6.7), and another from the general location was collected by Gordon (now curated in the Peabody Museum). The headdresses and necklaces on these single-person figurines are consistent with those worn by characters on figurines from Travesía clearly marked as female. The figurine collected by Gordon actually uses modeling to suggest breasts under the cape. While we agree with Butler that the pair in these figurines is represented in a manner intended to stress unifying features, we find it more likely that the two figures representationally would have been legible as females.

It is almost as if at Travesía the patrons and users of figurines were playing off the established imagery of male-female doubles, in a way intended to be differ-ent from contemporary settlements. This is not the only aspect of the archaeol-ogy of Travesía that suggests that some families at the site were interested in standing apart from the common practices of the network of towns that sur-rounded them, emphasizing enduring distinction rather than identity.

liVing in luxuryDecades after pioneering investigations there in the 1880s and 1890s, Travesía

was subject to extensive, albeit sketchily described, work by Doris Z. Stone and researchers from the Middle American Research Institute (Stone 1941, 58–86). These excavations tested a central compound with cut stone buildings covered in thick plaster stucco, surrounding courtyards with formal stairways, all covered with the same white stucco. A ballcourt was located on the southwest side of this Quadrangle (figure 6.8). Stone also excavated in other areas of the architec-tural center of the site. She carefully described the associations of whole objects recovered with architectural features, platforms, stairways, and balustrades.

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Perhaps because Travesía was, until the 1970s, the only site in the lower Ulúa Valley with stone architecture to have been excavated and published, it attained a reputation as the most important site in the valley. Stone conducted no survey of the site and produced no map beyond the central Quadrangle, which she estimated consisted of between 50 and 60 buildings. When renewed research began at Travesía in the late 1970s, the former banana plantations had been converted to sugar cane cultivation, which involved levelling all but the central Quadrangle. Luckily, aerial photos at a scale of 1:20,000 existed from just prior to the plowing of the fields making up Travesía, and these were used to recon-struct the area of the site and approximate the number of buildings that once composed it (Sheptak 1982). This aerial photo survey, followed up by a ground

Figure 6.7. Figurine from Travesía showing single figure wearing cape or huipil. Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin (IV Ca 23502). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

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survey of 124 hectares of plowed fields extending out from the Quadrangle, showed that Travesía was about the same size as other large towns in the lower Ulúa Valley, with an original estimated 150 buildings ( Joyce 1985, 504–22; Joyce and Sheptak 1983).

Stone (1941) was impressed by the substantial nature of the architecture at Travesía and the presence of stone sculpture, otherwise almost unknown in the region. Travesía yielded multiple examples of geometric stones, which we can identify today as likely roof ornaments. Similar carved stones were otherwise found only at the hilltop center of Cerro Palenque to the south (figure 6.9). Cut stone architecture used by some residents of Travesía, and by their contempo-raries living at Cerro Palenque, distinguished them from their neighbors at sites like Currusté, who instead employed rounded river cobbles in building even

Figure 6.8. Map of Travesía. From Doris Z. Stone (1941) Archaeology of the North Coast of Honduras. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, vol. 9, no. 1.

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their largest platforms and buildings ( Joyce 1991). This was not simply a matter of available raw materials: Travesía, located in the center of the floodplain, is further from sources of stone than is Currusté.

The cut stone architecture of Travesía was actually not visible; it was covered by a thick white stucco. Christina Luke (2012) argues that this was part of a suite of practices through which the residents of Travesía associated themselves sym-bolically with white stone, which she suggests was the most highly valued raw material in the culture of the lower Ulúa Valley. A similar emphasis on whitish or gray albitic jade, rather than the more commonly prized blue to green jades of neighboring regions, has been noted in the extensive jade carving industry of

Figure 6.9. Stone sculpture from Cerro Palenque in style shared with Travesía, likely an ornament from the roof of a building. Photograph by Rosemary A. Joyce, used by permission.

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Salitrón Viejo, southeast of the Ulúa Valley (Hirth and Grant Hirth 1993). This is the only Honduran jade carving tradition described to date. Notably, again, the preference for whiter stone is not simply an issue of raw material source: chemical analyses have demonstrated that the Salitrón Viejo albitic jades come from the Motagua River source zone that also yielded green jade used by neigh-boring societies (Bishop, Sayre, and Mishara 1993). Hondurans showed a pref-erence for white stone, crossing artifact categories, which contrasted with the preferences of societies northwest and southeast.

The premier example of white stone luxury production in Honduras is the carving of marble vessels, a tradition that began before 1000 BC (Luke et al. 2003). Around AD 600, a specific combination developed of cylindrical vessel forms copied from Ulúa Polychrome vases and anthropomorphic, animal, and geometric motifs that persisted in production with minor variation through at least AD 850 (Luke 2002). Through a combination of stylistic and compositional analyses of vessels, compositional analysis of raw material from quarries, and the recovery of fragments of marble from the production process, Luke demon-strates that Travesía was likely a major center of production of these classic Ulúa Marble vases (Luke and Tykot 2007). Their production and use would have been another way that the residents of Travesía created distinction between them-selves and the leading families in other comparably sized towns of the region, by employing white stone vases instead of multicolored pottery vases.

Reported recovery of Ulúa Marble vases is strongly concentrated around Travesía. In the same region, sometimes at the same settlements (Stone 1936), small ceramic effigies of Ulúa Marble vases were used (figure 6.10). These were made in the eighth to early ninth century in some of the same workshops, using the same mold technology that was employed for figurines at sites from Campo Dos to Cerro Palenque (Hendon 2010; Lopiparo 1994).

Ulúa Marble vase effigies from the lower Ulúa Valley belong to the Tacamiche class of ceramic miniature vessels. Marble vase effigies have a more restricted distribution than other miniatures whose clay and nonplastics sug-gest were made in the same workshops. All examples of Ulúa Marble vase effigies have motifs specific to the carved stone vases, such as panels of scrolls, impressed in molds or carved into the vessels. Some are entirely unslipped. Others were originally covered with a thick, glossy white slip that emphasizes their appearance as miniature marble vases. Both unslipped and white slipped versions could have postfire blue pigment painted on the rim. This pigment, usually called “Maya blue,” has been identified as composed of indigo and spe-cific clays, the best-known sources of which are in northern Yucatan (Arnold et al. 2007; Sánchez del Río et al. 2006). Recently, analyses have shown that

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Maya blue was produced in the Guatemalan Petén from clays of the same structure available locally there (Cecil 2010). While technological analyses of samples from Honduras are not complete, either another manufacturing cen-ter existed for this pigment, which would still imply some degree of shared technology, or the pigment itself was traded to Honduras, either from the Petén or northern Yucatan.

The Wittkugel collection from Travesía includes eight examples of ceramic versions of Ulúa Marble vases. The smallest appears to have been unslipped and only summarily smoothed. Five other miniatures show traces of white slip pre-served in the scrolls, on the base, or in other more protected areas of the vessel. Two of these also have preserved blue pigment on the rim. The final two exam-ples are unique in the recorded corpus of pottery from the valley. Both covered in dense white slip, they are not miniatures but full-size versions of typical Ulúa Marble vase forms executed in fired clay rather than stone.

We understand the production of these ceramic skeumorphs as an indication of a zone of influence that Travesía families created through limited gifting of stone vases to certain families in hinterland settlements. These families would have gained status by their association with the leading families of Travesía and

Figure 6.10. Ceramic effigy of Ulúa Marble vase, Campo Dos. National Museum of the American Indian (184098.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

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in turn may have been responsible for reproducing in pottery the stone vases that commemorated their social ties to the crafting family of Travesía.

It is a mistake to treat these ceramic effigies as bad copies. Technologically, a great deal of craft skill went into their manufacture, and the degree of skill varies from piece to piece. The most faithful copies, not scaled down, are those recorded from Travesía itself. Small-scale copies are found in sites both with and without real Ulúa Marble vases (Luke 2002). The distribution of molds demonstrates conclusively that some hinterland sites were producing effigies of stone vessels (table 6.3). By accepting Ulúa Marble vases as a premier valuable, the families living at these places adopted positions as subordinates to Travesía, the locale where the form was innovated, where the most faithful copies were made, and where the living quarters of a leading family were thickly coated in white stucco that reiterated identity with the source of white marble (Luke and Tykot 2007; Luke 2012).

cenTering The lower ulúa ValleyA final line of evidence for the pretension of Travesía’s leading families to

special status within the web of towns in the lower Ulúa Valley comes from the analysis of site orientations (Lopiparo 2003, 241–64). As we described in chapter 4, the axes of formal architecture at a group of sites converged on a single moun-tain at the south end of the Ulúa Valley, Montaña de Santa Barbara.

Independent towns in the lower Ulúa Valley shared a regard for Montaña de Santa Barbara as a place in a sacred landscape, possibly as a kind of ancestral

Table 6.3 Sites with molds and fragments of ceramic effigies of Ulúa Marble vases

Site Vessel fragments MoldsCampo Pineda CR-103 x xCR-365 x xCurrusté CR-32 xTravesía CR-35 xMantecales CR-69 xCR-78 xCR-80 xCR-107 xCR-380 x

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mountain (Lopiparo 2003, 256; Joyce, Hendon, and Lopiparo 2009a). Exploring the secondary (east-west) orientations of sites sharing this common orienta-tion, Lopiparo found that in the case of Travesía, its secondary orientation aligned with other significant landmarks on the eastern and western horizon. On the west, Travesía’s secondary axis aligns with the mouth of the canyon of the Chamelecón River as it enters the lower Ulúa Valley. On the east, the orien-tation passes over the mountains bordering the valley in the area where, on the winter solstice, the sun would rise (figure 6.11).

By locating the Quadrangle at Travesía at a point where a valley-wide shared orientation to Montaña de Santa Barbara intercepted a unique geographically marked seasonal event, the residents of Travesía effectively centered the entire valley around themselves. This geographic location was combined with the patronage of a stone vase carving craft that Luke (2012) suggests evokes ancestral mountains. Taken together with its distinctive architectural style, emphasizing whiteness, the seventh- and eighth-century residents of Travesía’s Quadrangle were engaged in a distinct way of locating themselves socially in reference to their neighbors. They shared with their neighbors the valley-wide orientation anchored by the southern mountain but at the same time, had located their central building group so that these buildings formed a pivot for the annual seasonal cycle.

Travesía’s leading family reached out beyond the limits of even this extended cosmological geography. Ulúa Marble vases of likely Travesía manufacture have been recovered as far north as Altun Ha in Belize, as far west as Guatemala’s Uaxactun, and as far south as Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula ( Joyce 1986; Luke 2010). A likely mechanism for their spread was as gifts exchanged between the leading family of Travesía and families in these distant regions with which they were connected through social ties like marriage and kinship.

Until the dramatic growth of a larger settlement at Cerro Palenque in the ninth century (see chapter 7), no other town in the lower Ulúa Valley shows anything like this combination of locally distinctive practices and long-distance peer connections. Given the evidence for their efforts to distinguish themselves from families in surrounding settlements, it would not be surprising if Travesía’s leading families abstained entirely from the production and use of the ceramic objects that were the main media for celebrating and commemorating social relations, that constituted the web linking families in contemporary towns and villages, over which the major family of Travesía clearly wished to assert domi-nance. Yet the residents of Travesía did use figurines and figural musical instru-ments, providing us an additional insight into how social relations worked when partners claimed unequal status.

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daily life aT TraVeSíaStone (1941) illustrated few figurines found in the excavations she reported.

On the steps of a platform she called the Temple of the Carvings, located a quar-ter mile from the Quadrangle, were deposited two complete figural whistles: an animal, most likely a canine, and a standing woman wearing a transparent cape over her shoulders, with breasts represented beneath (Stone 1941, figure 51). The woman is depicted with a head of hair without any headdress or headband.

In keeping with dominant models at the time, Stone thought the buildings she excavated were temples, but today we can compare them to households excavated more recently in the lower Ulúa Valley and recognize the Quadrangle as almost certainly a residence of a wealthy family. This compound had been

Figure 6.11. Map of major axes of Travesía projected on the landscape, showing orientation to solstice sunrise and mountain on south. Drawing by Jeanne Lopiparo, used by permission.

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remodeled three times (Stone 1941, 67, 70). Stone’s report illustrates only those objects she found of particular interest, but she repeatedly refers to finding bro-ken pieces of unslipped jars and bits of burned material.

New excavations were undertaken at Travesía in the late 1970s and early 1980s ( Joyce 1983, 1987a; Lincoln 1979; Robinson, Hasemann, and Veliz 1979; Sheehy 1978, 1982; Sheehy and Veliz 1977). Looters threatened the site’s preservation after agricultural work in what recently had become sugar cane fields reportedly exposed large caches of Ulúa Marble vases. The first group of excavations here were primarily directed at relocating the Quadrangle—now virtually invisible on the surface—and in trying to locate stratigraphic deposits that would allow dating of the occupation of the site (Sheehy 1978, 1982; Sheehy and Veliz 1977). While surface disturbance from agriculture had greatly altered the Quadrangle, the outlines of cut stone buildings and thick stucco walls and floors were still buried below the modern surface (Robinson, Hasemann, and Veliz 1979; Lincoln 1979).

When Rosemary A. Joyce returned to Travesía in 1983, in response to renewed reports of illicit excavation of marble vases, she initiated excavation designed to provide more extensive views of the features that would illuminate the range of activities undertaken by people living at Travesía ( Joyce 1985, 504–21). In a survey of the area extending out from the Quadrangle, she had noted ceram-ics diagnostic of the span of time from ca. AD 250 through at least AD 950 ( Joyce 1983, 1987a). Joyce supervised two excavations at Travesía. The first, a 2-by-2-meter unit, was placed between heavily looted areas in a field with cut stone and artifacts visible on the surface, north of the Quadrangle. Excavation here continued to 2.7 meters below the modern ground surface. It revealed a sequence of features dating from before AD 300 to after AD 850. The second excavation was placed south of the suspected site of the Quadrangle and ended at 1.4 meters. Excavations here sampled features dating from about 450 to AD 850. While the second excavation produced only one interpretable feature—a stone-fronted terrace dating around AD 750–850—the first excavation provided a window into a long-occupied quarter of the town, one where making pottery, hosting visitors from afar, and using imported luxuries was part of everyday life.

The earliest occupation recorded, before AD 300, was represented by post-holes and remnants of clay and plaster, with flecks of carbon—traces of a per-ishable building on what was then the levee of the Ulúa River—uncovered in the excavation north of the Quadrangle. In addition to sherds from decorated serving vessels of the kinds used to offer food at ceremonies, and of jars bur-nished to a gloss and ornamented through grooving and modeling, the scattered trash from this early group of residents included river snail shells, eaten as a

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soup up to recent decades in Honduras. The well-finished bowls and jars and the traces of plaster show that the residents here were already taking steps to distinguish their residences and the meals served there in the same ways that their descendants would five centuries later.

A second set of occupants in the same area built a more substantial structure, rebuilt at least once, between AD 450 and 550. This building had a plaster floor and wattle and daub walls, supported by a course of carefully selected and laid stones with traces of a plaster finish on the exterior. The remains of a firing facility accompanied the preserved wall of the second stage of this building. With a circular floor about 1.6 meters in diameter, a well-preserved fired clay vent supported on a stone foundation, and a collapsed clay covered dome, this is recognizably a kiln. The soil between the two phases of the plaster-floored building here is blackened by carbon, suggesting that a predecessor of this kiln was in use in the first stage of this building. The soil covering this firing facility incorporated sherds of overfired painted ceramics, classic examples of “wasters,” reinforcing the identification of the oven as a kiln.

This ceramic firing facility was clearly part of a residential compound. Trash in the fill between floors, and caught against the edges of the two structures, included river snail and clam shells, obsidian blades, and a full range of vessels, from open bowls to jars, including polychrome painted plates and cylinders, forms strongly associated with feasting.

Fragments of a fired clay earspool were also recovered in the trash associ-ated with this corner of a house compound. Such ornaments, the only common object in burials from the area between AD 400 and 1000, have been found deposited, singly and broken, in areas around residential group burials at con-temporary sites near Travesía, where their association with mortuary settings in household sites was statistically significant ( Joyce 2011, 39–40). Breaking these napkin ring earspools seems to have been part of the ceremonies involved in placing house members to rest.

