Outside of Houses - Cynthia Robin

Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications (London,Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)Vol 2(2): 245–268 [1469-6053(200206)2:2;245–268;023397]

Journal of Social Archaeology A R T I C L E

245

Outside of housesThe practices of everyday life at Chan Nòohol, Belize

CYNTHIA ROBIN

Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, USA

ABSTRACTThis article examines the social construction and experience ofeveryday life in one socially salient place, the late Classic Maya farm-steads of Chan Nòohol, Belize. Men, women and children workedaround the house and the ‘domestic’ and agricultural domains wereneither socially or spatially segregated. Nor was everyday life a strictlyinside or outside, private or public affair. These points underscore thefact that rigid Western taxonomizing is inappropriate for understand-ing life cross-culturally. Beyond farmers’ houses and agriculturalterraces, Chan Nòohol was largely devoid of the physical surfacetraces that archaeologists often excavate. But this lack of architectureended up being a blessing in disguise, because the entwined paths ofpeople left visible traces in the porous soil surfaces. The imprints ofpeople’s daily walking and working documents some of their diverselifeways and experiences. By integrating an analysis of the socialconstruction of place with an analysis of living experiences, this articleseeks to move beyond the impasse of theoretical polarities that havehistorically divided our field.

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246 Journal of Social Archaeology 2(2)

KEYWORDSdomestic archaeology ● feminist theory ● Maya ● Mesoamericaphenomenology ● practice theory ● social organization ● spatialanalysis

■ INTRODUCTION

It is indeed the dwelling, as a silent and determining memory, which ishidden in the theory . . . and which, moreover, gives the supposition a certainreferentiality, an appearance of reality. (de Certeau, 1984: 58)

Archaeologists tend to focus on residential structures when they study thedomestic world. This is perhaps unsurprising, because the remains ofancient buildings (i.e. mounds, tells, höyüks, tepes) often are the mostvisible features we encounter on the contemporary land surface (seereviews on structure-centrism in archaeology in Pyburn [1989], Steadman[1996]). But any built environment consists of much more than buildings,as built places comprise all spaces that people construct, use and concep-tualize (e.g. Ashmore and Knapp, 1999; Bender, 1993; Erickson, 2000; Low,1996). Maintaining archaeology’s traditional focus on particular culturalfragments – structures – may inhibit our ability to identify important lociand meanings of ancient lives. To illustrate this point, this article examinesthe social construction and experience of everyday life in one sociallysalient place, the late Classic Maya farmsteads of Chan Nòohol, Belize,which – beyond farmers’ houses and agricultural terraces – were largelydevoid of the physical surface traces that archaeologists often excavate.

■ BEYOND HOUSES IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THEDOMESTIC DOMAIN

Anthropological studies of the domestic domain in the 1970s initiallyposited the universality of a contemporary Western division between‘domestic/house (inside)/private/female/consumption/passive’ and the act-ive public exterior world of male politics and production (e.g. Rosaldo andLamphere, 1974). In so doing, spaces, especially houses (structures) vs.exterior spaces, were construed as fixed and unproblematic containers forcertain kinds of social actions and interactions that were seen as private andenclosed or public and exposed in relation to the type of spatial containerwhere they occurred. Over the past few decades archaeologists and anthro-pologists alike have critiqued this position from the perspectives of feminist

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247Robin Outside of houses

and domestic studies. Feminist scholars were amongst the first to begindocumenting how domestic and public spheres as isolated social and spatialdomains were constructs of particular historical scenarios, such as certaincontexts in the development of Western capitalism (e.g. Gilchrist, 1999;Hendon, 1996; Joyce, 2000; MacCormack and Strathern, 1980; Moore, 1996;Tringham, 1991; Wall, 1999). Particularly relevant to the Chan Nòohol case,Classic Maya ‘domestic’ places cannot be defined as non-public placesbecause ‘public’ ritual performances and political meetings occurred inthese places (e.g. Hendon, 1997; Inomata, 2001; Joyce and Hendon, 2000;Yaeger, 2000). Classic Maya ‘domestic’ places could also be key locationsfor extra-household production (e.g. Folan et al., 2001; Hendon, 1996;Shafer and Hester, 1983). Historical and contextual studies, such as these,relieved domestic spaces of their passive abilities to contain particular typesof activities (e.g. private vs. public activities) that reflected rigid Westerntaxonomies. Anthropologists and archaeologists began illustrating howspace only became a meaningful social entity as people constructed, usedand reused it.

