Integration and disintegration at Minanha, a petty Maya kingdom in the North Vaca Plateau, Belize

Abstract

• Diachronic reconstruction of household integrative practices at Minanha. • Chronology spans the Late-Terminal Preclassic through to the Early Postclassic. • Household responses to rise and fall of the royal court vary within community. • Historical contingency is important for understanding this variability. • Collapse of the Minanha polity resulted in process of “societal compression”. Research focusing on the emergence and collapse of ancient Maya polities is abundant, with many studies detailing these sociopolitical transformations from the perspective of apical elites at Classic period centers across the lowlands. It is, however, only relatively recently that studies have examined how the integrative strategies of commoner populations were both enabled and constrained by processes of sociopolitical integration and disintegration. This detailed settlement study reconstructs how the practices of a commoner community in the site core of Minanha, Belize, were central to the construction and reproduction of the social dynamics of this ancient Maya center, from its founding through to its abandonment. We explore how households adapted and reorganized in response to major sociopolitical transformations, emphasizing integrative and disintegrative processes associated with the rise and fall of Minanha’s Late Classic (AD 675–810) royal court. This diachronic perspective illustrates the historically contingent nature of household and community responses to the Classic Maya collapse. We utilize a conjunctive methodology that combines “bottom up” (household and community) and “top down” (royal court) data to provide a nuanced and holistic picture of processes of sociopolitical transformation in the Maya lowlands.