A layer of silty loam covered these structures—evidence of flooding. The area was leveled, and a new house floor was created, in the same location as those that had been buried and, like them, was covered by plaster. This third house floor partially covered a large subfloor pit. Ceramics from the fill below this floor date between AD 550 and 700 while those found immediately above the house floor date from AD 650–750, suggesting the new structure at this location was built around AD 700. A variety of polychrome bowls and jars, as well as ceramic effigies of marble vases—products of the kinds of molds found in abun-dance at Campo Dos (see chapter 4)—were discarded by the residents of this phase of the house compound here. A specialized form of simply shaped vessel,

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an unslipped cylinder small enough to hold in the hand, with burned material inside, was also recovered. Such vessels, called candeleros, are abundant in house sites in the region, possibly used for the domestic ritual burning of tree resins. One locally made vessel from this trash employed a unique iron pigment, specu-lar hematite red, which was characteristic of Copán and otherwise is rare or absent in the lower Ulúa Valley. A tiny fragment of specular hematite pigment was collected in these deposits. Access to that pigment, and perhaps the impli-cation of ties to or at least knowledge of practices esteemed at Copán, reinforces the impression of wealth of the family that occupied this area in Travesía.

A considerable break in the archaeological deposits followed, accompanied by geological evidence of a change in the course of the Ulúa River further away, then back to a position close to this house compound (Pope 1985). There is no continuity in the use of space by the people whose activities are visible here at this time, estimated as around AD 750 to 850. Any buildings were placed out-side the limits of the excavation. The main evidence of the presence of occupants comes from three overlaid trash pits containing dispersed carbon, fragments of bone and shell, ceramics, and chipped stone. The bone and shell represent spe-cies commonly used for food in the lower Ulúa Valley (Henderson and Joyce 2004): river clam and crayfish, deer and small mammals.

Pottery from these trash pits reinforces the impression of a household occu-pation and provides the first evidence of the use of figural ceramic artifacts noted at the site: flutes with modeled birds. Candeleros were also discarded, along with polychrome bowls, cylinder vases, and small jars; and larger red-painted jars make up the kind of food and beverage serving complex noted in other households in the valley. In addition, many examples of Tacamiche group mold-made bowls, with impressed bands of profile human heads, were recov-ered. One sherd represents a vase made on the far northeast coast of Honduras, pertaining to the Selin complex (Healy 1978, figure 7d). Its presence here attests to connections reaching east along the Caribbean Coast.

The chipped stone used and discarded included blades, flakes, and tools of brown chert and brownish quartzite. These cherts and quartzites are available as cobbles in the river-courses of the central floodplain of the lower Ulúa Valley. The majority of the chipped stone from the trash pits of the last household at this location, however, consisted of imported obsidian that was being worked at this location, based on the recovery of six cores, seven core fragments, and more than 128 blade segments, all unretouched and most representing the plat-form or distal ends of blades, recovered from a volume of only 0.5 cubic meters of pit fill. Cores and core segments discarded all were either exhausted or had hinge fractures that would have made continued blade production difficult. All

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complete cores fell between 5 and 7 centimeters in length, suggesting a degree of workshop uniformity. Core platforms were striated or, in some cases, ground.

Importing obsidian, and especially evidence of the production of blades, sug-gests that the residents of the house compound in this area of Travesía were among the families that maintained long-distance connections, and they used them to import luxury materials that could then be employed to support pro-duction for household-based ceremonies and hosting of guests from near and far, reinforcing their own standing in terms rooted in centuries-long tradition but with significant reinterpretations appropriate for changing social conditions:

Preparations for the visitors from the lowlands of Belize were well underway. For generations the people who lived in the great courts of the white city had sent carved marble vases with visitors when new marriages were being celebrated or gave them to relatives who came with sons and daughters from afar to leave them behind as spouses for Travesía’s houses. The canoes went to Belize with cacao and brought back other valuables, including obsidian, that would be shaped by house stone workers into tools for everyday use and for the flourishing workshops of wood-carvers, bone and shell workers, and potters.

While the people of the house were only younger siblings, “sisters” of the family of the white courts, they were proud of their origins, in the days when the monkey boys walked on the land, when the first birds called. They enjoyed visits by distant kin to mark the birth of new children, when the ties between houses were reemphasized: standing together as siblings, not needing to worry about which was older or more powerful.

Those visits stood in sharp contrast with the times when the people of the white courts invited elders from nearby villages to mark the turning of the sun in winter. Then, every step in the ceremony was risky: the young men and women playing their flutes and dancing the steps received from the ancestors long before. Neighboring houses were always watching for signs that the family no longer could support craft workers as they practiced their skills, critically examining the jewelry they wore, the cloth of woven cotton, the bark beaten to smooth sheets to be worn pleated in headbands, the carved bird heads with their brilliant green feathers worn by the young women. It was a delicate balance to decide who should receive the well-made pots with glossy white slip that made them look like stone, who would be impressed by these signs of the history that linked the family to the white courts and the ancestral mountain.

There were going to be new people this season, new players in the ballcourt. Some, they had heard, were from the place where the Humuya River rose. Others were coming from the east along the coast. It was good for the people of the

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white courtyard to bring new brothers and sisters for the games and for the feasts and dances that would follow. The river had returned; soon the new groves of cacao would bloom and the people of the white city would again be able to pres-ent the grandparents of their children with gifts sufficient to establish that their children belonged to the place of the white courtyards.

The people who used the bird flutes discarded in this household group around AD 800 were living in a changing world. The superficial levels that covered their trash pits show evidence of radical changes in pottery after AD 850. Worked stones forming a line at one edge of the excavation suggest there were buildings in this area at this time. But no intact features were recorded. The main evidence of this final occupation at Travesía comes from broken pieces of pottery and fragments of chipped stone mixed in the final levels of the site. There is almost no obsidian; instead, the residents continued their use of local brown chert. Ceramics give an impression of continued access to imported vessels, but now these vessels are Las Vegas Polychrome from Comayagua to the south. Instead of the previously abundant Ulúa Polycrome bowls and cylinder vases, the more common serving forms now are locally made Baracoa Fine Paste dishes and vases. A shift in emphasis from Ulúa Polychrome bowls to relatively flat Baracoa Fine Paste dishes implies changes in food preparation and serving, also seen in a rise in red slipped open bowls, which take the place previously occupied by polychrome bowls. Fragments of fine paste tradition figurines showing the faces of human beings were mixed with these sherds and lithics, testifying to the continued use of figurines. Yet the people of Travesía, who had worked so hard to distinguish themselves from the other towns nearby through their patronage of marble vases, saw these strategies come to nothing as the families at Cerro Palenque eclipsed them (see chapter 7).

oTherneSS: humanS and animalSMost museum collections of figurines from Travesía, including those from

Stone’s work, and a group collected by Gregory Mason, now at the National Museum of the American Indian, are small. Nor did more recent excavations at Travesía produce large numbers of figurines. The very large sample of figurines from Travesía preserved in Berlin serves as a unique resource to evaluate what figurine imagery was common there and compare it to the assemblages from Campo Dos, Currusté, and Cerro Palenque. Of the 325 figurines from Travesía in the Berlin collection, 287 show stylistic and technological traits that are typi-cal of the period from AD 600 to 1000 (table 6.4). Almost half of the figurines represent nonhuman animals, birds, or human-animal hybrids (table 6.5).

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Animals play a significant role in the imagery of the lower Ulúa Valley. Animals, humans costumed as animals, and animals with human-like charac-teristics appear on the painted pottery of the area beginning around AD 600. Joyce (unpublished manuscript) argues that they represent mythological fig-ures and human participants in rituals related to the mythology of the area. This mythology contrasts in marked ways from the more familiar narratives of the highland Maya, such as the early colonial Popol Vuh. None of the typi-cal scenes of the Popol Vuh storyline that are so prominent in Guatemalan polychromes are found in Ulúa Polychromes: no images of boys shooting birds with blow guns; no imagery of a personified corn plant emerging from the earth; no ballplayers; and no Hero Twins engaged in autosacrifice are recorded. Instead, the human actors on Early and Late Ulúa Polychromes are shown holding ritual paraphernalia, including musical instruments, in processions or dances, and in the latest examples, sometimes are facing a single figure seated on a raised throne or stepped platform. Animal figures dominate the imagery

Table 6.4 Figurines from Travesía excavated by Erich Wittkugel

Totalca. AD 550–AD 800hand modeled and punctate 1large hand modeled effigy, mold-made front (La Mora) 22

ca. AD 650–850mold made (incomplete) 4mold made, whistle attached on back of body 133 head flat 25 head open on back 7mold made, whistle in head 8whistle, made of series of independently molded balls 82 trio of independently molded balls 28

ca. AD 850–1000mold made of fine paste without temper 13

date unknownunique, partially molded and hand modeled 9

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from the mid-seventh through the mid-eighth century, often to the exclusion of human figures. They stand in iconic locations and are provided with jewelry, making it clear that they are to be seen as human-animal hybrids, supernatural or mythical beings.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1975, 177), exempting the Popul Vuh from consideration in his multivolume study of Native American narratives, Mythologiques, com-mented that in Mexico and Guatemala, myths were “reformulated by educated speakers” and would require reanalysis to make them comparable to the oral traditions in other areas. While it is likely that he was thinking primarily of the writers who converted oral narratives to texts after European colonization, these myths were already subject to textualization by indigenous political and social actors before the arrival of Europeans.

One of the more striking features of the recruitment of otherwise common Native American mythological incidents, like the bird-nester theme, for use in political narratives is the foregrounding of human actors. In Mexico and Guatemala, narratives feature human characters, where in North America and South America, anthropomorphic animals took similar roles. From this hemispheric perspective, the mythologies of the lower Ulúa Valley have more in common with those of Central and South America than with neighboring

Table 6.5 Imagery of figurines from Travesía

Nonhuman animals No. Birds No. Human No.

Dog-human hybrid No.

105 46 176 6

armadillo 4 bat 2 women 59

dog 20 crested bird 2 men 29

feline 8 hummingbird 1

frog 7 owl 33

rodent 3 vulture 7

monkey 11

pisote 2

turtle 1

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societies to the north and west. Ethnographic accounts of the oral traditions of the Tolupan of northeast Honduras (Chapman 1978) provide examples of a more South American mythology from Honduran territory, adjacent to the zone of production of Ulúa Polychromes.

Nothing as detailed as the Tolupan oral traditions has been recorded for the lower Ulúa or Comayagua Valleys. Collected traditions of the Honduran Lenca from southern Honduras are like Nahuatl oral narratives described as hybrid products of “narrative acculturation” to Spanish colonialization in Mexico (Taggart 1983, 85–113). In narratives associated with field rituals in Honduras (Chapman 1985, 1986), the roles of supernatural beings are played by saints and biblical figures or are assigned to depersonalized spirits that are brought to inhabit non-iconic objects, such as bromeliads, through ritual. This tradition can be compared to the way that corn and bean spirits are brought to life in anthro-pomorphic paper cutouts by ritualists among the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of the Mexican Gulf Coast (Sandstrom 2003, 2009). Some Honduran figurines may have served as iconic vessels for similar spirits, perhaps more personalized, in prehispanic ritual practice.

To understand how prehispanic Hondurans used figurines, we consequently need to take into account the human figurines that might represent ancestral beings as well as animal figures, which may have been iconic bodies for zoo-morphic characters whose deeds were recorded in origin traditions. We do not expect the same traditions to be celebrated or the same beings summoned at all towns inhabited between AD 500 and 1000 any more than we would expect human ancestors to be uniformly recognized across this network of societies. As with headdresses on human figurines that we suggest play the role of crests, specific animals may well have had strong associations with specific families and thus appear more commonly at certain sites where those families were promi-nent or their members numerous.

Travesía is a good example of the apparent emphasis on specific animals in parallel with emphases on specific crests worn by human figures (table 6.5). One third of the animal images from Travesía in the Wittkugel collection are of birds or bats, many carefully detailed to suggest specific species, like the Crested Bobwhite, also identified at Campo Dos (figure 6.12). This proliferation of ani-mal imagery cannot simply be attributed to a desire to record the surrounding world; many significant animals whose remains are identified in archaeological sites (Henderson and Joyce 2004), or that are simply native to the environment (Pope 1985), go entirely unrepresented. A particularly notable example is the deer, a common animal in archaeological assemblages but virtually absent in ceramic imagery. The most common images in figurines are of an owl (figure

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6.13), a dog (figure 1.6c), and a monkey (figure 6.14), with felines (figure 6.15), frogs, and vultures (figure 6.16) not far behind.

There is some overlap between the imagery of figurines and that of painted pottery. Owl heads are shown on painted pottery from near Travesía, as orna-ments on the back of belts on ritual dancers (figure 6.17). Monkeys are so com-mon on the painted pottery typical of Travesía that they are a defining ele-ment of the polychromes produced there between AD 650 and 750 (figure 6.18). Felines appear a little later than monkeys but are diagnostic of the succeeding polychrome group from the same area (figure 6.19). Slightly earlier, certain poly-chrome pottery vases have protruding bird heads painted red, possibly meant to represent vultures (figure 6.20). Rarer animals depicted in figurines are painted on a small number of pots: armadillos and bats in particular.

Figure 6.12. Figurine from Campo Dos depicting two Crested Bobwhites. National Museum of the American Indian (183202.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

Figure 6.13. Figurine from Travesía depicting an owl. Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin (IV Ca 23512). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

Figure 6.14. Figurine from Travesía depicting a monkey. Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin (IV Ca 23512). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

Figure 6.15. Figurine from La Lima depicting a feline. National Museum of the American Indian (182493.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

Figure 6.16. Mold for a vulture head, Ulúa River Valley. National Museum of the American Indian (150696.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

Figure 6.17. Ulúa Polychrome vase representing a dancer with an owl head on back of belt. Manchester Museum (0.5209/28). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

Figure 6.18. Ulúa Polychrome bowl representing a monkey, a depiction common at Travesía. Museo de Antropología e Historia de San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

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The overlap between media is nonetheless incomplete. Dogs, common in figurines, are not known from painted pottery; nor are frogs, another common animal in figurines, found on painted pottery. Despite the diversity of birds shown crafted as figurines, the most common bird from painted pottery, a long-legged white waterbird (figure 6.21), is entirely absent as a figurine.

The differentiation between representations of animals on different objects used in ceremonies extends to Ulúa Marble vases. Felines and a bird head, sometimes a bat, and sometimes possibly a vulture, are carved as handles on certain marble cylinders (figures 6.22, 6.23). These overlap with the imagery of late polychrome pottery and of a subset of figurines but record a much less extensive inventory of animals than either of these other media.

The implication is that the different representations of animals are intention-ally chosen for their relationships to the ceremonies in which specific objects were used. Like the headdresses of figurines, animal imagery can be thought of as a kind of immaterial property, similar to crests representing ritual and mythological ties and knowledge.

Figure 6.19. Ulúa Polychrome cylinder representing a feline. Museo de Antropología e Historia de San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

Figure 6.20. Ulúa Polychrome vase with lug head representing a bird, possibly a vulture. Museo de Antropología e Historia de San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

Figure 6.22. Ulúa Marble vase with feline handle. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (043955.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

Figure 6.23. Ulúa Marble vase with bird handle. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (061262.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

Figure 6.21. Ulúa Polychrome vase representing a waterbird. Manchester Museum (0.5209/29). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

Figure 6.24. Figurine from Campo Dos depicting a dog body with a human head. National Museum of the American Indian (183833.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

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From this perspective, the frequency of dogs deserves particular attention. There are no representations of dogs in painted pottery or carved stone. In addi-tion to figurines representing apparently naturalistic dogs, many figurines pair a dog body with a human head (figure 6.24). Analysis of faunal assemblages from the lower Ulúa Valley shows that dog bones are early and form a significant part of the material discarded by residents of these towns (Henderson and Joyce 2004). Dogs may have had both a pragmatic use (eaten in ritual) and a ritual significance, as vehicles for transformation or even companions after death, as they were in areas as widely separated as Peru and Central Mexico (Benson 1991).

douBling animalSThe animal figurines from Travesía in the Wittkugel collection are of par-

ticular interest for our project because they include examples of doubles. Each suggests a slightly different perspective on human doubles from the same area. One figurine depicts a dog with a bird sitting on its back (figure 6.25). The fig-ures are of distinct size and seem almost to refer to some kind of now-lost nar-rative tradition. A second double that contrasts two animals in size represents a small dog on the back of a larger one (figure 6.26). This figure echoes a small frog on the back of a larger one, precisely the way a baby frog rests on the back of its parent.