In a similar vein scholars working on issues of domestic life have shownhow the constellation of anthropological concepts – domestic, household,and house – are historically defined, not universally defined. Cross-culturally, domestic domains as well as houses may comprise interior and/orexterior places, public or private venues, etc. (e.g. Gillespie, 2000; Helli-well, 1992; Sandstrom, 2000; Vom Bruck, 1997; Wilk and Ashmore, 1988;Yanagisako, 1979). One example which is particularly relevant to the ChanNòohol case study is the difference between the meaning of the Englishterm house and the Maya term nah which is glossed in English as ‘house’.The term nah was used in the Classic Maya period (AD 250–900) and isused in a number of contemporary Maya languages. In contemporaryYucatec Maya, nah refers to a complex of core domestic and work spacesthat are sources of knowledge about the world, including houses, yards andfields, or, in other words, sleeping spaces and habitual workspaces (Hanks,1990; see Gillespie [2000] and Vogt [1976] for similar notions of houses fromother contemporary Maya areas). This house concept is equated with habit-ually used interior and exterior spaces as well as domestic and non-domesticwork spaces. It is not the structure we would refer to as a house in the west.A lexical similarity between the Classic Maya and contemporary Yucatecterm for house does not imply an equivalency of meaning for these twoterms. The contemporary meaning of nah illustrates the diversity of culturalmeanings of houses and domestic places.

From these multifaceted critiques new directions in domestic studieshave emerged.

1 Houses as structures (or any other space for that matter) are notpassive containers housing people and their actions, nor are they the

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sum total of what should be studied in the domestic or any otherdomain.

2 Unexamined notions of the existence of domestic and public spacesimpede our understandings of particular historically and culturallycontingent situations.

3 People actively construct and experience meaning (unconsciouslyand consciously) through their construction of places and experienceof spaces.

Thus the beginning point for the analysis of the domestic world has revertedfrom universal theoretical formulation to investigations of specific historic,contextualized case studies of people and the places and meanings theyconstruct, inhabit, and experience.

■ PLACE, SPACE, AND EVERYDAY LIFE

Time-space geography and space and place studies have consistentlyscrutinized the contextual relationships between people, space andmeanings (e.g. de Certeau, 1984; Giddens, 1985; Lefebvre, 1991; Low, 1996;Moore, 1996; Pred, 1990; Soja, 1989). As this literature focuses on time andspace, dimensions that have historically constituted archaeological analysis,archaeologists interested in developing lived understandings of the pasthave found time-space studies particularly appropriate for archaeologicalresearch (e.g. Gilchrist, 1999; Gosden, 1999; Hutson et al., 2000; Joyce andHendon, 2000; Love, 1999; Thomas, 1996; Tringham, 1991). These archaeo-logical and non-archaeological authors reject notions of human–spacerelations which define space as passive backdrop or container for action.Rather than seeing space as something abstracted from human lives, spacescome into being as they are lived, constructed and experienced by people.Studies of space are also inseparable from studies of time. From the longuedurée (sensu strictu Braudel, 1972–73) to the short-term movements ofpeople going in and out of places, place has a history and memory andspatial meanings change as the people moving through them change. Fromthe diverse group of space and place writers, in this article I highlight thework of de Certeau (1984) on the spatiality of everyday life. De Certeau(1984: xv) noted how all practices in the world are indeed spatial practices,and from such a perspective we can move the study of people’s practicessquarely into the domain of a spatial archaeology, instead of conceptualiz-ing archaeological evidence as the impoverished residues of the people andpractices we cannot access directly. De Certeau’s focus on the contexts ofpractices (1984: 33) and the relationships between the traces of practicesand the practices themselves (1984: 97) again makes his work particularly

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amenable to an archaeological endeavor which examines contexts andtraces of practices.

De Certeau developed two interrelated concepts – place and space – witha particular focus on the analysis of everyday life (de Certeau, 1984:91–130). De Certeau’s first concept, place, refers to the ordered settingswhich people create and give meaning to and which subsequently influencepeople’s lives. Places organize an ensemble of possibilities for people (e.g.a wall that prevents a walker from going farther). De Certeau’s secondconcept, space, refers to the multifaceted experiences of being and doingin a place which may or may not conform to previously constructed and/orconceived meanings and which continue to constitute and reconstitute themeanings of places. Spaces are the diverse walkers who bring places intoexistence and who work through the possibilities of place by followingcertain possibilities, disregarding others and inventing new possibilities.Place and space are only extricable in our own analytical abstractions asthe two depend on each other for their operation. Space does not existoutside of place, nor does place have any meaning until activated by space.Neither place nor space comes into being outside of the historical andcontextual locus of their production and reproduction. ‘Thus the streetgeometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space bywalkers’ (de Certeau, 1984: 117).

