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Los templos y monumentos de Copán están repletos de símbolos del agua y de sustento, ambas fuerzas importantes en el desarrollo de complejidad social a través de la región y prevalente en toda Mesoamérica. Nuestro trabajo revela que los sistemas de agua manejados en Copán y áreas circundantes de Honduras tienen una historia larga y se manifiestan en diversas formas. Además de funciones prácticas, desde irrigación hasta el almacenamiento de agua, las fuentes y sistemas de agua tenían numerosos usos religiosos. Discutiremos cómo se concebía, usaba y se representaba el agua en tiempos antiguos y las formas que en que creemos se utilizaba su carácter sagrado en el arte para elevar la autoridad política. Por medio de nuestras investigaciones sabemos que la organización comunitaria era importante para la operación exitosa del manejo de los sistemas antiguos de agua. Puede que algunos de estos métodos sean relevantes en los paisajes actuales para mejorar las condiciones de vida, asegurar la potabilidad del agua y mejorar las cosechas.

INTRODUCTIONSustainable water management (an organizational mode that preserves the renewability of the resource and equitable access to it) in less developed countries is fast becoming one of the greatest environmental challenges of the twenty-first century (UNICEF and WHO 2011). The United Nations Human Rights Council recently passed a global resolution (Resolution 64/292) declaring "safe and clean drinking water and sanitation" a basic human right (cf. Bakker 2007; Mirosa and Harris 2011; UN 2010), and calling on states and international agencies to supply financial resources, technology transfer, and capacity building to provide for safe and accessible water and sanitation. Meanwhile, in Honduras, government agencies charged with overseeing water and sanitation have largely failed to meet the demands of growing metropolitan areas (Balthasar 2011). Private sector participation in water and sanitation services in periurban regions of the country has also experienced significant challenges and setbacks (Phumpiu and Gustafsson 2009). Community-based interventions in rural sectors by outside development organizations seeking to design treatment and delivery of potable water have also been largely ineffective (Fogelberg 2010). Even self-organized efforts by communities in different residential contexts have been unsustainable (Casey 2005). Why are communities in Honduras struggling to obtain safe and clean water?In this article, we take a holistic look at the social, economic, ecological, and engineered contexts of gravity-fed water systems in the Palmarejo Valley, a predominantly rural sector in northwest Honduras, with the greater goal of identifying key barriers to long-term sustainability of water provisioning. In doing so, we apply a systems-based perspective employing a grounded-theory and mixed-methods approach to cultural analysis (e.g., Billgreen and Holmen 2008; Loker 2003; Wells et al. 2014), which allows us to view water management as a socioecological system (Bennett 1976) that couples human behaviors and perceptions with the biophysical environment. This perspective resembles what geographers and other social scientists increasingly refer to as the "hydrosocial cycle" (Linton 2014; Sultana and Loftus 2012; Swyngedouw 2009), which "attends to the social nature of [hydrological] flows as well as the agential role played by water, while highlighting the dialectical and relational processes through which water and society interrelate" (Linton and Budds 2013:1). After describing the household and community contexts of water management systems in Honduras, we present the results of our emerging work in the Palmarejo Valley, where we have conducted interviews with valley residents and community leaders, mapped cultural and environmental features using GPS, and performed water quality tests to measure levels and isolate sources of heavy metals and bacterial contamination.We have observed that community-based approaches commonly employed in development projects in this region may not be appropriate in all contexts due, in part, to the scale at which they operate. While the utility of the concept of scale has been debated (Leitner and Miller 2007; Marston et al. 2005; Moore 2008), we find it useful in our research for characterizing the sociospatial constructs that actors develop and deploy in different political and economic contexts to influence how individuals, organizations, and institutions manage resources (see Herod 2011; e.g., Goodman et al. 2008). Here, our emphasis is not on spatial categories, per se, but on the social processes that constitute them (Marston 2000) and the connections that link them (Latour 1993). The social construction of scale can thus be seen as a material expression of power relations (MacKinnon 2010). Water, in particular, is increasingly subject to "scale challenges" (Cash et al. 2006), because it moves across social and natural landscapes-or waterscapes (Budds and Hinojosa 2012)-that crosscut multiple scales (Norman et al. …