These are instances of asymmetrical doubling, which we might compare to figurines showing a woman holding a child. Fragments of two examples of mother and child figurines are noted in the Wittkugel collection from Travesía (figure 6.27). Mother and child figurines are icons of an important social rela-tionship. This particular conjunction of an adult female and a young child, when viewed through the same lens as used throughout the book to understand mar-riage figurines, becomes more than just the representation of some kind of uni-versal human connection or relationship. As noted in chapters 2 and 3, a semi-otic perspective requires us to recognize that meaning is made, not simply read from an image as if it had been poured in through the original intention of the maker. Signs have a multiplicity of meanings that resonate with one another, amplifying and deepening their significance. The mother and child in all exam-ples recorded from Travesía either wear identical headdresses or the child has a bare head, with jewelry and hairstyle conforming to the mother’s. Consequently, we suggest that they provided another opportunity for the people who made and used these figurines to index multigenerational ties that endured across time and space. As with representations of single adults and adult couples,

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Figure 6.25. Figurine from Travesía depicting a dog with a bird on its back. Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin (IV Ca 21960). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

Figure 6.26. Figurine from Travesía depicting a dog with a smaller dog on its back. Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin (IV Ca 21961). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

Figure 6.27. Fragment of figurine from Travesía depicting a woman holding a child. Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin (IV Ca 22145). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

headdresses and jewelry serve to connect individual representations of people to larger social groups. They commemorate historical social relations and record the generational transmission of rights between people identified as members of the same group, identity that would have been embodied in the display of crests during the performance of rituals. The juxtaposition of human adult and

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child records another dimension of the creation of social relations—that of gen-erational time or descent.

Figurines showing women holding children, belonging to the La Mora group, the earliest fired clay figurines produced after production resumes around AD 550–650, are found in a number of sites in the lower Ulúa Valley. La Mora figurines are in part a “revival,” deliberately echoing features of the much earlier (800–400 BC) Playa de los Muertos figurines found in the area. Specifically, the poses (kneeling or seated) and nudity are thematic features that carry over from the earlier figurines to the new La Mora group but are not part of the tradition of mold-made figurines that flourishes afterward.

There is concrete evidence that residents of Travesía encountered and engaged with early figurines. Fragments of Playa de los Muertos figurines were redepos-ited in construction dating after AD 650, without any other evidence of earlier artifacts to suggest mere mining of early trash (Stone 1941, 71, 74). The residents of Travesía who built this architecture seem to have been deliberately making a connection to a deep past, one that connected them with the earliest residents of the place we now know as Travesía.

The Wittkugel collection from Travesía includes 17 Playa de los Muertos figurines, probably excavated from deeply buried levels, as the collection also includes an assemblage of early pottery vessels. One of these Playa de los Muertos-style figurines depicts a woman holding a child in a pose very much like that of La Mora figurines (figure 6.28). If we want to think of doubling in historical terms, the original doubling in the lower Ulúa Valley, both in the long term and in the short term, is of clearly unequal human figures, one dependent on the other.

Animal doubles from Travesía, however, do not just represent two figures of different sizes. Others present an equivalence between two nearly identical fig-ures. One shows a bird with two bodies joined so that only two legs and wings are presented, with a pair of heads emerging from the ambiguously doubled body. At first glance, this figurine gives the impression of a double-headed bird. This is especially interesting in light of the imagery of the human couple from Travesía, which we can see as using one cloak to produce the impression of a single body with two heads.

Birds appear to be particularly important at Travesía. Thirty-three, or almost 20 percent, of Travesía’s human figurines wear bird costumes or bird head-dresses. The single most common identifiable bird is an owl (figure 6.13). Birds with wrinkled heads are second in frequency, almost certainly referring to the distinctive head of the vulture. The double bird figurine is one of two that show a crested bird, quite possibly the Crested Bobwhite (Colinus cristatus). Some

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human figurines from Travesía wear bird costumes or headdresses with two bird heads in profile, a different form of doubled representation.

The final animal double from Travesía is a pair of monkeys, standing in human posture, wearing earspools and pendants (figure 6.29). Similar “man monkey” hybrids become common in polychrome painted pottery in the eighth century (Viel 1978). Single monkey figurines, of which another 10 were noted in the Wittkugel collection, usually wear earspools (80 percent) and often pen-dants as well. Monkey pendants normally appear to be cacao pods, a reference to the economically and ritually important tree crop that was a prized product of the lower Ulúa Valley.

The monkey couple figurine in the Wittkugel collection is similar to one excavated in the Travesía-Santana area by George Byron Gordon (1898, figure

Figure 6.28. Playa de los Muertos group figurine from Travesía depicting a woman holding a child. Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin (IV Ca 22183). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

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14). In both cases, the pendants of the pair are slightly differentiated. All mon-keys with preserved bodies, including those in these two pairs, exhibit male genitalia, making it clear that these represent male same-sex pairs, an identity that is comparable to the human figural doubles from the Travesía area. While the human double figurine is a pair of closely similar women, the monkey dou-ble figurines represent a pair of closely similar men: both possibly images of siblings—human sisters and monkey-men brothers.

Social relaTionS and riTual pracTice aT TraVeSíaWhile specific imagery distinguishes Travesía, the people of the town were

using figurines in ways similar to those of neighboring communities. Most

Figure 6.29. Figurine from Travesía depicting a pair of monkeys. Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin (IV Ca 21967). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

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Travesía figurines in the Wittkugel collection are definitely musical instruments (82 percent), objects that would be used in ritual. A very large number (30 per-cent) of the human figurines from Travesía are made using an assembly tech-nique that formed partly hand-modeled bodies around round whistle chambers, with a mold-made head attached. Two-thirds of these are distinctive repre-sentations of humans with animal headdresses or masks or anthropomorphic animals (figure 1.6b). The vast majority of these wear male costume elements such as loincloths. Although in the overall assemblage identifiable human sub-jects are twice as likely to be female as male, only 16 percent of these multipart figurines depict clearly female subjects. These examples showing female subjects are all constructed slightly differently, showing a unique repeated image that combines owl and female features (figure 1.6a).

Other traces of the practice of ritual at Travesía are similar to those from surrounding sites. Censers are present in the Wittkugel collection and were noted in Joyce’s excavations as well. All are too fragmentary to provide clear indication of the associated imagery. In addition to fragments from figural censer lids, hourglass-shaped bodies, and ladle censers, Wittkugel excavated 35 small, modeled candeleros, objects used to contain burning materials, con-sidered a form of a personal incense burner. The collection also includes 32 fragments of small mold-made vessels, miniatures of the large jars and cyl-inders that would have been used for presenting and consuming beverages. Among these were eight examples of imitations of carved stone Ulúa Marble vases. We suggest they were also used in ritual, not unlike the vast numbers of miniature vessels and miniature metates preserved in Balankanche Cave in Yucatan (Andrews 1970).

While these portable materials used in ritual and discarded at Travesía closely parallel those from other sites in the lower Ulúa Valley, Stone (1941, 66–67) docu-mented evidence of other ritual actions that are not so common. One of these is architectural caching of a thorny oyster shell (Spondylus species). Two complete shells were deposited on one of the platforms in Travesía’s Quadrangle along with a piece of unworked jade and the spire from a Strombus shell. Depositing Spondylus shells was a ritual action repeated at Cerro Palenque (see chapter 7). It is reported in Mesoamerican sites from Teotihuacan to Copán, where it was practiced in connection with rebuilding of the ballcourt and major public stair-ways ( Joyce 1986, 324; Longyear 1952, 110–11). It distinguishes the occupants of residential groups at Travesía from others in the area and links them to a widely dispersed network of noble families across Mesoamerica.

A second practice Stone (1941, 75) recorded at Travesía links families there with another aspect of the public practice of ritual at Copán. This was the burial

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of a feline, recovered from the fill of a subterranean chamber that also contained burned sherds and ash. Feline burials were noted at Copán in the construction fill of a major temple platform and in the foundation deposit for a historical monument, Altar Q (Ballinger and Stomper 2000). Joyce (1988b) has argued that the towns of the lower Ulúa Valley were in most ways disconnected from Copán. Yet at Travesía traces like these suggest stronger identification with rit-ual practices characteristic of Copán.

The highest frequency of pottery likely coming from Copán in the entire lower Ulúa Valley is actually found at Travesía, although the number of vessels involved is quite small. The Wittkugel collection includes a Copador composite silhouette bowl; a resist on cream slip slab foot tripod; a polished cream fluted cylinder; and an ivory paste, orange slip and resist bowl. All are possible imports from Copán. When considered as a proportion of the more than 1,100 vessels in this collection from Travesía, the frequency of possible Copán imports is mod-est. Even if we add to the single Copador vessel from the Wittkugel collection a partial carved brown vase recovered by Joyce in her excavations, described above, and another recovered by Stone (1941, figures 66, 67), Travesía has a very low incidence of imported pottery from Copán. There are more early (pre-AD 650) vessels in the Wittkugel collection than distinctive late types. This, plus the remarkable lack of reported Ulúa Marble vases from Copán, suggests that any strong relationship between Travesíaand Copán faded before Travesía devel-oped Ulúa Marble vases as luxuries that made their way to sites in Belize, the Petén, and Costa Rica after AD 650.

The Wittkugel collection also contained fragments from 11 different poly-chrome vessels of nonlocal paste and surface treatment, closely comparable to pottery from the Petén and northern Belize, as well as a nonlocal figurine of a dwarf drummer, recalling an image from the Bonampak murals (Smith 1955; Mock 2003, 252). This abundance of objects imported from across the Gulf of Honduras agrees with the results of Joyce’s excavations at Travesía, where she noted a particularly high frequency of pottery with pastes distinctive of the Belize River Valley ( Joyce 1987a; Sheptak 1987).

At Travesía, despite Stone’s designation of one of the buildings she excavated as the Temple of the Carvings, the contexts for evident ritual actions are resi-dential compounds, as in other lower Ulúa Valley sites, not larger public plazas like those that saw ritual deposits laid at Copán. The families that recapitulated these practices at Travesía were creating distinction in the local fashion, by ritual practice in domestic spaces where it is likely that neighbors and kin from other places were in attendance. More than any other place we have investigated in the lower Ulúa Valley, however, those “other places” included very distant ones,

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especially Maya sites where social relations were more hierarchical than in the network of Ulúa Valley towns and villages.

Ritual events in domestic spaces at Travesía incorporated highly distinctive materials that were the products of exchange from distant sources—marine shell and jade—or of local sponsored production by craft specialists work-ing in white stone. The figurine assemblage displays subtle differences from figurines used in neighboring towns. It includes a higher emphasis on the acts of ritual themselves and less emphasis on the display of what might be family crests by humans participating in ritual. In three cases, including a figurine deposited in a prominent location on the stairway of a distinctive building (Stone 1941, figure 51), human figures actually wore no head covering, their makers in effect opting out of the dominant engagement in display of crests facilitated by this medium.

Most of the figurines from Travesía in the Wittkugel collection (60 percent) wear hats or helmets displaying animals, often in what are best understood as costumes of ritual performers, many combined with masks. This differentiates Travesía from other contemporary sites in the lower Ulúa Valley, where human figurines usually wear a defined range of turbans or headbands (Tercero 1996). Only 55 of 176 human figures from Travesía wear turbans (31 percent), and only 12 (7 percent) wear headbands. When we focus on figurines that are preserved with sufficient detail and depicted carefully enough for specific headdresses to be further identified, the majority (59 percent) wore a distinctive turban with diagonal bands enclosing underlying material shown with depressed dots, sug-gesting some puffy material (headdress group AF).

Travesía’s leading families may well have been more interested in contract-ing social relations with more distant partners—possibly including families at Copán, in Belize and the Petén, and to the south in Costa Rica—than with investing in the medium used by neighboring sites to articulate a continuing web of connections through which families were maintained in a structure of reciprocity. Locally abundant figurines, presumably produced at Travesía, are in general less carefully crafted than those noted in neighboring towns. Heads are large flat slabs and features are quite generic.

While some Travesía families maintained their engagement through ceramic objects made and used in ritual, in the eighth century a stronger emphasis emerged on media that would distinguish Travesía’s leading families from oth-ers in asymmetric relationships of wealth and patronage. Commemorating marriages in detail may have been less important here than recording other metaphors of pairing with hierarchy: parents and children or monkey brothers, each combining categorical equivalence with hierarchy in birth order.

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Returning to the double human figures shown sharing one woman’s blouse, we might consider whether these figurines presented families and allies as sib-lings, effectively contesting the ranking enacted when one family accepted a spouse from another. These family relations were not simply generalized sibling ties: they were ties between sister families, another hint that in the lower Ulúa Valley, at least, social identity was traced through women like those so promi-nent in figurine imagery.

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DOI: 10.5876_9781607322788.c007

7Cerro PalenqueHosting and PowerThe site of Cerro Palenque sits above the confluence of

the Río Ulúa, Río Chamelecón, and Río Blanco on one of the hills at the southern end of the lower Ulúa Valley. Dorothy Hughes Popenoe visited Cerro Palenque some time before her death in 1932 and Doris Z. Stone was there in 1936 (Stone 1941, 57–58). Materials from the site were acquired in the 1930s by Gregory Mason on behalf of the Heye Foundation and are now part of the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). Systematic excavations there took place in the 1980s by Rosemary A. Joyce ( Joyce 1982, 1985, 1986, 1987a, 1987b, 1988a, 1988b, 1991) and in the late 1990s through early 2000s by Julia A. Hendon, assisted by Jeanne Lopiparo (Hendon 2002, 2007, 2010, 2011; Hendon and Lopiparo 2004).

Taken together, these projects recovered figurines, whistles, other figural artifacts, and molds but no con-joined paired figurines of a man and a woman. Our review of the NMAI’s collections from Cerro Palenque also did not turn up any paired human figures. The people living there were part of the same cultural tradi-tion and social networks as the residents of Currusté, Campo Dos, and Travesía. Cerro Palencanos made and used figurines in ways that underscore their importance as person-like objects that embodied social identities distributed through exchange across time and space. Modern excavations have recovered figurines and frag-ments of figurines in a range of carefully documented contexts, in a community that became the largest in the region after AD 800, providing our best under-stood case of how figurines worked in one of the most socially complex settings of the lower Ulúa Valley. At Cerro Palenque we see the life cycle of figurines and

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whistles from creation to participation in social significant rituals to destruction and burial. Their use of gendered imagery presents us with yet another example of how these iconic representations become indexes of particular kinds of social relations, adding a third possibility to the two we have already discussed—male and female conjoined pairs indexing marriage at Copán, Tenampua, Campo Dos, and Currusté, and same-sex conjoined pairs indexing other siblings or similar related identities at Travesía.

The communiT y of cerro palenqueCerro Palenque started out as a small settlement placed on the highest eleva-

tion of the hill. This first occupation of Cerro Palenque is notable for the quality of its architecture. The buildings here recall those of Travesía in their use of cut stone and plaster, materials not used at contemporary sites such as Campo Dos and Currusté. The founding settlers of Cerro Palenque also decorated buildings with stone sculpture similar, although not identical, to that of Travesía. These fea-tures reinforce the suggestion by Joyce (1988b; 1991, 130–32) that Cerro Palenque was originally a subsidiary of Travesía and stand as another sign of Travesía’s efforts to establish a broader sphere of influence in this part of the valley.

Cerro Palenque did not remain a subordinate site, however. Its expansion began in the mid-ninth century, coming in part at the expense of Travesía, which saw a parallel decline as people shifted residence from its hinterland to the newly attractive hilltop center, with which they already had social rela-tions. Cerro Palenque’s residents abandoned the original area of living quarters and monumental architecture and moved downhill (figure 7.1), building some 500 new structures, including houses, household ritual platforms, kitchens, and monumental ceremonial architecture on a lower series of ridges that run in a roughly north-south direction (Hendon 2010; Joyce 1991). For about 150 years, during the Terminal Classic period, Cerro Palenque was the largest settlement in the lower Ulúa Valley.

