Prehispanic residence and community at San Estevan, Belize.

Abstract

Research at the site of San Estevan, Belize begins with the premise that more serious attention must be paid to the significance of residential variability in archaeological modelings of the lowland Maya. A classification of structure groupings is used to track the distribution of San Estevan's diverse residential arrangements across the site. Norms of social structure and economic inequality prove inadequate frameworks to account for the spatial and temporal variation manifest by San Estevan's residential classes, nor do they help to explain the spatial regularities underlying the distributions of these classes. I suggest, instead, that the site's residential units best effect divergent organizational strategies adopted by San Estevan's prehispanic domestic groups. Whereas diffuse political authority, impoverished political economies, and kingroup self-sufficiency traditionally have been invoked to account for Maya residential patterns, domestic strategies at San Estevan gained their shape directly in relation to the functions housed in the community's precincts of monumental architecture. I conclude that prehispanic Maya residential distributions formed through stringent economic and political entailments of community life.