Excavations at Rosita - an Elite Mayan Central Place Revisited

Mayan researcher Timothy Preston has included his third season of excavation at the Rosita Site in the 2008 Blue Creek Project field report (17th Sojourn: The 2008 Season of the Blue Creek Archaeological Project), submitted to the Institute of Archaeology in Belize. Having worked on a couple of other sites with Tim, I’m familiar with the some of his work and so I can provide some background where necessary.

Since the Maya Research Program’s Blue Creek Project does not maintain interpretive sites (which are considerably expensive to maintain), site work nearly always entails modified backfill, where the site is reburied in order to protect it from the elements and from looters. I use the term “modified” because the backfill is done in a way as to allow easy location of the site structure and avoid damage that may be done by re-excavation before structure boundaries are relocated. Tarps are initially laid over exposed structure before backfill and the fill material (dirt, cobbles, etc.) adjacent to the structure is typically of a very different composition, structure and color than the typical hardened limestone and caliche (extremely soft limestone with a nearly rubber-like consistency) that often hides elite Mayan architecture made from the same or similar material.

I’ve often wondered how often researchers really return to such sites, given the large time and labor investment with backfill, especially when heavy machinery is out of the question. Of course, allowing a site to rapidly decay to an unrecognizable mass of crumbled limestone seems unconscionable, so we backfill with little complaint. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Rosita was a revisited site. Partial excavation was done there in 2003, but no maps or photographs were produced from the site and a number of gaps exist in the data. To compound these issues, the backfill did not include tarps or any apparent intentionally placed indicative markers of the architecture. Fortunately, differences in soil color, texture and density related to the previous excavation were evident through most of the pre-excavated portion of the site.

Preston’s overall quest at Blue Creek, though not mentioned in this portion of the report, is to see how power and authority are reflected in classic Mayan architecture. This is part of the overall “scholarly imperative” of the Blue Creek Project and indeed the majority of Mayanists, to understand the Classic Mayan collapse. Preston looks for patterns in site layouts and locations relative to other elite and common site locations to determine the nature of Mayan authority and power, and how they were leveraged within the community. “Common” artifacts seem to be secondary, although artifacts do receive a great deal of attention when they appear to be significant to Preston’s line of questioning (i.e., the context within the architecture and the nature of the artifact may reveal something about Mayan power and authority.) Also, in apparent alignment with the idea that the causes of a culture’s fall may be seen in the nature of its rise, data on early classic and Preclassic architectural layers are also carefully collected.

2008 was actually the third year of Preston’s excavation at Rosita. To date, it appears that the Maya occupied the site from the middle of the Preclassic period through the Terminal Classic. Preston interprets Rosita as a secondary polity of at least eight residential groups including “numerous“ related non-residence structures, with semi-independent political ties to the Blue Creek site core 3.5 km away, from the later Preclassic to the Late Classic periods. While fluctuations in status among the Maya are common overall, Preston does not mention evidence of any such changes, so it appears to be assumed for now that Rosita’s political position remained relatively constant throughout its occupation. Overall, Rosita appears to follow the same layout pattern as nearly all other documented elite residences: All residences are arranged in groups that surround a large non-residential central place, which according to Preston serves as an administrative center for localized resource control.

Tim’s field work for 2008 concentrated on the apparent central place for Rosita. Three phases of construction were identified: a Late Preclassic phase (Phase I), an Early Classic phase (Phase II) and a Late Classic phase (Phase III). Three dating techniques were used for cross-verification; architectural features, construction sequence determination and ceramic analysis. The exact method of dating ceramics was not specified. Since dating appears to have been directed towards associations with Mayan cultural phases rather than numeric dates, a typological method seems likely (although numeric dates may simply not have been included in this report). Ceramics can be especially useful in this context since shards were often used by the Mayans as construction fill, thus providing a date that very closely precedes construction.

Aside from period verification, Preston’s project provided data on known dimensions (though partial excavation and detailed taphonomic circumstances left gaps in much of the Phase III data), orientation, features and various artifacts, which included empty cache boxes, an intact ceramic vessel that appeared to have been incorporated into the construction fill (an apparent dedicatory vessel), and stone “pens” of unknown function built on top of platform ledges. Interestingly, although new phases were built over the old, very little expansion of the previous structure took place during construction periods. Phase II data shows that what was later a single building, then existed as two buildings with a central corridor. So far, there have been no clues as to the specific functions of the buildings or the corridor. Preston states that during the Late Classic period, these buildings were combined, and then subsequently buried. Unfortunately, detailed evidence for his interpretation of the Phase II buildings’ demise is not given in the report. One of the Phase II buildings appears to have been built as a round structure during the preclassic period, and then modified into a quasi-rectilinear form with an extension during the Early Classic period.

Preston did not provide much detail on matrix measurements in his report, but context matrix resolution appears to be very course, as it was in other projects that used the same division terminology in an operation/sub-op/lot system (although sub-ops are really activity descriptions and were not incorporated into the data organization). My experience with Preston’s system elsewhere included work with lots of very large and irregularly sized and shaped areas that were defined relative to architectural features. Lots were the finest level of resolution for the locations of common artifacts. Special items were given more detailed positional descriptions in text form, but if their positions within the lot were measured at all, I never had the opportunity to observed this activity. This method reflects a much greater emphasis on associations with architecture, than on other considerations such as possible taphonomic shifts in position and potential interpretations of household activity.

Overall, thus far the project is showing some glimpses of inter-polity variability and standardization related to construction, and has given us a few more questions to ask. While a few details appear to be lacking (which may not be relevant to this report, but should be at least included in references to other information) and a goal bias may be present in Preston’s collection methods, Rosita has certainly given us more questions to ask. Fortunately, a 2009 report is in the works that should include further data on Rosita, and plans have been in the works for 2010 excavations as well.