Through her survey and mapping of the site, Joyce (1982, 1985) discovered that each of the ridges where people had built houses also contained an area of pub-lic buildings. The largest of these, the Great Plaza, is an impressive space that maintained the orientation toward Montaña de Santa Barbara first established by the earlier settlement (Lopiparo 2003, 255–63). The plaza itself is 300 meters long (figure 7.2). It connects to a second area of monumental buildings to its north by way of raised ramps. At its opposite end, a set of stairs leads to a raised platform supporting a ballcourt. Just past the ballcourt, still on the same large platform, is a residential patio group.

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The public architecture on the other ridges is smaller than the Great Plaza and would have been most appropriate for ceremonies sponsored by and primarily for the residents of the particular ridge. The spatial layout of the site suggests a segmented and nested set of social identities starting with the coresidential group sharing a patio and extending to other patios on the same ridge, bound together by ritual events at their local public space. The community as a whole was tied together by the ball game and related events in the Great Plaza as well as through shared material culture and practices (Hendon 2011, 2012a; Joyce 1987a, 1991; Joyce and Hendon 2000).

Joyce (1991) excavated public and residential locations in the older and newer parts of the site. Hendon’s work concentrated on the ballcourt and the residential patio immediately to the south of it (Hendon 2010). These excavations tell us that people lived in groups of stone, clay, and wood buildings arranged around cen-tral courtyards. Each such grouping would contain one or more houses, separate cooking and storage areas, and a ritual space such as a platform or temple, often

Figure 7.1. Map of central Cerro Palenque, ca. AD 850–1000. Drawing by Rosemary A. Joyce, used by permission.

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Figure 7.2. The Great Plaza, ballcourt, and associated residential compound at Cerro Palenque. Drawing by Rosemary A. Joyce, used by permission.

on the eastern side of the patio. One of the houses might have a stone bench inside the main room, a sign that the most senior and important members of the family lived there. Houses with benches also had more fine paste bowls and dishes in their trash, indicating that this is where guests would be served food and drink to welcome them to the patio group. Home-based ritual practices included

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caching objects in the ground or inside platforms. Social ritual events relied on providing a meal, reiterating the valley-wide focus on feasting as a major form of sociality (Hendon 2007, 2011; Joyce 1991)

The group south of the ballcourt is similar to others at the site in the arrange-ment of its buildings and the fact that people carried out activities related to their daily life. It stands out, however, because of its proximity to the ballcourt; its scale, including the size of its patio and buildings; the material culture of its inhabitants; and because certain kinds of events and activities only took place there. The people living there were, by virtue of their proximity to the public per-formative space of the ballcourt and the scale of their residential architecture, the most spatially prominent family in the town. We argue that they were also the most socially prominent family, thanks to their social networks, their participation in long-distance exchange relations, and their involvement in the ball game and craft production (Hendon 2010).

Early accounts of Cerro Palenque assumed that its placement, so different from other sites in the area, was driven by a need for defense (Stone 1941, 57). Yet, although its location on a hilltop certainly makes Cerro Palenque defensible, con-flict seems an inadequate explanation for its growth and location, since contempo-rary villages like Campo Dos and Currusté that were built on the open floodplain revealed no signs of violent encounters or defensive measures. An explanation that is better supported by the archaeological evidence is that the choice of loca-tion put Cerro Palencanos in an advantageous position to participate in the active exchange networks between lower Ulúa Valley residents and people living to the south and east in Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, continuing an earlier pattern of forging long-distance peer connections seen also at Travesía.

At late Cerro Palenque evidence for these networks can be found in the pres-ence of imported pottery, including Tenampua and Las Vegas Polychromes (Hendon 2010). Blanco Gray dishes, originating in the Cuyumapa Valley to the east, were the most frequent kind of foreign pottery found ( Joyce 1988a, 1993c; Lopiparo, Joyce, and Hendon 2005). Pottery from places as distant as Yucatan and El Salvador was also present in the site ( Joyce 1987b, 1988a, 1993c). Source analy-sis of obsidian indicates that Cerro Palencanos imported it from several differ-ent sources, including the highland Guatemalan sources of Ixtepeque, El Chayal, San Martín Jilotepeque, San Bartolomé Milpas Altas, and Jalapa as well as the Honduran sources of La Unión and La Esperanza (Hendon 2011; Shackley et al. 2004). The Yucatecan pottery and the Guatemalan obsidian indicate that Cerro Palenque was connected to trade networks that tied the lower Ulúa Valley as a whole to the Maya lowlands, especially Belize and the Yucatan Peninsula ( Joyce 1986, 1987b, 1988b; Luke and Tykot 2007; Sheptak 1987).

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Cerro Palenque’s location also seems directly related to the desire to incor-porate itself into the historically important sacred landscape of the lower Ulúa Valley dominated by Montaña de Santa Barbara. Its builders took care to ori-ent its most important areas to the peak. This orientation also aligns it with Travesía, to the north, reflecting the close ties between the two towns. The plan of the community itself contributes to the creation of a symbolically charged setting as well. Unlike other settlements we have discussed, including Copán, Campo Dos, Tenampua, and Currusté, the newer part of Cerro Palenque did not cover up the older ceremonial and living spaces. Instead, that area was left alone, thus preserving its orientation toward Santa Barbara. The highest point of the site was visible to people in the Great Plaza, the ballcourt, and the adja-cent residential group. It served as a common point of reference for all parts of the later settlement, which had its buildings oriented on the ridges so as to maintain the view of the hilltop (Hendon 2002, 2007; Joyce and Hendon 2000).

The family living in the residential compound near Cerro Palenque’s ball-court continued Travesía’s focus on the use of Spondylus shells and marble as distinctive ways of embodying community identity, without sharing Travesía’s fixation on white marble. Hendon and Lopiparo found an Ulúa Polychrome bowl dating to the ninth century buried beneath the patio floor, near a build-ing on the eastern side of the compound (Hendon and Lopiparo 2004). The bowl held half of a Spondylus shell and a wedge-shaped piece of green marble that had been reworked from a vessel. A second half of a Spondylus shell was found nearby (figure 7.3). This cache is similar to one excavated in a residential compound of the older part of the site that combined a Spondylus shell with a jade bead ( Joyce 1991, 62).

Green marble was not widely used in Honduras, and it may have come into style specifically in the ninth century. A piece of another green marble vase was placed in a contemporary ninth-century ritual deposit at the site of Mantecales (figure 5.1), in the hinterland of the Chasnigua territory encompassing Campo Dos, near the boundary with the Travesía territory (see chapter 4; Joyce with Pollard 2010).

Further evidence of a preference for green to mark important places in the ninth-century community of Cerro Palenque comes from architectural use of gray green schist. This shiny, sparkly stone was used sparingly at the site but in significant locations, one being an isolated platform mound at the northern end of the complex of public architecture north of the Great Plaza. Here the schist was used as a facing for the southern terraces of a platform. The second location where this schist was used was a residential group, labeled Group 1 (figure 7.1), part of a cluster of four patio groups built close together west of

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the Great Plaza ( Joyce 1991). A low platform in the center of this patio incor-porated a schist block, possibly a plain stela, at its southern end. Both of these locations were associated with important caches of figural artifacts, which we discuss further below.

The design of ninth-century Cerro Palenque connects the new town to its own past and to the larger social and sacred history of the lower Ulúa Valley. Practices of daily life and the ritual cycle created small- and larger-scale acts of commemoration that connected past and present at multiple levels of society—from the individual, the coresidential social group, the social houses, clusters of patio groups on the same ridge, and the community as a whole. Figurines were central to these practices.

Figurines are person-like in several ways, including how they come into existence, how they circulate at multiple social scales, and how they are treated at the end of their existence. Their complex lives are not always equally evident, even with careful archaeological research. At Copán, we had no examples of manufacture and little evidence of figurine use in rituals, other than those associated with burials by certain families of specific individuals. The villages

Figure 7.3. Objects from cache in residential group near Cerro Palenque ballcourt containing Spondylus shell and fragment of green marble vessel. Photograph by Julia A. Hendon, used by permission.

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in the lower Ulúa Valley discussed so far have expanded the social contexts in which figurines participated, allowing us to provide a richer interpretation of the local theories of production of personhood that shaped social relations and interactions.

Figurines are person-like not only through their appearance but because of the events that they become part of and which they help commemorate. Their ability to represent significant aspects of changing social identities, experiences, and relationships enmeshes them in cycles of human experience. Understanding how they work is not simply a matter of describing what they represent: it is dependent on understanding the way they are made, move through social situ-ations, and come to rest.

craf Ting perSon-like oBjecTSAnalysis of the mineralogical composition of the clay used to make fine paste

pottery and figurines revealed the presence of multiple production centers in the valley, including Campo Dos, Currusté, and Cerro Palenque (Lopiparo 2003, 2004; Lopiparo and Hendon 2009; Lopiparo, Joyce, and Hendon 2005). Use of fine paste pottery was widespread at Cerro Palenque, including local versions as well as pottery produced in other parts of the valley. Figurines, whistles, and other three-dimensional clay objects from Cerro Palenque also suggest local and nonlocal origins ( Joyce 1985, 1991). Producing such clay vessels and objects, however, took place only in the large patio group next to the ballcourt, where kilns and molds for both figurines and fine paste vessels were found (Hendon and Lopiparo 2004; Hendon 2010). Cerro Palenque joins sites we have already discussed, including Campo Dos and Currusté, as well as others in the valley such as Campo Pineda (CR-103) and CR-381, as a place engaged in the produc-tion of figural artifacts and fine paste pottery, but with a more restricted location within the site itself (Lopiparo 2003; Lopiparo and Hendon 2009).

Making things out of clay is a transformative process that mingles together different kinds of materials—the clay itself and water at a minimum, often tem-pering material as well—that are changed in their appearance and properties through the skilled manipulation of the potter who mixes, shapes, paints, and fires the objects. These transformations find parallels in the creation of human beings, who are shaped both before and after birth by the intervention of socially responsible beings. Socialization and the construction of a culturally valid form of personhood come about as a result of manipulation of the body’s appear-ance—cutting the hair, piercing the ears or lip, wearing appropriate clothing ( Joyce 2000a, 2000b)—and through interacting with other beings, including

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humans, ancestors, plants, animals, and material objects such as figurines. The relationship that develops between potters and the product of their labors is part of this process (Hendon 2010, 149–53).

At Cerro Palenque kilns were placed at the southern end of the patio, dis-tancing them from the ballcourt but putting them close to the most impressive structure in the patio group. One kiln was right in front of this building while the second was off to the side. Each has a circular base made of small stones and was covered by a dome of clay. A clay box below the kiln held fuel, the heat from which was drawn into the kiln chamber by a series of flues (Hendon and Lopiparo 2004; Hendon 2010, 135). Both kilns would have been visible to people in the patio. Their placement contradicts common assumptions about what people consider disruptive or unpleasant activities—firing kilns creates heat, smoke, and odors while clay preparation requires water, piles of bulky raw material, and so on (Arnold 1985).

The family living near the Cerro Palenque kilns did not seem to have been bothered by these features of clay working. They located their kilns in a promi-nent part of their living space, allowing their participation in pottery production to be evident to all visitors to their compound as well as their neighbors. What they removed out of sight of visitors was food preparation, obscured behind the large southern mound (Hendon 2010, 2011; cf. Wells 2004; Urban, Wells, and Ausec 1997).

The archaeological evidence at Cerro Palenque and many other communities in Honduras suggests that pottery production was not something that went on all the time (Beaudry 1984; Douglas 2002; Lopiparo 2004; Lopiparo, Joyce, and Hendon 2005; Schortman, Urban, and Ausec 2001). It was not an industry in the modern meaning of the term or a full-time craft production as conven-tionally defined by archaeologists (Costin 2001). It was a socially and politi-cally important activity that demanded household sponsorship of resources and space necessary to develop skill and craft knowledge (Hendon 2006), because the products of these practices served in critical social relations.

As noted in chapter 5, the use of molds at Cerro Palenque and throughout the region contradicts another commonly held idea about craft production: that molds facilitate standardization of the finished product and increase output without requiring more labor input (see Halperin 2009). Ulúa Valley potters do not seem to have adopted molds for this purpose. The figurines, whistles, and other figural artifacts they made, such as pendants, are remarkable for the diver-sity of their imagery and size, not their increasing similarity ( Joyce, Hendon, and Lopiparo 2009b; Lopiparo 2006a). The archaeological excavations at sites in the lower Ulúa Valley that provide us with a depositional context for molds

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reveal that it was not uncommon for a mold to be used to produce only one or at most a few examples. Lower Ulúa Valley potters found molds to be an effective way to reproduce the same image or theme at different sizes while controlling more precisely the details of the figure’s appearance and measurements ( Joyce, Hendon, and Lopiparo 2009b; Joyce 1993d; Lopiparo 2003, 2004, 2006a, 2007; Lopiparo and Hendon 2009). Based on the recovery at Tenampua and Copán of multiple versions depicting two specific individuals scaled differently in the couple figurines there, figurine makers there used molds in the same way.

Many such mold-made objects, including the marriage figurines, are whis-tles. Mueseologist David Banegas, himself an expert potter, has made exact replicas of the mouthpieces of whistles in the collection of the Museo de Antropología e Historia de San Pedro Sula, Honduras. In a demonstration to Julia Hendon in May 2009, Banegas played these replicas, allowing her to hear these musical instruments and appreciate the variety of pitch and the qualities of the notes produced by each size of mouthpiece. Banegas showed that even the sound of whistles with no finger holes and only one air hole can be varied somewhat by the force with which one blows into them or how much of the air hole is covered.

The mouthpiece is at the back of the whistles and often at the base of the figure as well. This is certainly the case for the double figurines we focus on here as well as many of the full-body single figures. This means that someone playing a whistle usually holds it upright, maintaining the orientation of the figure it depicts. The whistles are around 10 to 12 centimeters tall. When one places the mouthpiece in position to play it, the front of the whistle faces the viewer and covers much of the features of the person. A straightforward human face, perhaps known to the viewer, is replaced or merged with the features of the whistle, which might be the full figure of a person, an animal, a conjoined couple, a pair of figures, or creatures combining animal and human traits. The conjunction of person and person-like object creates a new identity—a hybrid-ized being—for the duration of the interaction between the two during which the musician imbues the whistle with her or his breath, sharing a part of herself or himself with the object, animating it through this mingling and drawing the object into the realm of co-essence or extrasomatic essences (Hendon 2010, 174). In chapter 5, we argued that figurines not only represent but also become a vessel for non-corporeal spirits of ancestors or mythological beings whose identities or stories were incorporated into rituals, perhaps including dances as well as stories. Their use as whistles by people taking part in these ceremonies would make them central to the process of integrating the world of the living, the dead, and the spirit.

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parTicipaTing in SignificanT eVenTSCerro Palenque possesses the only ballcourt known from the ninth century

in the lower Ulúa Valley (see chapter 4). Ball games would have been occa-sions in which the whole community could participate. Hosting a ball game would connect the town to the larger spiritual landscape of the valley, since ball-courts shared the orientations toward Montaña de Santa Barbara, the southern mountain identified in lower Ulúa Valley centers ( Joyce, Hendon, and Lopiparo 2009a). Games could have been scheduled to coincide with important seasonal changes or marked moments in the history of families and communities.

The role of host allowed Cerro Palenque to assert itself as a distinct commu-nity while reaffirming its place in the social fabric of the lower Ulúa Valley. Its ballcourt was clearly designed to be part of the core of monumental ritual archi-tecture at the heart of the community but was also accessible from the leading family’s large residential group by a paved walkway that led from that group’s patio into the playing alley of the court. When Cerro Palencanos hosted the ball game at their town, the living space to its south would have been the most accessible open area for people to gather, view the game, eat, drink, and social-ize. A raised platform at the northern end of the patio provided an elevated viewing area for those especially privileged by the hosts (Hendon 2010, 216–19).