Ulúa-style marble vases played important social, political, economic, and religious roles in southern Mesoamerica during the seventh through eleventh centuries A.D. However, most such vessels known to archaeologists are part of looted collections or else were unearthed before the advent of modern archaeological practices. As a result, little is known about the context, use, and chronology of these objects. Recent investigations at the site of Palos Blancos in northwest Honduras discovered an Ulúa-style marble vase in an undisturbed mortuary context. Excavation of the burial context, along with bioarchaeological and stable isotope analysis of the human remains, suggests that the vase was placed as an offering, possibly to an ancestor of the residential group. Phosphate and pollen studies indicate that the vase once held a corn-based beverage . Radiocarbon dating of four charcoal samples from immediately below and adjacent to the vase yielded a range of dates from the beginning of the Late Classic period, ca.A.D. 600-800. Through analyses of the context and contents of the vase, this research contributes to a more holistic understanding of the use and meaning of Ulúa-style marble vases in southern Mesoamerica.

Exploring the implications of a recent discovery in NW Honduras, this paper considers the ethical dilemma that arises when an archaeologist's responsibility to disseminate information conflicts with her/his commitment to protect cultural resources. We suggest that applied archaeology that benefits local communities among which investigations are conducted is a first step toward developing long-term solutions to conservation and stewardship challenges.

Recent research on pre-Hispanic Maya water management has revealed a diverse array of water-control techniques that were employed in the Maya Lowlands. Since much of this research has focused on water management for consumption and agriculture, other forms of water management—namely, for drainage and flood control—remain poorly understood. This report describes the various water-control techniques dedicated to drainage and flood control at Late Classic Copan, Honduras (a.d.600–900), and explores the social implications of this form of water control. Technological variation in water control throughout urban Copan and between Copan and Palenque, the other major Maya center where drainage and flood control have been investigated, suggests that water management at Copan may have been organized differentially across the urban center.

Recent research on prehispanic water management throughout the Americas has made significant contributions to our understanding of the diversity of adaptive systems employed in regions where water is seasonally scarce, such as the Maya Lowlands. Since much of this workfocuses on large-scale technologies, the political and economic consequences of these systems for smaller social units remain poorly understood. Social dynamics associated with less-intensive forms of water use and control are investigated at Late Classic (A.D. 600–900) Copán, in a water-rich setting of western Honduras. Ethnographic, iconographic, and archaeological datasets suggest that lagoons located in Copán’s urban residential sectors may have been conceptualized, utilized, and maintained as communal property with ancestral ties by the inhabitants of surrounding domestic groups. By shifting the scale of analysis from the polity to the community level, these lagoons can be viewed as forms of communal property that created an economic and ideological basis for local social integration but offered limited opportunity for the centralization of power through monopolistic control. Yet, toward the end of the Late Classic, the appropriation of water-related dynastic symbolism and possibly ritual seems to have provided nonroyal elites with a means for creating local social identities, which undercut and eroded royal authority.

This chapter examines the historical relationship between Honduran Lenca worldview and how ecological resources are managed through ritual practice. The way in which the Lenca conceive of the biophysical environment is an active process of meaning-making that takes place through their interaction with the environment. The Lenca codify this relationship in the compostura, a complex set of ceremonial performances linked to economic practices that mediate human needs and desires with those of the ancestors who animate the landscapes surrounding households and communities. Through an examination of contemporary, historical, and archeological cases in western Honduras, this chapter explores how ritual economy shapes, and is shaped by, environmental worldview.

[sustainability, curriculum development, global citizenship, global sustainability, education, University of South Florida]