Operationalizing conceptual tools like de Certeau’s place and space,which interrelate the ordered worlds which humans construct with theirlived experiences of being in that world, provides one way out of theimpasse of theoretical polarities between studies of the social structure andstudies of practice and experience. As Sherry Ortner (1984) brought homein her seminal article on anthropological theory, throughout the history ofanthropology there has been a polarization between the study of socialstructures and the study of practices. As Ortner also noted, a new symbolof anthropology emerged in the 1980s which she referred to as ‘practice’but which actually incorporated a diverse range of interests in practice,praxis, action, interaction, activity, experience and performance (Ortner,1984: 144). Practice approaches sought to bridge the social structure/practice divide by showing the recursive relationship between the two (e.g.Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1984; Sahlins, 1985). In addition to the theoristsOrtner discussed, phenomenologists and ethnomethodologists have alsosought to achieve a similar goal (e.g. Garfinkel, 1984; Scott, 1985). Despiteadvances derived from these approaches, archaeologists are currentlyunderscoring the need to bridge social structure and practice in archaeo-logical research as ‘an important but neglected point in recent studies’(Dobres and Robb, 2000; Gillespie, 2000; Johnson, 2000: 213). In part, bothpractice and phenomenological/ethnomethodological approaches andtheir applications have been critiqued for either focusing too heavily onsocial constructionism or social experience (see Dobres and Robb, 2000;

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Gillespie, 2001; Johnson, 2000; Ortner, 1984; Oudemans, 1996; Yaeger,2000).

De Certeau’s relational notion of space and place draws from bothpractice and phenomenological approaches (among others), and as suchillustrates the important complementarity of these two perspectives in aunified analysis of social structure and social practice. From a temporalperspective, if the places and meanings people constructed in the past influ-ence people’s subsequent actions (place), then it should also be so thatpeople’s ongoing actions (the way people use space) continue to constructand reconstruct spatial meanings (space). As de Certeau would argue, howcould we possibly understand the social construction of social structurewithout simultaneously understanding social experience and vice versa?Although not necessarily working through the ideas of de Certeau, orframing anthropological debates in terms of practice and phenomenologicalperspectives, a number of archaeologists have recently pointed out theimportance of integrated analyses of social constructionism and socialexperience (e.g. Dobres, 2000; Gilchrist, 1999; Gosden, 1999; Hutson et al.,2000; Joyce and Hendon, 2000; Love, 1999; Meskell, 2001). In the follow-ing analysis I operationalize de Certeau’s concepts of place and space toillustrate the interpenetration of social construction and social experiencein the everyday lives of Maya farmers at Chan Nòohol, Belize.

Figure 1 Location of Chan Nòohol and Xunantunich in west-central Belize

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■ EVERYDAY LIFE AT CHAN NÒOHOL, BELIZE

Background to Chan Nòohol

Chan Nòohol is a cluster of seven farmsteads located on gently undulatinglimestone uplands in the Mopan and Macal river interfluvial of the BelizeRiver valley in western-central Belize (Figure 1). The Chan Nòohol farm-steads were part of a larger farming village called Chan (Ehret, 1998). Theywere located south of the village center (‘nòohol’ is south in Yucatec Maya).The history and internal dynamics of the larger village is the currentresearch project of the author.1 Here I focus on the Chan Nòohol farm-steads, which were excavated between 1996 and 1997 (Ashmore et al.,forthcoming; Robin, 1999, 2001a, b).

Chan Nòohol’s seven farmsteads were located approximately 50 to 100meters from one another (Figure 2; farmsteads are identified by thenotation CN1–CN7). Each farmstead consisted of agricultural areassurrounding one to two primary residences and in some cases other ancil-lary buildings. The one natural water source at Chan Nòohol was a stream,

Figure 2 The Chan Nòohol Settlement Cluster

N

0 50 m

CN5

CN3CN4

CN2

CN1

CN7

CN6

House Ancillary Str.Pathway/EntrywayAgriculture

Work Area

Refuse

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now running only intermittently. An artificial reservoir (aguada), located atfarmstead CN1, may have augmented the water supply for at least someresidents. As the Chan Nòohol area is 3 to 4 km away from a major riverand half a kilometer from a subsidiary drainage, these water resourceswould have been of clear importance for farmers.