Hendon has suggested that the periodicity of figurine production at Cerro Palenque coincided with that of the ball game and other significant social and ritual events. Such events provided opportunities for hosts to reaffirm relation-ships with their relatives who had moved away through marriage or for other reasons and to foster ties with members of other social houses (Hendon 2010, 137–39). Figurines were active participants in the events and rituals as musical instruments, as something to be animated, and as objects to be exchanged or broken or buried. The desire to create and exchange person-like objects helps us understand further the use of molds. Molds make it easier for people of differ-ent levels of experience or skill to be part of the process of making something. The intricacy of the design can be preserved even when children participate (Lopiparo 2006a). The really skilled part of the craft becomes making the molds, preparing the clay, or firing the objects. By creating a way for more people to be involved, molds were a means to a different end—not more objects that were just like one another but objects that created opportunities for social interactions between master craft workers and those not as adept in the manipulation of clay.

The molds and fragments of pottery made in those molds that Hendon found during her excavations at Cerro Palenque indicate that fine paste figurines and whistles, as well as decorated vessels, were produced in the patio of the family

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living adjacent to the ballcourt. The most abundant fine orange slipped bowls made and discarded in this prominent residential compound, the type Lasaní Orange, were rare in Joyce’s excavations in outlying residential groups ( Joyce 1993c). Debris from cooking demonstrates that at least some of these vessels were used to serve food and drink in the patio itself while others were distrib-uted throughout the site in small numbers and to Cerro Palenque’s neighbors (Hendon 2010, 135–39).

As we have emphasized throughout this book, production of Ulúa tradition objects was never centralized or dominated by one particular place. Instead, Cerro Palenque became one of many producers of these objects—objects which share stylistic and material traits but which serve as markers of connectedness and difference through the features of dress, especially headdresses, and, in the case of the vessels, decoration. Cerro Palenque’s production of figurines and fine paste pottery was an integral part of how its residents maintained their connections with social houses living throughout the lower Ulúa Valley. These connections were strengthened by exchanges of people through marriage, fos-terage, and other networks and by exchanges of valued, person-like objects such as figurines and whistles and decorated serving and eating vessels.

Figurines moved between individuals, social groups, and villages, mimick-ing the movement of people who left one place to go to another as part of the ongoing process of creating long-term ties between families and communi-ties. Figurines may well have accompanied some of these individuals in their transition from one community to another, and they could also have served as ways of commemorating social ties even after the individuals involved had died. Figurines also have the potential to commemorate shorter term interactions, such as the ball game feasts or other events celebrated by a family or village, providing a tangible referent of the events and the ties created through those events that became a focus of memory.

Breaking and depoSiTing figurineSDuring Joyce’s work on the isolated northern mound with the green schist

architectural facing, she found fragments of a large ceramic effigy figure (figure 7.4) in the shape of a person wearing a bird costume and sandals ( Joyce 1991, 67, 114). The fragments came from a deposit resulting from earlier looting of the site, together with a fragment of a stone sculpture without iconic markings. The body of this standing figure, apparently male, shows feathers from a bird costume (fig-ure 7.4b), without parallel in other sites that have yielded pieces of similar figures, made to stand on lids over censers containing burning resins (see chapter 5).

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This is not the only location in the site where we have documented evidence of the use of figural objects, and bird costumes are repeated elements elsewhere in the site. Buried in the fill of the small platform in Group 1, the second struc-ture with green schist facing (figure 7.5), were two figurines and a whistle ( Joyce 1985, 141–45, figure 70a; 1991, 48, 95, figures 23a, 23e; 1993d). A male figurine wear-ing bird wings on his arms and a helmet in the shape of a bird with an open beak framing his face had been buried on the eastern side of the schist block (figure 7.6). Both man and bird wear round earspools. The man has a collar made of rectangular beads, and his only other clothing is a simple loincloth. He holds a conch shell trumpet in his left hand. A matching pit on the western side of the schist block held a female figurine wearing an ankle-length skirt (figure 7.7). She also has round earspools, but her necklace has a single rectangular plaque as a pendant. Unlike the male figure, she has no headdress. Instead, she grasps her hair with her left hand while balancing a jar with two handles on her head, a jar that matches the shape and style of the vessels used at the site to carry liquids.

Figure 7.4. Fragments of ceramic effigy figure wearing bird costume, from censer excavated at Cerro Palenque. A: fingers and toes; B: fragment showing end of feather; C: fragments showing parts of headdress. Photographs by Julia A. Hendon, used by permission.

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The third clay object, the whistle, depicted a person’s head and torso with elabo-rate headdress and jewelry.

Deliberately broken figurines also made up a key ritual deposit in the ball-court residential group, associated with the rebuilding of the structure on the west side of the patio. Before starting work on the structure’s foundation plat-form, people smashed censers and fine paste eating and drinking vessels on a pavement that would become the base for the platform. Among the broken vessels on the pavement were large pieces of a figural censer decorated with a motif of human long bones bound with rope. Over this layer the builders started adding the fill needed to create the platform. The basic components of

Figure 7.5. Plan of Cerro Palenque Group 1 showing location of pair of cached figurines. Drawing by Rosemary A. Joyce, used by permission.

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the fill were gravel and dirt, but it also contained a lot of artifacts, most broken. The builders laid the fill in a series of thin layers. Pieces from the same vessel occurred together in the same layer. They looked as if they had been broken as part of the depositional process itself, as the fill was being placed. The top of the platform was reached after about 16 centimeters, at which point a femur bone from the body of a young, healthy adult was placed just under the stairs of the building, supported on the foundation platform. At a later point in the history of this building, as it expanded in size, it was covered over by a larger platform, leaving the buried human bone, the bone effigy censer, and the traces of the ritual events in place (Hendon 2010, 183–85, 2012c).

This kind of breakage, including figural artifacts, at the moment of renewal of buildings is known from other sites in the lower Ulúa Valley. Campo Pineda (CR-103), CR-80, and CR-381 are close neighbors of Campo Dos (figure 6.2). At these settlements of varying size, occupied by participants in the network of social relations documented in this book, Jeanne Lopiparo (2003) described repeated acts of ritualized deposition and destruction that parallel those seen at Campo Dos, Currusté, and Cerro Palenque. The villagers frequently burned and

Figure 7.6. Male figurine from Group 1 cache Cerro Palenque. Drawing by Than Saffel, courtesy of Rosemary A. Joyce.

Figure 7.7. Female figurine from Group 1 cache Cerro Palenque. Drawing by Than Saffel, courtesy of Rosemary A. Joyce.

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rebuilt their wood and clay houses, often placing intact or broken objects, such as figurine molds, figurines, and pottery vessels, in the collapsed debris. Sometimes they broke clay objects on a floor near a destroyed building or included broken artifacts in the fill of the new house they were building (Lopiparo and Hendon 2009). Lopiparo (2003, table 5.5A) noted that molds in these deposits were par-ticularly large and elaborate. Anthropomorphic molds from such deposits were designed to produce figurines that were unusual in design or detail, underscor-ing yet again that the importance of molds lay not in their ability to streamline production but in the control of imagery.

in The land of BirdSWithin the lower Ulúa Valley, headdress elements found on many anthropo-

morphic figures, not just those of conjoined couples, served as crests. Headdress elements provide one way to differentiate people by marking them as belong-ing to particular social groups, families, and villages. At Cerro Palenque, birds repeatedly marked men and women’s headdresses or costumes (Lopiparo and Hendon 2009; Joyce 1991), linking them yet again to Travesía and smaller vil-lages in its hinterland. Multiple male and female figurines in museum col-lections, when added to the ones excavated from Cerro Palenque, allow us to suggest that men wearing bird costumes and helmets and women wearing headbands with profile bird heads were a shared marker of social identity in a central zone of the lower Ulúa Valley, extending from the Travesía territory to what becomes the territory of Cerro Palenque.

One of the figurines from Travesía in the Wittkugel collection in the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin shows a man wearing a bird costume that is very similar to the Cerro Palenque figurine both in design and raw material. The left arm and foot are missing, making it impossible to know if he held anything in that hand. The right arm extends straight out from the body. There is a bird’s head on top of his arm and a flap of cloth and fringe below that turns the sleeve into a bird’s wing. A similar figure was found at Campo Dos (figure 1.7), and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology has several male figures wearing bird costumes as well.

Birds also appear as part of women’s headdresses, worn so that the bird’s head sticks out to the side of a headband. One especially striking example is a broken piece of a figurine’s head from the Cerro Palenque ballcourt residential group that depicts a large-beaked bird in profile (figure 7.8). Below the animal’s head we can see part of the figure’s hair, cut just above the ear, which displays a cir-cular earspool (Hendon 2010). Another bird headband came from a residential

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group northeast of the Great Plaza at Cerro Palenque ( Joyce 1985, 178–79, figure 70f ).

Displaying birds as crests is a practice that bridges the earlier and later occu-pation at Cerro Palenque, as would be expected of crests held as property in a multigenerational house or family. Joyce (1985, 217–20, figure 69b) excavated a figurine head wearing a profile bird head at the hilltop center that was occu-pied before AD 800. While many of the examples are incomplete, the most common version of the bird headband has profile bird heads at both sides.

gender and producTiVe acTionAs our detailed discussion of the couple figurine whistles from Campo Dos,

Travesía, Copán, and Tenampua has emphasized, figurines and whistles were

Figure 7.8. Fragment of figurine headband with profile bird head from Cerro Palenque. Photograph by Julia A. Hendon, used by permission.

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legible in different ways depending on the details of their appearance, the set-ting in which they were used, and with whom they interacted. The Tenampua geometric design on the headdress of the female half of the Copán and Tenampua pairs conveyed information about identity, origins, and social ties that would have resonated in different ways depending on whether one was at the city of origin or the distant city where several of these paired figurines ended up. The Campo Dos marriage figurine features a completely different design from the Copán and Tenampua ones. It shows a woman with more elaborate jewelry and dental modifications than her partner while both have much more similar headdresses. The relative position of the couple’s arms is something that is carefully depicted in all couple figurines and varies—the hand of the woman of the Campo Dos couple is on top, whereas the opposite is the case for Copán and Tenampua.

At Cerro Palenque, we do not have this kind of representation of a couple in a single figurine. What we do have is a pair of figurines cached in the small platform in Group 1. The male figure’s entire body is clothed in a bird-themed costume while the female figure’s clothing does not allude to avian crests or mythological creatures. She wears jewelry and a simple skirt. Even more dis-tinctive, she wears no hat, turban, headband, or helmet; on her head is a jar. The decision to make this figurine with a jar on her head and to bury it in association with the male bird-man and with a third clay figure—in this case, a whistle—conveys a different, but not unrelated, set of meanings than the couple figurines we have discussed so far. Yet without the contextual association of two figurines documented archaeologically we could not subject this pair of figurines to analysis in the way that we have been able to analyze the couples depicted conjoined on single figurines.

Given the semiotic significance of headgear, the fact that the woman in the Cerro Palenque pair wears a jar instead of a crest means that her headgear indexes productive action rather than affiliation with a social house or place. The theme of productive action is signaled in other ways within Ulúa and La Mora figurine traditions. Figurines showing a woman holding a pot (figure 7.9) are other examples of this theme (Butler 1935, figure 6c; Joyce 1993d; see chapter 5). Such figurines, and the molds to produce them (figure 7.10), were placed in deposits associated with building renovation in the Chasnigua terri-tory (Lopiparo 2003, 172–76, figure 4.19). Although at first glance it might be tempting to dismiss these examples as icons referencing some kind of apolitical domestic activity, it is crucial to consider their context and associations when interpreting them. The female figurine from the Cerro Palenque cache was deposited in a ritual platform and paired with a male also indexing productive

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action, most overtly by the conch shell trumpet in his left hand. The cache represents two of the central features of ritual events held at Cerro Palenque. Feasting, the materials needed, and the crucial role of women as hosts—their labor and skill at organizing and producing enough high-quality food and drink of the kind that people want to enjoy—are all implied by the jar itself and by the act of it being carried by a woman (Hendon 2010, 195–201). Music and dance relating to concerns specific to Cerro Palenque are signaled by the man’s full-body costume, its bird imagery, and his possession of a musical instrument. The presence of an actual clay whistle in the Group 1 platform further under-scores the connection with ritual events. As a pair, the two complete figurines embody sets of actions and relationships. One such relationship is the comple-mentary and cooperative actions by family members or members of the same social house. The gendering of these actions is strongly marked by the clear distinction between male and female who perform different but equally valued parts of the process (Hendon 1999; Joyce 1993d).

Figure 7.9. Figurine depicting a woman holding a pot, Ulúa River Valley. National Museum of the American Indian (061896.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

Figure 7.10. Fragments of figurines and molds depicting a woman holding a pot from CR-381. Photograph by Jeanne Lopiparo, used by permission.

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This is not a conjoined pair, and that difference also must be considered. The rarer circumstance is for figurines to show joined male and female images; while we have been able to discover many more examples than we originally knew about when we started our research, the number remains small (table 6.2). The permanent union of two figures in one object takes what otherwise would be two subjects and substitutes for them a single subject: not a male actor and a female actor, not two separate social houses or families, but one social actor that united two social groups. Another version of the creation of a single social actor may be found in the same-sex conjoined pairs discussed in the previous chapter. In those cases, two female actors are merged into one, reflecting, we have sug-gested, Travesía’s efforts to differentiate itself from its neighbors.

The Cerro Palenque pair is composed of separate figurines placed nearby, but each in its own pit. This pairing is not that of marriage, of the substitution of one joint subject for two. Instead, the pair could represent many different complementary gendered pairings: siblings, elders, or representatives of differ-ent ritual groups important to the ability of social houses to reproduce them-selves over time.

imageS and imagining Social life aT cerro palenqueWith the understanding we have gained from close examination of figural

artifacts and the contexts where they were made and used at sites in the lower Ulúa Valley, we are now in a position to better portray the way they acted in significant social events like those that would have taken place when ball games were held and guests were hosted by the families of Cerro Palenque:

The headwoman stood on the raised platform at the north end of her patio and looked out over a scene of controlled chaos. It was close to the summer solstice and the heat and humidity that enveloped the valley was only slightly lightened by the breezes that blew fitfully across the hills. A long line of children ran through the patio, swooping and dipping like the flocks of parrots that roosted on the ancestral hill, their voices calling to one another as they wove around groups of men and women working furiously to finish preparations for the upcoming feast and ball game. Other children, following orders from harried parents or older siblings, trotted here and there on errands. A line of young girls carrying water jars on their heads moved at a steady pace in and out of the patio. The smells of grilled venison and turtle soup, tamales and beans scented the air.

A cloud of smoke drifted by, then another enveloped the headwoman for a moment, catching in her throat. Behind her, one of the potters called to her son

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to bring more wood for the kilns. Another skilled clay crafter instructed the younger members of his family how to arrange the molds and baskets of clay to best advantage. Three girls and a boy, close to marriageable age and old enough to take on a more responsible role in the production process, discussed their plans. They were, for the first time, in charge of organizing the children and older people unused to working with clay but who would expect to play a part in the making of figurines and whistles. Even though most of the objects that would be given away to visitors and family members were already finished and on display, the chance to help shape these small figures—to give them life—was an impor-tant part of the ceremony.

The headwoman’s husband and the chief men of the other prominent social houses of the town made ready for the visiting team of players. Crews of younger men prepared the ballcourt, making sure it was swept clean and its playing alley level. She could hear the buzzing drone of conch shell trumpets and the higher pitched, birdlike notes of the whistles as the fitful breeze shifted to blow toward her from the Great Plaza. Her eldest son’s dance costume would remind all their guests that the right to this bird crest had been passed down through her hus-band’s family since their ancestors had lived in the white town, now abandoned on the floodplain.

The middle-aged woman massaged her neck, arching her back so that her spine creaked. She had been working for days to ensure that the feast that would be the final culmination of the ball game went smoothly, sleeping little, travel-ing throughout the town to call in favors, cajoling and pressuring her relatives, clients, and friends to give her their time and labor. No one would leave one of her feasts complaining of hunger or whispering that the tamales hadn’t been properly spiced or that the beer had gone off. Her daughters, daughters-in-law, cousins, and nieces who still lived in the town had begun the lengthy and delicate process of fermenting maize into beer and turning cacao into drinks and sauces days ago. Women from some of the smaller social houses who would never be able to sponsor such a large feast on their own had volunteered to grind maize throughout the day to ensure a steady supply. Their labor was crucial to the suc-cess of the feast, and the headwoman had gifts of cloth, food, and figurines set aside to thank them.

