Considering memory and processes of abandonment and reorganization in the past with case studies from southeastern Mesoamerica

Abstract

Built places hold great power to both shape and mold behavior and communicate meaningful narratives and ideas. Such narratives and meanings are encoded and reproduced via social acts of remembering and forgetting. This paper explores the ways that places are memorialized or forgotten after periods of social and political re-organization when groups of structures or whole sites are abandoned. Herein three memory strategies are emphasized: protecting places, citation of abandoned spaces, and abandonment as an act of forgetting, in order to provide tools for archaeologists discussing memory and abandonment. Each strategy is illustrated using archaeological case studies from the Late Preclassic (300 BCE–100 CE) to Late Classic (600–900 CE) in southeastern Mesoamerica.