The occupation of Chan Nòohol’s seven farmsteads was quite short-lived, restricted largely to the late Classic Hats’ Chaak phase (AD660–790).2 During this time period many other small clusters of farmsteadslike Chan Nòohol were constructed and occupied throughout the environsof the civic-center of Xunantunich, the political capital of the region at thistime, which was located 4 km west of Chan Nòohol. This temporal corre-lation between the construction and occupation of numerous farmsteadclusters like Chan Nòohol and Xunantunich’s regional political florescenceis not surprising because the scale and intensity of construction at Xunan-tunich certainly required a large labor force. Possibly even more criticalhere, this part of the Belize River valley area had always been an import-ant site for agricultural production in ancient Maya society (Ashmore etal., forthcoming; Fedick and Ford, 1990; Willey et al., 1965).

Given the proximity of Chan Nòohol and Xunantunich, Xunantunich wasmost likely the center of major ceremonial celebrations and other politicaland administrative activities for the residents of Chan Nòohol. Each day,from their homes and fields, the residents of Chan Nòohol could see thecentral temple-pyramid at Xunantunich on its imposing hilltop in thedistance. As they viewed this temple-pyramid each day, Chan Nòohol’sfarmers would have had a constant reminder of the broader society in whichthey were participants. This distant image of monumental construction,which was unlike any construction at Chan Nòohol, may also have remindedChan Nòohol residents of the limits of their social world and of the socialdifferences that existed in their society. The archaeological research at ChanNòohol discussed here was part of the larger Xunantunich ArchaeologicalProject directed by Richard Leventhal and Wendy Ashmore between 1991and 1997, which investigated the interrelationships between the civic-centerof Xunantunich and the surrounding settlement (e.g. Ashmore, 1998;Ashmore et al., forthcoming; Leventhal and Ashmore, forthcoming).

Constructing the place of Chan Nòohol

For the initial inhabitants of the Hats’ Chaak phase of Chan Nòohol, theChan Nòohol area was an abandoned landscape of a more limited pre-Classic settlement. The ‘filling in’ process, actuated by Chan Nòohol’sfarmers’ expansion into then ‘new’ lands, is a quite common settlementpattern during the late Classic population maximums in the Maya area (e.g.Fedick and Ford, 1990; Rice, 1993). At first glance (see Figure 2), settle-ment at Chan Nòohol may seem quite unorganized – fields and houses

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haphazardly placed, at no set distances, following no uniform orientations.But moving beyond strictly geometrical notions of order and organization,Chan Nòohol’s farmers seem to have constructed the place of Chan Nòoholutilizing quite detailed cultural knowledge of agricultural practices and theintricacies of the land.

Farmers at Chan Nòohol constructed their farmsteads around and facinga stream (all house compounds, except CN7, faced the stream). They usedthe potential of the sloping terrain at Chan Nòohol in both house and fieldconstruction. Farmers selected and cleared low bedrock rises (and in onecase an abandoned pre-Classic house platform) for the construction ofhouse platforms, and the distances between these rises, in part, accountsfor the different distances between house compounds. They built low stoneretaining walls following the contours of the sloping land to create flatterraced surfaces for agricultural production. The cultural construction ofplace at Chan Nòohol was created and ordered by molding and extendinga form that already existed in the topography of the land and the previ-ously abandoned pre-Classic landscape. Farmers’ use of land in theconstruction of place at Chan Nòohol, suggests that the ‘natural’ and‘cultural’ worlds formed a continuum of difference rather than constitutingthe binary and opposed categories typical of contemporary Westerncultural constructions (compare Ashmore and Knapp, 1999; Bender, 1993;Erickson, 2000; Thomas, 1996).

As well, Chan Nòohol’s farmers were not constrained by the same limi-tations that constrain the productivity of modern farmers in the region.Chan Nòohol’s Vaca suite, Cuxu subsuite soils, are considered marginalunder modern mechanized agricultural regimes (King et al., 1992). ButChan Nòohol’s farmers transformed the land into a productive agriculturallandscape by building terraces and adding fertilizer.3 They indeed createdan anthropogenic landscape that supported over a century of habitation.