She heard voices from the ballcourt. Turning her head, she saw a group of women and adolescent girls exchanging greetings with the men cleaning the court. Finally, here was her oldest daughter and the woman from Currusté who had married her youngest son—a member of one of the most important houses and a beauty as well—bringing the last of the beer. She gave thanks that her daughter-in-law had been willing to make an extended visit here to help out with

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the summer solstice ball game, bringing her husband and small child. Some of the girls, including her granddaughters, were trading sideways glances with the young men and carrying their jars with conscious grace. Even a little sway in their walk! As the newcomers entered the patio itself, they passed the headwoman, calling out to her as they made their way past the kilns to the cooking fires behind the southern mound. She gestured to her daughter to pause, meaning to tell her that they needed to talk soon about marriage plans for the girls. It would strengthen their social house if the girls married outsiders, perhaps into the fam-ily of her daughter-in-law or perhaps into one of the important families from one of the other villages down below on the floodplain; but there might be local families that her daughter wanted to bring into their house as well. She trusted her daughter’s judgment in these matters. She was a good daughter, the head-woman thought. She had never regretted marrying her daughter to her cousin, a local boy whose family lived on the next ridge over. The couple bid fair to become the leading members of his house and her daughter would remain in the town all her life.

An elderly man approached the platform. He was one of the best crafters of paper decorations and ornaments in the valley and expected a lot of praise and admiration for his work. Just last spring he had refused to work with the head family at Campo Dos when they sponsored the planting season ball game because the headwoman there had not appreciated his banners and rosettes enough the year before. Only many honeyed words and a large present of finely woven cloth had brought him around. The headwoman was determined that no such disaster would befall her. Knowing the importance of keeping the old craftsman happy, her daughter waited patiently beside her, the large two-handled jar of beer balanced easily on her head. Would she and her daughter come see the finished decorations and discuss how best to place them around the patio and ballcourt? The two women climbed down from the platform and followed the man to the eastern side of the patio, where he and his fellow crafters had placed their work on the platform of the patio’s temple. She thought, everything seems to be going well, but there is so much left to do . . .

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DOI: 10.5876_9781607322788.c008

EpilogueMany accounts of the fundamental binding relations in ancient societies take the perspective of govern-ment, of political relations, especially political strate-gies that are recognizable to people living in contem-porary nation-states defined by a claimed territory, favored language, and purported historical identity (Anderson 1991). The questions asked concern how an identified political leadership located in a vis-ible capital generates power and how power moves out into the places where the citizenry lives. One of the strengths of archaeology, though, is its capacity to provide us with views of societies that are not just weaker, less-developed versions of those of today, but that are organized in other ways, making us question how governance might actually have been practiced in other times and places.

Of the societies that flourished in what is now Honduras between AD 500 and 1000 that we have examined in previous chapters, only Copán has the kind of evidence traditionally used to examine state governance: inscriptions carved on stone monuments commemorating individual officeholders and their suc-cession in office and spaces apparently dedicated to the work of governance, both local administration and dip-lomatic relations with distant peers.

At Tenampua, Campo Dos, Currusté, Travesía, and Cerro Palenque, we are hard pressed to identify his-torical rulers. We do think we have identified the house sites of prominent families in some sites, like Travesía, Cerro Palenque, and Tenampua. Yet the kinds of non-residential buildings and spaces we can point to as places for politics to happen, and the suite of activi-ties that took place in those plazas and around those

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ballcourts, are not easily depicted as spaces and actions of state administrations or foreign relations like those known at Copán.

To understand this network of Honduran societies, we have instead examined the spaces they created and the things they used in and around those spaces as evidence for social relations: how families created links through marriages that extended across societies of different scales and bound them over generations, by making some people kin of people in other places. The social relations we trace existed not at the scale of “ethnic” groups (Maya and Lenca) or even of regions (Copán Valley, Comayagua Valley, Ulúa Valley), but of families and individual actors.

We believe that it is most likely that the families and individuals involved would have identified themselves with their town and its web of people rather than with the kind of fixed territories, ethnicities, or linguistic groups that define contemporary nation-states. It is on the level of the town that we see evidence of differentiation of identity, and it is in towns that visual media displaying badges of difference were produced, used, and discarded, in events clearly related to important changes in the social status of residents. Our argument is, further, that these events in the social lives of residents of a network of towns were the way coordination of claims on resources, agreements about joint actions, and contracting of economic and social ties at long distances took place.

This is true as much for Copán, with its additional medium of historical texts, as for the other Honduran societies we have examined. All that really differenti-ates the towns connected through the social ties we have traced is the degree of unequal distribution of economic resources, the differential deployment of wealth to create objects of high culture that distinguished some families and individuals within the town, and the ability of some families and individuals to persuasively claim greater authority in arenas of critical importance to the com-munity as a whole ( Joyce 2000d).

difference, idenTiT y, hierarchy, and heTerarchyWe have demonstrated that the main medium for the display of badges of

difference in this network of Honduran societies was ceramic figural objects used in social ceremonies at the scale of the town—from the smallest masks and musical instruments to the largest figural effigies, freestanding or incorporated in incense burners. Our goal in tracing connections forged through the produc-tion, use, and exchange of such objects, and differentiations made possible by their juxtaposition at particular events, has been in part to coordinate the scale of social relations with the scale of materials used to create them. Even at Copán,

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where archaeologists privilege stone monuments as the primary source of infor-mation about political structure, there was a parallel practice of creating social relations mediated through objects produced and used by households hosting others at moments in the life course of individual members, through which his-torical connections were ensured, reinforced, and reinterpreted (Hendon 2010).

Figurine use in Honduras demonstrates that a network of social relations bound together societies normally considered as having vastly different politi-cal systems. Here and elsewhere (Hendon, Joyce, and Sheptak 2009; Joyce and Hendon 2000; Lopiparo 2007), we have argued that in Honduras between AD 500 and 1000, relations between towns are best understood as heterarchical rather than as a single hierarchy (usually a hierarchy with Copán at the top). Heterarchical relations form multiple overlapping hierarchies that mediate relations among communities in a landscape (Crumley 1987, 1995). The classic study of the Burgundian landscape by Carole L. Crumley and her colleagues illustrated the independence of church, state, and market hierarchies (Crumley and Marquardt 1987). It directs us to identify the specific arenas in which differ-ence can be converted to ranking and to be cautious about assuming that higher rank in one arena automatically converts to higher rank in another.

The specific linkage between Copán and Tenampua that we have examined here is a historical relationship that is not part of the textual record at Copán but is commemorated in images reproduced multiple times there as well as at least once at Tenampua. In terms of identity and difference, hierarchy and het-erarchy, marriage is an especially interesting kind of social action (McKinnon 1991). Marriages temporarily create unequal rankings, as one family gives up a child to a second family that, depending on the historical situation, might be expected to compensate the other to a greater or lesser degree. In Mesoamerica, marriages historically were mediated by formalized exchanges of specific goods that recognized the relative inequality of givers and takers of spouses and the offspring that they would produce (Gillespie and Joyce 1997).

If we are correct in identifying the female in the Tenampua-Copán pair as from Tenampua (based on her crest-like headdress), historical patterns known from Mesoamerica would suggest that the Copán family incurred a debt and the donor of the wife, the Tenampua family, would have been recognized as ascendant in this exchange. Inequality introduced by the dependence of one family on another for its continuity can either be intensified, by repeating the same kind of alliance, or balanced, by contracting marriages that reverse the direction of exchange of man and woman. Either way, the pattern of mar-riages between families creates an ongoing relationship over generations, and it is these ongoing relationships that we suggest were commemorated by the

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production, reproduction, circulation, curation, display, and burial of figurines in Honduras.

The image recovered at both Copán and Tenampua is, we argue, generic, visually identifying a daughter of Tenampua and a son of Copán, but not neces-sarily as specific persons. The reproduction of this image could record repeated marriages over multiple generations; or it could reiterate a reference to a single event that was of such historical importance that it became an enduring touch-stone for social relations between families at the two sites. In either case, the relationship would not have placed the Copán family in a position of hierarchi-cal dominance. The two families could have been commemorating a historical debt of the Copán family to that of Tenampua. Alternatively, repeated mar-riages could have equated the two families as peers in a continuing relationship that abstracted each out of the web of local social relations, in the same way that some houses in the “Great Row” in the Tanimbar Islands formed a separate sphere of marriage and debt that separated them from the remaining houses, viewed as lesser status (McKinnon 1991, 124–26).

Other material remains at Copán and Tenampua suggest an ongoing, mul-tigenerational relationship. The historical relationship between Tenampua and Copán commemorated by these figurines may be one of the social relation-ships responsible for the presence at Copán of Ulúa Polychrome pots, valued so much that they served to ritualize burials among the nobility of Copán. By comparison with the dated sequence of Ulúa Polychromes in the Ulúa, Yojoa, and Comayagua region, the Ulúa Polychromes present at Copán (table 3.1), all of types most likely to come from the Yojoa to Comayagua region, date as early as the second half of the seventh century. The latest Ulúa Polychromes used in burials at Copán belong to the distinctive Tenampua group made in Comayagua, possibly at or under the patronage of Tenampua itself, that were produced into the ninth century.

This was not a unilateral relationship in which higher-ranked or more “com-plex” Copán received tribute from a lower-ranked, “simpler,” or even dependent Tenampua. The evidence for reciprocal exchanges from Copán to Tenampua is less well established. In part this is due to the different histories of research and reporting that we grappled with throughout this book. But it is also the case that including pots in burials is much less common among the people of the Ulúa, Yojoa, and Comayagua regions, at least until around the ninth century. So it is among the sherds discarded by the residents of these sites that we need to look for evidence of the exchange of vessels from Copán.

Even then, the frequencies of pots received from Copán seem to be much lower than the frequency of Ulúa Polychromes at Copán. The typical

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polychrome pottery of Copán, Copador, is never found in large amounts in the rest of Honduras. The frequency of Copador vessels appears to be highest in Comayagua (Stone 1957, 42), with limited amounts reported from the Yojoa district (Baudez and Becquelin 1973, 294–95), and almost none recorded in our examinations of collections from the lower Ulúa Valley. However, Copador was not actually a highly valuable or restricted good in the Copán Valley: it was the pottery used by everyone in the region, apparently produced in multiple households, following patterns that were much more limited than the diversity of imagery on Ulúa Polychromes (Beaudry 1984). The communities that pro-duced Ulúa Polychromes did not apparently view Copador as a great luxury, even when they were historically connected to families at Copán.

The real luxury ceramics of Copán’s nobility, the rarer brown or black carved vessels that shared the iconography and sometimes even texts of monumental art, might be expected to be absent from the smaller, less hierarchical towns of the rest of Honduras. Yet unlike Copador, which is almost entirely absent from the Ulúa Valley, a number of these vessels appear there (e.g., Stone 1941, figures 66, 67).

It is likely that pottery was not the only, or perhaps even the main, type of object given as gifts by families of Copán to their affiliated kin in other towns in Honduras. The most restricted luxuries of the Copán state were executed in stone, bone, and shell (see, e.g., Agurcia Fasquelle 1991; Aoyama 1999; Baudez 1994; Easby 1993; Garber et al. 1993; Hendon 2010, 142–44; Widmer 1997). Indirect evidence suggests that textiles, produced by high-status women of the noble social houses of Sepulturas, were also important (Hendon 1997, 2006, 2010, 129–35). Some such luxury objects did travel from Copán to Honduran peer societies.

A spectacular example is a jade mask found in Comayagua (figure 8.1; McEwan 1994). Likely once suspended from the belt of a powerful man, it car-ries an inscription referring to the ruling family of Palenque (Martin and Grube 2008). Its itinerary en route to Comayagua likely included a stop at Copán, where in the late eighth century a woman from the Palenque ruling family arrived and served as the mother of one of the last rulers of Copán (Martin and Grube 2008).

In Comayagua, as in most of Honduras, carved jade objects are relatively rare (Hirth and Grant Hirth 1993), which would have made this object an especially distinctive piece of regalia for the local family receiving it. We sug-gest that it was marriage between a high-ranking Comayagua family and a noble family from Copán that facilitated the transfer of this mask such a long distance within Honduras. This was also the probable mechanism that moved this object from Palenque to Copán. The Tenampua and Copán couple figu-rines are evidence for such marriages, parallel to the texts that tell us of the

Figure 8.1. Jade belt mask found in Comayagua, with inscription referring to Palenque. Photograph © Trustees of the British Museum, used by permission.

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woman from Palenque, otherwise virtually invisible, who mothered a Copán ruler. Other ceramic figurines from places like Travesía and Campo Dos (fig-ure 8.2) commemorate the practice of wearing masks suspended from the belt, indicating that objects like this formed part of the regalia of ceremony in Honduran towns.

The absolute size of the towns and their inferred territories that we discuss in the lower Ulúa Valley are smaller than that of Copán. Yet they also yielded abundant evidence of the use of ceramic figural sculpture, at a multitude of scales, in ceremonies through which social relations were contracted, commem-orated, and renewed. Here again, social relations articulated ties across a range from small villages to the largest, wealthiest towns.

Figure 8.2. Ulúa tradition figurine showing a mask suspended from a belt, excavated at Campo Dos. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (183842.000). Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

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At the smaller end of the spectrum, Campo Dos, despite incorporating a ballcourt, has no evidence of cut stone buildings organized in a plaza, or of stone sculpture that might have displayed badges of identity and difference at a larger scale to visitors to the houses of leading families in the community. At Currusté, a formal plaza of tall river cobble platforms that once supported more perishable buildings included some low platforms supporting plain stone stelae (Hasemann, van Gerpen, and Veliz 1977). The earliest occupation at Cerro Palenque, between AD 450 and 650, involved the construction of formal plazas surrounded by cut stone buildings with thick plaster covering walls and floors, adorned with stone-sculptured ornaments on roofs and in doorways ( Joyce 1988b, 1991). These features echoed those of the contemporary, but larger, site of Travesía, where one family inhabited an elevated, enclosed Quadrangle with cut stone buildings covered with thick white stucco; they or another family constructed platforms supporting stone monuments where ritual caches con-forming to cosmopolitan norms were created; and some families patronized the development of the most restricted luxury in the valley, Ulúa Marble vases. After AD 800, when Cerro Palenque expanded to become the largest settle-ment in the valley, the newly constructed plaza of the town was provided with stone walkways, and it featured a large ballcourt ( Joyce 1991; Hendon 2010).

In all of these towns, and in others even smaller than Campo Dos, mold-made figurines, figural musical instruments, masks, and large human and animal effigy sculptures were used in ceremonies that, among other things, commemo-rated the dead and likely marked other life events such as birth and maturation (Hendon 2007, 2010; Joyce 2011; Lopiparo 2006a, 2007; Lopiparo and Hendon 2009). Each of the towns we discussed provided evidence of the local produc-tion of such objects, and the careful recording of details shows that each has a mixture of locally distinctive forms that are most common along with rarer examples of objects and images that are more common elsewhere. This is espe-cially evident in the uneven distribution of different headdresses worn by the anthropomorphic figures that are the subject of many of the figurines produced.

We compare the headdresses worn by anthropomorphic figures, the most vis-ible of these locally distinctive forms, to crests used among the societies of the Northwest Coast (Anderson 2004; Hart 2005; Lévi-Strauss 1999). As in ancient Honduras, the societies of the Northwest Coast varied in size and wealth, but in each, some families were recognized as having historical claims to precedence, signaled, among other things, by their control of the production and use of crested objects. These displays simultaneously commemorated historical claims by these families to precedence and connections with others and differentiated those authorized to display these crests from others in their own settlements.

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Crests were displayed at scales ranging from the individual body (where they adorned masks and costumes) to the house (where they were incorporated in panels and posts) as well as in the locations where the remains of the dead were disposed of and their ancestral presence commemorated.

The display of crests by means of ceramic figures in Honduran sites perma-nently commemorated what otherwise would have been more fleeting embod-ied experiences of participating in social ceremonies ( Joyce 1998). In such per-formances, the living body would have been adorned with distinctive badges, many of which may themselves have been of perishable materials. It is no acci-dent, we argue, that the main actions referenced in Honduran figurines are the presentation of children, the display of adorned bodies with markers of age differences, and the posing of actors dressed for ritual performance.

