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Mortuary rituals at the mission church of Yacman, a sixteenth-century rural Maya community, reflect locally specific variants of cultural hybridity relevant to the comparative study of the archaeology of agency and social change in early Colonial settings of Mesoamerica. Burial practices in this church reveal early adoption of Christian norms, followed by a return to more traditional Pre-Columbian family mausoleum-like interments. At the same time, these Maya mission residents, like many of their contemporaries in the region, co-opted the Christian church as a new community nucleus and as a resting place for ancestors. These findings, with additional evidence for hybridity from domestic contexts, reveal strategic expressions of Colonial Maya identity at Yacman, a modest and remote rural settlement that exercised options to experience social change on its own terms, far from the supervisory gaze of Spanish friars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most distinctive features of the Postclassic capital of Mayapan is the immense wall that encloses large portions of the site's settlement zone. This 9.1 km-long feature is the largest example of a walled enclosure known in Mesoamerica. Based on ethnohistoric references, it seems that the construction was well known to Postclassic and Colonial period residents of the Northern lowlands. The most common assertion regarding the enclosures is that the wall had primarily defensive functions. Unfortunately, little solid archaeological evidence or cross-cultural comparison has been offered to support this interpretation. In this paper, I correlate the form of the gates with cross-culturally derived and unambiguously defensive features, finding that the design of the gates strongly suggests that they are indeed defensive. Possible secondary functions of the wall are also explored, such as the control of people and goods entering the city, as ritual barrier, the control of internal populations and its symbolism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Lime was widely utilized throughout ancient Mesoamerica. Drawing on the expertise of traditional Maya lime producers from a small local community, we address the energetics, material inputs, and archaeological signature of burnt-lime production in the Northern Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. When compared with the estimated lime usage at the Maya site of Mayapán, the data collected from experimental lime burning suggest that traditional lime production was reasonably labor intensive and used large, albeit sustainable, quantities of raw materials, especially wood. Lime manufacture was an important component of ancient Mesoamerican economic life, especially in urban settings where it may have been a fill time occupation for some, at least during certain parts of the year: This analysis allows us to predict what the remains of lime burning sites should look like and where they are most likely to be encountered archaeologically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spatial contexts of effigy censer and figurine molds at Mayapan, Yucatan, Mexico suggest a tightly controlled industry in which elite representatives of state government and religious orders exerted oversight over production and distribution. Attached artisans at Mayapan made these and other restricted goods for residents of palaces and patrons of the city's public buildings. The study of effigy ceramic production reveals that, like earlier, Classic period Maya kingdoms, Postclassic elites also sponsored the crafting of symbolically charged goods. This finding expands understanding of Postclassic period economic organization, which is best-known for its expansive regional market exchange. The limited distribution of effigy censers and figurines further attests their primary use in the context of state-sponsored ceremonies and, to a lesser extent, high-status mortuary settings. Unlike other places and times in Mesoamerica, neither figurines nor effigy censers are representative of household-scale religious practice for the majority of urban residents at Mayapan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents evidence from a mass grave at the Itzmal Ch’en administrative group, an outlying ceremonial center at the Postclassic period Maya political center of Mayapán, Yucatan, Mexico. The grave contains the remains of at least 20 individuals, likely the group’s elite patrons. The remains were subject to extensive postmortem treatment that included butchering, burning, and scattering, along with ritual paraphernalia and midden debris. The deposit is significant in the context of the city’s prolonged sociopolitical collapse, as radiocarbon evidence suggests that the deposit predates the final abandonment of the city. The shallow grave is instead associated with an ethnohistorically-documented period of internal conflict from between CE 1302 and 1400. More broadly, we evaluate the Itzmal Ch’en mass grave as a rare form of mortuary deposit in the Maya region, an example of desecration and ritual violence. The abandoned ceremonial plaza and grave site would have represented a macabre monument to a period of violent conflict in the city’s history that would have been visible to the city’s remaining occupants for the last half century prior to Mayapán’s final abandonment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]