Hybridity and Mortuary Patterns at the Colonial Maya Visita Settlement of Yacman, Mexico

Abstract

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.