Figurines served as the primary medium to record the events through which social relations were contracted, commemorating distinctions in age, sex, ritual role, and place of origin. Such figural sculptures are often incorporated in objects clearly used pragmatically in ceremonies through which social relations were created: incense burners, musical instruments, masks, and beads. We suggest that even when we cannot discern the pragmatic purpose of figural objects such as miniature masks, pendants, or musical instruments, in practice pragmatic uses existed—for example, serving as vessels for spirits invoked in ritual. The social relations created through the use of these things, and more important, through the ceremonies in which they were used that are referenced in part by their visual imagery, created and reproduced a heterarchical political landscape in Honduras between AD 500 and 1000.

douBlingWhen we turn to the relatively rare examples of human pairs in ceramic

sculpture, we seek an understanding of this imagery in terms of the contracting of social relations, as through marriage alliance. At the same time, though, we need to be careful not to abstract the human pairs, especially the more legible male-female couples, from the broader group of representations of which they are part, which we describe as doubles. Doubling itself—whether as two fami-lies made one through marriage, as two teams creating a ball game together, or as the identically garbed figures enged in ritual, painted in pairs on Ulúa Polychromes dating to the sixth and seventh century (figure 8.3)—was a fun-damental way that politically independent towns in Honduras ideologically mediated the contradiction of being peers who could only temporarily assert advantage in specific situations.

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In doubling, hierarchy is minimized, and at first glance we might be tempted to see doubled figures as identical. As in the two teams that played matches in the ballcourts that are common features of sites across Honduras, what doubling actually presents us with are peers between whom hierarchy is situational and shifting. Host towns would have been, for the period of cer-emonies held there, in ascendancy, but for most of the history of this network of settlements, no one town managed to convert its temporary position into a more permanent one.

Which is not to say that there were no tensions, no signs of such attempts to assert continued hierarchy. At Travesía, where multiple lines of evidence suggest an attempt was made to institute enduring hierarchy, human double figurines

Figure 8.3. Ulúa Polychrome vase representing pairs of crossed human figures. Museo de Antropología e Historia de San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Photograph by Russell Sheptak, used by permission.

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were also produced. But these play subtly on the implications of different kinds of social relations, emphasizing sibling relations (with their identity and muted hierarchy of age) and generational transmission instead of alliance between equals. In the late town of Cerro Palenque, which grew to an unprecedented size, the male-female pairing created by burying two figurines together portrays these individuals as actors in a shared ritual, with complementary roles. Nothing in their costume allows them to be identified with their families of origin, as the leading family of Cerro Palenque asserted a different logic of community lead-ership that institutionalized hierarchy through hosting, at least for a little while.

maTerial relaTionS and reSearch fuTureSThe material relations created among towns in Honduras between AD 500

and 1000 were always dynamic. Different towns, and likely different families within them, gained and lost social status. Our ability to understand this land-scape requires us to adopt a methodological position that sees each place, no matter how small, as potentially a site of historically significant action. It is impossible to examine social relations, negotiated at the level of the individ-ual and the family, from a distanced perspective that merges different places together. While this may be heuristically useful as a first step in sketching out spheres of interaction, if we end there we will only reproduce accounts that equate styles with vaguely defined ethnic groups or peoples analogous to the nation-states with which we are familiar and comfortable.

Yet there are distinct challenges to the kind of study we have presented here. The theoretical reframing is actually the most trivial thing: by building on con-temporary archaeologies of practice, materiality, understandings of meaning-making from archaeological semiotics, and perspectives on action at the house-hold scale grounded in feminist archaeology, we shifted our scale of explanation to one most appropriate to our questions. In the process, we realized that we needed to understand unique artifacts in the context of larger samples, and we met this challenge by including with our smaller, more recently excavated mate-rials other curated material from museum collections.

What we hope we have demonstrated is that these collections, while result-ing from excavations carried out with less concern for provenience at the microscale within sites, have the advantage of situating smaller samples in a richer interpretable context. Repeatedly, we have found that even where we thought we knew the basics of chronology and artifact inventories from long-studied sites like Travesía and Campo Dos, museum collections changed our views. Most of these collections have been archived, unseen for generations

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since being assimilated into culture history by authoritative experts in the past. These experts became filters of what was known, and it is only by returning to the material remains themselves that we can surprise ourselves with new ques-tions, not just new answers to old questions.

As Alison Wylie (1992, 2002) long ago reminded us, it is the signal virtue of archaeology that the things we study resist our explanations, forcing us to change views. Our experience in writing what started with a modest proposal to study the links between two sites, and ended as a formulation about how social relations were mediated for centuries across Honduras, amply illustrates this point. Time and again we abandoned ideas we thought were clear and expanded the scope of materials we needed to address. While our main conclusions have to do with the historical agency of peoples in Honduras and the mediation of that agency through networks of people and things, equally significant would be a call for renewed study of collections carefully curated for generations in the museums of the world, which wait to urge archaeologists to reconsider all of our taken-for-granted beliefs and understandings.

DOI: 10.5876_9781607322788.c009

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Index

Altar Fine Orange, ceramic group, 9, 20

Altar Q. See CopánAltun Ha, 112Amazon, 45Ancestors, 81, 121; and burial, 28,

70, 85; commemoration of, 10, 70, 82; and display of bone bundles, 85, 95–98; and figu-rines, 146; and personhood, 145

Animals: anthropomorphized, 35, 122–123; armadillos, 122; bats, 121, 122, 125; deer, 116, 121; dog, 20, 36, 122, 125, 126, 127, 128; felines, 15, 51, 93, 95, 122, 123, 125, 126, 133; frogs, 67, 122, 125, 127; monkeys, 35, 47–49, 67, 122, 123, 124, 130–131, 131, 134; owls, 19, 36, 121–122, 123, 129, 132; vul-tures, 122, 123, 125, 129; water bird, 47, 125, 126. See also bird

Balankanche Cave, 132Ballcourt, 6–8, 70, 78, 160; at

Campo Dos, 65, 69–70, 166; at Cerro Palenque, 8, 138–141, 147, 166; at Copán, 70, 132; at Curruste, 8, 81; in Cuyumapa Valley, 70; and hierarchy, 70, 168; orientation, 70; at Quebrada Camalote, 80; at Rio Blanco, 80; at Tenampua, 39, 42, 70; at Travesia, 105, 107; in Ulua Valley, 78–80

Ballgame, 29–30, 70, 156, 167; at Campo Dos, 75; at Cerro Palenque, 139, 141, 147–148; in Ulua Valley, 78, 80

Banegas, David, 84, 146

Baracoa Fine Paste, ceramic group, 8, 9, 20, 48, 118

Bauer, Alexander A., 35Belize: exchange with Honduras,

3, 64–66, 89, 133–134, 141; marble vases in, 112, 133; poly-chrome ceramics, 66, 133; River Valley, 80, 135

Biological analysis, 25, 33, 36Birds: on censers, 93; as crest, 153;

Crested Bobwhite, 122, 129; figurine, at Campo Dos, 67; figurine, double, 122, 127–129; figurine, at Travesía 118, 121, 129; on flutes, 18, 116, 118; on marble vases, 125, 126; on metate, 43; owl, 19, 129; on ritual bundle, 96, 98; on Ulua Polychromes, 122; vulture, 129; waterbird, 47, 125, 126

Birth, 29, 85, 166Blanco Grey, ceramic type, 8, 9, 141Blue, Maya, 109–110Bonampak, 133Bones, human: bundle, 85, 86, 87,

95, 97–98, 151; effigy, 85, 92, 95, 150–151

Bosque. See CopánBowser, Brenda J., 45Burials, 96–98, 117; at Campo

Dos, 69, 70; at Copán, 23, 28–30, 34–38, 49, 162; at Currusté, 87; of felines, 132–133; figurines in, 4, 10, 32, 63, 143, 162; at Los Naranjos, 48–49; in lower Ulúa Valley, 60–61, 70, 97, 115; orientation, 70, 81, 87; secondary, 85

Butler, Mary, 60, 99, 105

INDEX196

Cacao, 4, 55, 64, 130Caching, 141, 166; at Cerro Palenque, 142–143, 143,

149–151, 151, 154–155; at Copán, 29, 49–51, 52; at Los Naranjos, 48–49; of marble vases, 114, 143; of Spondylus, 132, 142, 143; at Tenampua, 48, 51; at Yarumela, 48

Campo Dos (CR-132), 7, 166–169; ballcourt, 62, 69–71; burial orientation, 97; ceramic production at, 10, 62, 67–69, 68, 87; excava-tions at, 60–61, 63–67; figurine, with belt mask, 165; figurine, bird costume, 21, 152; figurine, Crested Bobwhite, 121, 122; figurine, dog, 126; figurine, double, 9, 58, 57–59, 72–75, 100, 154; figurine, double, bird 122; figurines, Playa de los Muertos tradition, 61–63; map, 62; marble vase, effigy, 110; Quebrada Chasnigua territory, 77–80, 101, 142; Quitamay group ceramics at, 81; Tacamiche group ceramics at, 8, 67–68

Campo Pineda. See CR-103Cancique Polychrome, 66Candeleros, 87, 116, 132Caribbean: coast, 6, 116; sea, 64, 80Caves, 4, 46, 81Cementerios. See CopánCenser, 29, 40–41; figural, from Cerro Palenque,

95, 148, 149, 150–151; figural, from Currusté, 83–85, 84, 85, 92–93; figural, from Mantecales, 93–95; figural, from Naranjo Chino, 96; figural, from Travesía, 132; ladle, 41, 51, 52, 132

Ceremonies: as house property, 28; Kuna, 16; life cycle, 63, 70–71, 92, 115, 165–169; for rebuilding houses, 53; and ritual mode of production, 69, 87, 90–91. See also ritual

Cerro Palenque, 137–143; ballcourt, 138–141, 139, 140, 142, 143 147, 166; ball games at, 147; bird imagery at, 151, 152–153, 153; caches, 132, 143, 149–150, 150, 151, 154–156; censers, figural, at 95, 148, 149; ceramic groups at, 8–9, 81, 141; ceramic production at, 144–145, 147–148; comparison with Tenampua, 42–43; figurine, pair, 149–151, 151, 154–156, 169; figurine use, 10; and gender, 153–156; Group 1, plan, 150; map, 139; marble vases, effigies at, 109; orientation of, 81, 97, 142; settlement plan, 8, 78, 138–140; sculpture, stone, at, 107, 108

Chamelecón River, 6, 8, 31, 60, 137; aban-doned course, 7, 61, 64; sites with imported polychrome on, 66; and territories, 80; and orientation of Travesia, 112

Chert: artifacts, 88, 118, 120; production, 44Chiapas, 5Chichen Itza, 16

Children, 39, 134, 161; at Campo Dos, 69; at Copán, 23, 25–31, 34–38; in craft production, 147; figurines depicting, 127–130, 128, 130, 167; ritual sponsorship, 63

Choluteca Valley, 43Chorti, 3Cognitive stickiness, 34Color symbolism, 108–109, 142Comayagua, 7, 31, 102, 121, 160–163, 164; and

Copán, 49, 51, 53, 55; figurines, 31; jade mask, 164; and Las Vegas Polychrome, 118; settle-ment pattern, 42–44; Ulúa Polychromes in, 2, 6, 46, 48; and Ulúa Valley, 55

Community of practice, 20, 48, 54, 68Conflict, military, 43–44, 141Copador Polychrome, 6; at Copán, 23, 28; external

distribution, 51, 55, 133, 163Copal. See resinCopán, 4–5, 23–38; Altar Q, 133; ballcourt, 70;

Bosque, 28; burial, 23, 25, 28–29; caching at, 29, 49–51, 52; Cementerios, 28; ceramic function at, 48; children, 23, 25, 38; dental modifica-tion at, 74–75; as dominant site in Honduras, 2–3; figurines, double, 7, 24, 24–25, 34–37, 90, 102, 146; figurines, early, 11; figurines, Ulúa tradition, 16, 29–31, 33; foreign enclave at, 31–33; Group 10L-2, 28, 29, 31; Group 9M-22, 29, 31, 32–33; Group 9M-24, 29, 33; Group 9N-8, 25–26, 27, 28, 31, 32–33, 36, 37; Group CV-20, 36–37; human biology, 25, 33, 36, 74–75; political organization, 160–161; relations with Tenampua, 43–47, 53, 154, 161–165; relations with Travesía, 116, 132–133; Sepulturas, 25, 26, 28–29, 33, 36, 165; settlement pattern, 6–7, 25–26, 28; social organization, 27, 159–160; Ulúa Polychromes at, 31–32, 33, 49–55, 162; Valley, 28–29, 31, 33, 49, 51

Costa Rica, 3, 64; exchange with Honduras, 43, 112, 133, 134; use of wax in, 16

Costume: animal, 119, 134; bird, 21, 124, 129–130, 148–149, 149, 151, 152–155, 153

CR-71. See MantecalesCR-80, 65, 71–72, 78, 151CR-103 (Campo Pineda), 65, 72–73, 78, 89, 144, 151CR-136, 69, 78CR-381, 72, 144, 151, 155Craft production. See productionCrested Bobwhite, 121, 122, 129Crests, 73, 166; animal images as, 125; display of,

128, 134, 167; figurine headdresses as, 73, 121, 152–154, 161

Crumley, Carol L., 161

INDEX 197

Currusté, 77, 80–86; ancestor commemoration at, 10, 95–96; censer, figural, 84, 95, 92–93; ceramic production at, 87, 88–89, 144; excavation plan, 83, 86; figurine, double, 7, 55, 87–90, 89, 138; fig-urine, mold, 89; figurine, Playa de los Muertos tradition, 16; map, 82; ritual performance at, 92–98, 151; settlement pattern, 8, 80, 81, 166

Cuyumapa Valley, 9, 70, 102, 141

Dance, 70, 91, 97, 120–122, 124, 146, 155Dedalos. See Ulúa PolychromeDental modification. See teethDeposit, structured, 28, 83, 93, 142, 150–152, 154Descent, 27, 129Dixon, Boyd, 43

Earspools, 18, 115; on figurines at Campo Dos, 57, 59; on figurines at Cerro Palenque, 149, 152; on figurines at Copán, 24, 35–36; on figurines at Curruste, 88; on figurines at Tenampua, 44; on figurines at Travesia, 104; on monkeys, 35, 130

El Chayal, obsidian source, 141El Salvador, 5, 43, 141Ethnic groups, 3, 160, 169Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin, 100, 118, 152Exchange, 4, 66, 148; of ceramics, 9; of figurines,

55, 147; long distance, 66, 112, 141; of marble vases, 112; of people, 148, 161

Face paint, 57, 58, 59Farm Two. See Campo DosFaunal remains, 63, 88, 127; deer, 116, 121; dogs, 127;

snails, 114, 115; clams, 115, 116; felines, 133Feasting, 55, 63, 70, 82; at Cerro Palenque, 141, 148,

155; at Copán, 31; at Currusté, 81–85; vessels used in, 48, 51, 68, 115

Figurines: bats, 121; birds, 19, 67, 118, 121, 127, 128, 129; in burials, 4, 10, 32, 63, 143, 162; at Campo Dos, 21, 57–60, 58; canines, 15, 20, 36, 113, 122, 126, 127, 128; at Cerro Palenque, 137, 144, 147–148, 149–150, 151; at Copán, 23–25, 24, 31, 34, 36–37, 90; at Currusté, 87–90, 89; crocodile, 67; dog (See canine); double, 23–25, 44–46, 45, 57–60, 58, 64, 87–90, 89, 99–101, 100, 101–105, 103, 127–131; double, animal, 128, 131; early (Formative Period), 4, 11, 12, 63; felines, 15, 122, 123; fine paste, 20–22, 21, 118, 144, 147; frogs, 122, 127; infants, 63, 64, 127, 128, 130; at Lagartijo, 99–101, 100; from La Lima, 123; La Mora group, 14–17, 15, 29, 129, 154; as masks, 18, 34; monkeys, 35, 67, 122, 123, 130–131, 131; mothers, 127, 128, 130; owls, 36, 121, 123, 129, 132; Playa

de los Muertos style, 11–12, 13, 61–63, 129, 130; production of, 8–20, 67–68, 87, 90, 101, 134, 146–149; Río Pelo style, 12–13, 14; from Río Ulúa, 103; "socketed", 18–20; supernatural beings, 18; at Tenampua, 44–46, 53; at Travesía, 100–105, 106, 127–131; Ulúa tradition, 16–18, 17, 31, 47, 71, 91, 105, 165; vultures, 122, 123; whistle, 17. See also musical instrument.

