ABOUT THIS BOOK

Coloniality in the Maya Lowlands explores what has been required of the Maya to survive both internal and external threats and other destabilizing forces. These include shifting power dynamics and sociocultural transformations, tumultuous political regimes, the precarity of newly formed nation states, migration in search of refuge, and newly globalizing economies in the Yucatecan lowlands in the Late Colonial to Early National periods—the times when formal Spanish colonial rule was giving way to Yucatecan and Mexican neocolonial settler systems.

The work takes a hemispheric approach to the historical and material analysis of colonialism, bridging the often disparate literatures on coloniality and settler colonialism. Archaeologists and anthropologists working in what are today southeastern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras grapple with the material realities of coloniality at a regional level. They provide sustained discussions of Maya experiences with wide-ranging colonial endurances: violence, resource insecurity, land rights, refugees, the control of borders, the movement of contraband, surveillance, individual and collective agency, consumption, and use of historic resources.

Considering a future for historical archaeologies of the Maya region that bridges anthropology, ethnohistory, Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and Latin American studies, Coloniality in the Maya Lowlands presents a new understanding of how ways of being in the Maya world have formed and changed over time, as well as the shared investments of historical archaeologists and sociocultural anthropologists working in the Maya region.

Contributors: Fernando Armstrong-Fumero, Alejandra Badillo Sánchez, Adolfo Iván Batún Alpuche, A. Brooke Bonorden, Maia C. Dedrick, Scott L. Fedick, Fior García Lara, John Gust, Brett A. Houk, Rosemary A. Joyce, Gertrude B. Kilgore, Jennifer P. Mathews, Patricia A. McAnany, James W. Meierhoff, Fabián A. Olán de la Cruz, Julie K. Wesp

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Kasey Diserens Morgan is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work on the uses of heritage in Mexico has been supported by sources including the Louis J. Kolb Society and the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Tiffany C. Fryer is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and assistant curator of Historical & Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. Her work on colonialism in the Americas has been supported by various sources including the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

REVIEWS

“This is a compelling and crucial collection of studies that should be read by all scholars of both the Maya and (post)colonialism in the Americas. However we conceive of the task—as decolonizing the ethnohistory of the Maya or as exploring coloniality as a way to better understand the Maya past and present—it is clear that a new conversation needs to take place, that these eighteen contributors have started it, and that we must join it as soon as possible.”
—Matthew Restall, author of When Montezuma Met Cortés and Return to Ixil

“This publicly engaged archaeology of recent Yucatán pasts as the subject of an entire collection is long overdue.”
—Minette E. Church, University of Colorado Colorado Springs

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Foreword | John Douglass

1. Characterizing an Archeology of Coloniality in the Maya Lowlands | Kasey Diserens Morgan and Tiffany C. Fryer

Part I: Colonial Lives | Tiffany C. Fryer and Kasey Diserens Morgan

2. A Livelihoods Approach to Colonial Period Farming Strategies at Tahcabo, Yucatán | Maia Dedrick, Patricia A. McAnany, and Adolfo Iván Batún Alpuche

3. Excavating the Third Root: Constructing Archaeological Narratives that Include Afro-Yucatecans | Julie K. Wesp

4. Piracy and Smuggling on the Eastern Colonial Frontier of the Yucatán Peninsula during the Eighteenth Century | Fior Daliso García Lara and Fabián Alberto Olán de la Cruz

Part II: (Post)Colonial Lives | Tiffany C. Fryer and Kasey Diserens Morgan

5. Confronting Violence in the Layered Landscapes of East-Central Quintana Roo | Tiffany C. Fryer

6. Traces of Power: An Archaeology of the Porfirian Armed Forces in the Military Campaign against “Rebel” Maya during the Caste War, 1899–1904 | Alejandra Badillo Sánchez

7. Living on the Edge: The San Pedro Maya in British Honduras | Brett A. Houk, Brooke Bonorden, and Gertrude B. Kilgore

8. The Final Frontier: Nineteenth-Century Mayan Refugees at Tikal, Guatemala | James Meierhoff

9. Landed and Landless: Comparing Labor Regimes in Northeastern Yucatán and British Honduras | John R. Gust

Part III: Futures for Recent Maya History | Kasey Diserens Morgan and Tiffany C. Fryer

10. Preserving the Nineteenth Century in the Throes of Twenty-First-Century Development: Twenty Years of Historical Archaeology in the Yalahau and Costa Escondida Regions of Quintana Roo, Mexico | Jennifer P. Mathews, John R. Gust, and Scott L. Fedick

11. The Cycle of the Living Dead: Ruins, Loss, and Preservation in Tihosuco, Quintana Roo | Kasey Diserens Morgan

12. Histories for the Maya Present: Archaeology of the Colonial and Recent Past | Rosemary A. Joyce

13. Engaging Archeology with the Histories, Cultures, and Political Legacies of the Lowland Maya | Fernando Armstrong-Fumero

Index

About the Authors

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