Flutes, 18, 116, 118Food: preparation, 48, 88, 120, 150; serving, 51, 140;

serving, vessels used, 65–66, 80–81, 114–116, 118, 148. See also feasting

Gell, Alfred, 34Gender, 24, 138, 155, 156Gifts, 38, 51–52, 66, 110, 112, 163Gordon, George Byron, 99, 100, 105, 130Ground stone tools, 43, 67, 88, 132Gualpopa Polychrome, 6, 66Guatemala, 110, 112, 120, 134; ceramics from, 66,

119, 133; obsidian sources in, 4, 141Guinope, obsidian source, 43

Haida, 73Headband, 71; bird, 152, 153; at Campo Dos, 59;

at Cerro Palenque, 149, 152–153; at Copán, 44; defined, 18, 72; at Travesía, 113, 134

Headdress, 148; animal imagery, 132; bird imagery, 129–130, 149, 152; at Campo Dos, 57, 59; at Cerro Palenque, 149, 150, 152; at Copán, 25, 36–37; as crests, 152, 161, 166; at Currusté, 88–89, 90; defined, 18; at Lagartijo, 99; leg-ibility of, 47, 53, 71–73, 101–102, 103, 154; at Tenampua, 44–46; at Travesía, 105, 127–128, 129–130, 132, 134

Heirlooms, 53Henderson, John S., 61Hendon, Julia A., 48, 95, 137, 139, 142, 146, 147Hero Twins, 105, 119Heterarchy, 160–161, 167Heye Foundation, 49, 51, 60, 137Hierarchy, 69–70, 111–112, 134–135, 161–163, 168–169Hinterland: of Copán, 6; of Quebrada

Chasnigua, 93, 101, 144; of Travesía, 101, 110–111, 138, 152; in Ulúa Valley 78–80, 79

Hosting, 63, 155, 161; of ball games, 70, 75, 147, 168; at Currusté, 82; at Travesía, 114, 117

House (building): architecture, 63, 65, 140, 166; construction, 115, 151–152

House (social), 26–28, 155, 156; at Cerro Palenque, 143, 147, 148; at Copán, 29, 38, 163; crests and, 73; at Currusté, 85

INDEX198

Household, 4, 6–7, 42, 51, 63, 73; analytic level, 3; as context, 29, 31

Huipil, 105, 106Humuya River, 7

Icon, 127, 154Iconic (sign), 35, 47, 53, 120–121, 138, 148Identity: analytical level, 3, 131, 142, 146, 159–160,

161; semiotics of, 47, 71–75, 111, 152–154; of social house, 27, 29, 38, 128

Incense burners. See censerIndex (sign), 35, 46–47, 127, 138, 154Inequality, 2–5, 161Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia,

12Ixcanrio Orange Polychrome, 66Ixtepeque, obsidian source, 141

Jade, 4, 132, 134; cached, 142; craft production in Honduras, 108–109; as dental inlay, 75; as gifts, 52; mask, 163, 164; as wealth, 63, 67, 69

Jalapa, obsidian source, 141Jewelry, 63, 67; on ceramics, 120; on figurines,

36–37, 57, 59, 127–128, 150, 154Joyce, Rosemary A., 12, 55, 61, 114, 119, 132, 133, 137,

138, 139, 148, 153

Kiln, 115, 144–145Kuna, 16Kwakiutl, 73

La Esperanza, obsidian source, 141Lagartijo, 99, 100, 100, 101, 102, 105Laguna Jucutuma, 80Lake Yojoa, 2, 6; ceramics at, 31, 48–49, 51, 66, 96;

ties to Copán, 55, 162–163La Lima, 60, 61, 123Lasaní Orange, ceramic group, 8, 9, 148Las Flores Bolsa, 73Las Vegas (site), 43–44Las Vegas Polychrome, 6, 44, 49, 118, 141La Unión, obsidian source, 141Legibility, 48, 73, 105, 154, 167; defined, 45–46Lenca, 3, 121, 160Leventhal, Richard M., 36Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 120Loincloth: as male costume, 18, 99, 132; on figu-

rines, 19, 24, 57, 88, 149Lopiparo, Jeanne, 18, 69, 71, 72, 78, 81, 83, 84, 85, 87,

88, 89, 90, 92, 101, 112, 137, 142, 151, 152, Los Naranjos, 4, 11, 48–49Lothrop, Samuel K., 39

Luke, Christina, 108, 109, 112Lunardi, Federico, 102

Mantecales (CR-71), 93–95, 98, 142Marble, 4, 80, 126; at Campo Dos, 67, 69; green,

142, 143; quarries, 80; at Travesía, 108–118, 133; vases, 55, 78, 109, 111, 112, 125–126; vase effigies, 8, 109–111, 110, 115, 132

Marriage, 28, 44, 63, 73, 112; ceremony, 29, 70–71; commemorated, 55, 134, 138, 163; as social strategy, 38–39, 148, 160–162

Mask, 93, 132, 160, 166–167; on belt, 163–165, 165; ceramic, 19, 87; jade, 163, 164; in performance, 18, 34, 134

Mason, Gregory, 60–61, 66, 67, 118, 137Maya, 2–3, 30, 119, 141, 160; blue pigment, 109–110;

dental modification, 75; exchange with Honduras, 64, 66; figurines, 60, 105; hierarchy, 134

Mayanization, 3Meaning. See semioticsMemory, social, 35, 38, 54, 148Men, 31, 43, 44, 98, 105, 131Metate, 43, 132Mexico, 5, 44, 120, 121, 127Middens, 31, 63, 67, 83Middle American Research Institute, 61, 105Miniaturization, 34Molds, 46, 132; in caches, 152, 154; at Campo Dos,

61, 67–68, 115; at Cerro Palenque, 144–147; at Currusté, 87–90, 89; at CR-381, 155; distribu-tion, 16, 37, 44, 61, 137; of marble vase effigies, 109–111; use of, 14–20, 36–37, 67–68, 90, 145–147; vulture, 123

Montaña de Santa Barbara, 70, 81, 111–112, 138, 142, 147

Motagua River, 7, 109Mother, 127, 129–131, 163Museo de Antropología de Historia de San

Pedro Sula, 84, 146Music, 34, 146, 155Musical instruments: construction of, 18, 20, 146;

disposal of, 48; figurines as, 1, 17, 22, 31, 132; production of, 87, 91; use of, 91, 112, 120, 147, 160, 166–167. See also flute; whistle

Myth, 47, 91, 119–121, 125, 146, 154

Naco Valley, 6, 16, 66Nahuatl, 121Naranjo Chino, 96, 98Narrative, 91, 119–121, 127National Museum of Denmark, 61

INDEX 199

National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), 49, 57, 59–61, 64, 67, 73, 102, 118, 137

Nearest-neighbor analysis, 78Nebla. See Ulúa PolychromeNecklace, on figurines, 18–19, 57–59, 88–89,

104–105, 149; on monkeys, 35Nicaragua, 3, 43, 64, 141Nicoya, 112

Objects: enchanting, 34, 46; person-like, 34–35, 37–38, 137, 143–146, 147–148

Obsidian: blades, 67, 88, 115; exchange of, 4, 6, 43, 52; mirror, 67, 69; production of, 4, 44, 116–117; sources, 4, 43, 141

Orientation, 113; of burials, 87, 97; geographical, 81, 111–113, 138, 142, 147; seasonal, 70, 81, 112

Palenque, 163, 164, 165Panama, 16Parmentier, Richard, 47Pasion River Valley, 20Pastor Fasquelle, Rodolfo, 84Peabody Museum (Harvard University), 99, 105,

152Pech, 3Peirce, Charles Sanders, 35, 46Personhood, 38, 105, 144Peru, 127Petén, 3, 110, 133, 134Pigment, 15, 57, 59–60, 109–110, 116Playa de los Muertos. See figurines.Plaza: at Cerro Palenque, 8, 138–140, 166; at

Currusté, 81–87, 82, 166; orientation, 97, 142; in settlement pattern, 69, 78–80

Political relations, 3–5, 28, 67, 85, 123, 161–163Polychrome. See Cancique; Copador; Gualpopa;

Las Vegas; Ixcanrio Orange; Sulaco; UlúaPopenoe, Dorothy Hughes, 42, 43, 53, 70, 137Popol Vuh, 119Power, 2–5, 44, 69, 159Pregnancy, 85, 92, 98Preucel, Robert W., 35Production: of ceramics, 46–49, 65–68, 68, 87–88,

115, 144–147; of chert artifacts, 44, 88; of figurines, 8–20, 67–68, 87, 90, 101, 134, 146–149; of marble vases, 78, 111, 114, 136; of obsidian artifacts, 4, 44, 119; ritual mode of 69, 82, 90; of textiles, 88, 165

Puerto Escondido, 4, 11, 63–64

Quadrangle. See TravesíaQuartzite, 116

Quebrada Camalote, 80Quebrada Chasnigua, 64, 72–73; figurine produc-

tion, 101; territory, 78–81, 93, 97, 142, 154Quebrada Mantecales, 78Quitamay, ceramic group, 8, 80–81

Regalia, 28, 59, 93, 95, 120, 163, 165Residential compound. See household compoundResin, 40–41, 51, 93, 95, 116, 148; copal, 16Rio Blanco (river), 8, 81, 137Rio Blanco (site), 80Río Pelo, 12, 13Ritual, 87, 132–133, 139, 147; bundle, 95, 97, 98;

burial, 23, 29, 51, 70, 162; burning, 40–41, 51, 87, 95, 116; crests in, 128; dance, 122; dogs in, 127; of fields, 121; household, 48, 133–134, 138–140, 155; life cycle, 25, 63, 71, 81, 143; mode of production, 69, 82, 90; and mythology, 119; seasonal, 70, 81, 123, 149; structured deposits, 83, 142, 150–151, 154, 166. See also ceremonies

Salitrón Viejo, 109San Bartolomé Milpas Altas, obsidian source, 141Sandals, 92, 148Sandoval, Doris, 84San Juan Camalote, 13San Martín Jilotepeque, obsidian source, 141San Pedro Sula, 102; figurine, double, 103Santa Barbara, 48. See also Montaña de Santa

BarbaraSantana, 99–100, 130. See also Ulúa PolychromeSanta Rita. See Ulúa PolychromeSchist, 142–143, 148–149Sculpture, stone: at Cerro Palenque, 107, 108, 138,

148, 166; at Copán, 28; at Los Naranjos, 4; at Travesía, 107

Selin complex, ceramics, 66, 116Selva. See Ulúa PolychromeSemiotics, 35, 46–48, 121, 127, 138, 154–155, 169Sepulturas. See CopánSettlement pattern, 43–44, 77–80, 106–107Sex, 88, 99, 101, 105Shell: cached, 41–42, 132, 134, 142, 143; and

exchange, 4; jewelry, 29, 63, 67, 69, 163Skirt, as female costume, 18, 99; on figural censer,

92; on figurine, 57, 59, 89, 151, 154Solstice, 81; and ballcourts, 70; winter 80, 112, 113Spielmann, Katherine, 69, 90Spondylus, 41, 132, 142, 143Stamps, 61, 67, 87Stone, Doris Z., 39, 105, 106, 107, 113, 114, 118, 132,

133, 137

INDEX200

Strombus, 132Sulaco Polychrome, 66Sulaco Valley, 43, 66Surlo, ceramic style, 29Swain, Eleanor E., 69

Tacamiche, ceramic group, 8, 67–68, 109, 116Tanimbar Islands, 162Teeth, 33; modification, 58, 59, 73–75, 154Temple of the Carvings. See TravesiaTenampua, 7, 39–44; ballcourt, 70; dedicatory

offering, 48, 51; defensive features, 10, 64; figurine, double, 44–46, 45, 53, 102–104, 146, 154; map, 40; motif, 45–46, 48, 154; relation-ship with Copán, 49–54, 161–165. See also Ulua Polychrome

Tenochtitlan, 16Teotihuacan, 5, 132Territories, in Ulúa Valley, 78–80, 93, 142, 152–154,

165Tiesler, Vera, 74, 75Tlingit, 73Tol, 3Tolupan, 121Toquegua, 3Town: analytic level, 3, 121, 160–161, 166–168;

Cerro Palenque as, 10, 141–142, 166, 169; Currusté as, 10, 81–83; defined, 6, 77–78, 79; Las Vegas as, 43–44; Mantecales as, 93; Tenampua as, 7, 10; Travesía as, 10, 107, 111–112; and territories, 78–80, 165

Trade. See exchange Travesía, 99–100, 105–108; 113–117; caching,

132–133; ceramic production at, 115; figurine, animal, 118, 121–127, 123, 128, 129–131, 131; figurine, child, 128, 130; figurine, crest, 134, 152; figurine, double, 100–101, 102–105, 103, 127–131, 128, 130, 131; figurine, Playa de los Muertos tradition, 16, 129; figurine, woman, 105, 106, 113, 128, 130; hierarchy, 10, 111–112, 168–169; hinterland, 78–80, 79, 93, 101; marble vase production at, 109–111, 112; obsidian produc-tion at, 116–117; orientation, 81, 111–112, 113; Quadrangle, 105–107, 107, 112–114, 132, 166; relations with Cerro Palenque, 138, 152, 166; relations with Copán, 133; sculpture, stone, 107–108; Temple of the Carvings, 113, 133. See also Ulúa Polychrome

Tsimshian, 73Tula, 44Turban, 18, 71, 101–103, 103, 134

Uaxactun, 112Ulúa figurine tradition, 11–20, 63–64, 71–73, 129,

134, 145–146Ulúa Marble vase. See marbleUlúa Polychrome: in burials, 49, 164; cached,

142; chronology of, 6, 8, 66, 118; at Copán, 23, 28–33, 33, 49–52, 162–163; Dedalos class, 6, 66; and marble vases, 109; and Maya polychrome, 2, 119–121; Nebla class, 6, 46; Nebla class, subclass Tigrillo, 125; in Quebrada Chasnigua territory, 80; ritual bundle on, 96–97, 98; Santana class, 6, 55; Santa Rita class, 6, 66; Santa Rita class, subclass Dedalos, 168; Santa Rita class, subclass Paloma, 125; as serving vessels, 2; Selva class, 6, 124, 126; semiotics of, 46–52; Tenampua class, 6, 40–46, 49–51, 52, 141; Tenampua subclass Zarza, 40, 41, 51; Travesía class, 55; Travesía class, subclass Bombero, 123

Ulúa River, 64, 78, 80, 99, 116Ulúa Valley: map, 74, 101, 113; settlement pattern,

7–8, 60, 78–80, 107, 111–112, 138–139United Fruit Company, 60, 61Usulutan resist, 5

Village: analytic level, 3, 165; burial orientation, 81, 97; Campo Dos as, 10, 67, 69; Formative period, 4, 63–64; identity and, 71–73, 152; and settlement pattern, 43, 77–80, 141, 152

Wealth, 28, 63, 75, 116, 168; and exchange, 66; and patronage, 134; and power, 5, 160

Whistle, 17, 19, 28, 67, 87, 99–100, 149–150, 154–155; and burials, 29; circulation, 38, 138, 144; con-struction, 18, 34, 132, 145, 146; figurine, animal, as 113; figurines, double, as, 23–24, 34, 36–37; as mask, 34, 146; as person-like objects, 34–35, 146–148; production, 147

Willey, Gordon R., 36Wittkugel, Erich, 100; collection, 105, 110, 121,

127–134, 152Women: in burials, 31; descent through, 127–129,

135, 161–162; as hosts, 154–155; life course, 63, 92, 98; from Palenque, 163, 165; as siblings, 135; status of, 73, 75, 154; and textile production, 163

Workshop. See productionWylie, Alison, 170

Yarumela, 4, 11, 48Yde, Jens, 61Yucatan, 64, 109, 110, 131, 141

Zarza. See Ulua Polychrome

material relations: the marriage figurines of prehispanic honduras

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