Initially a single residence was constructed at each farmstead and, as Iexplore further, later the residents of farmsteads CN5 and CN7 added anadditional residence. The construction of all original house platforms atChan Nòohol was quite variable as farmers largely used unshaped piecesof limestone or chert cobbles from the vicinity of Chan Nòohol to buildtheir house platforms. The initial house platforms at Chan Nòohol werequite low, ranging in height from 0.3 to 0.8 m. These stone platforms wouldhave supported pole and thatch superstructures as no stone and only oneinstance of bajareque (fired clay walling material) was encountered at ChanNòohol (the lower section of the house at CN6 had a bajareque wall). Inmost of Chan Nòohol’s houses a large part of the interior was taken up bya low bench, a seating or sleeping area. Much of the daytime living andworking at Chan Nòohol happened outside houses in outdoor spaces orwithin ancillary structures.

The construction of Chan Nòohol’s buildings was similar to the

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well-preserved pole and thatch buildings built by certain families at thefarming village of Ceren in El Salvador which was covered by a volcaniceruption around AD 600 (Sheets, 1992). It differed from the largelybajareque and stone houses constructed by higher status commoner families(e.g. Sheets, 1992; Yaeger, 2000) and lower status noble families (e.g.Hendon, 1991). Contrasting with buildings made of solid stone or bajarequewalls, people at Chan Nòohol constructed buildings that were partly light-,sight- and sound-permeable. The interiors of Chan Nòohol’s buildingswould not necessarily have been so ‘private’ for people immediately insideor outside the house, as these people could have peered and talked throughopenings between the pole walls. As Sweely (1997) also discussed at Ceren,and scholars have discussed cross-culturally (e.g. Helliwell, 1992; Weiner,1991), the construction of pole and thatch houses enables a different set ofpossibilities in terms of visibility, audibility and privacy for those inside andoutside a house than when houses are constructed of solid walls. Wherethere are multiple structures in a house compound, people inside pole andthatch houses could have overheard, or even participated in conversationswith people in neighboring structures or immediately outside. For example,when the Foi of Papua New Guinea return to their longhouse villages forceremonies, men stay in men’s houses and women stay in women’s houses(Weiner, 1991). While a strict geometrical or division-of-labor spatialanalysis of this situation might lead one to suspect that Foi men and womenlead quite socially segregated lives during ceremonial times, Weinerdiscusses how Foi men and women listen and even raise their voices toparticipate in each other’s conversations from within different pole andthatch houses. Communicating through permeable walls and across openspaces, Foi women and men experience a commonly-lived world.

The permeability of sight and hearing through pole walls would havebeen different for those on the inside and those on the outside of thesestructures. People on the inside would have been able to see more of thelighter outside, and hear more of its noises, than would be possible forpeople on the outside looking in (at least during the day, with this situationbeing reversed at night). There likely would have been social conventions,which are now beyond our ability to reconstruct, that would have prohib-ited socially unacceptable people from walking right up to a pole and thatchhouse and peering in. From a greater distance the figures inside wouldappear to the outsider as only shadows and whispers, providing privacy forfamilies from their neighbors or anyone socially defined as an outsider.

Conceptualizing the place of Chan Nòohol: a family farmsteaddedication ritual

A unique find of a dedicatory cache offered following the construction ofthe first house at farmstead CN5 illustrates how this family conceptualized

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the new place of their farmstead at Chan Nòohol. At farmstead CN5 adeposit of ordinary river cobbles and a used and broken fragment of agreenstone axe was placed over a sealed miniature chultun (a subterraneanchamber) located behind and at the rear axis of the first house built at thatfarmstead. Residents placed the cobbles behind their house before inhabit-ing the farmstead because occupation-related refuse was discarded on topof it throughout the farmstead’s use life, indicating a dedicatory role for thedeposit. The cobbles had distinctive colorations. The north cobble had twowhite lines, the south cobble had one yellow line, the west cobble was halfblack and half red with the black half towards the west and the red halftowards the east, and at the center of these was a broken and heavilybattered fragment of a greenstone axe.

I have interpreted this deposit of ordinary stones as an ordinary farmingfamily’s version of a dedicatory cache, which consecrated their farmsteadas the center of the world axes. The cardinal directional symbolismevidenced in the CN5 cache was an important component of noble ClassicMaya rituals, caches, and conceptual models of the organization of theworld (e.g. Ashmore, 1991, 1998; Joyce, 1996, 2000; Robin, 2001a, c). Aswell, sanctifying ordinary house lots and fields in terms of cardinal worldaxes associated with specific colors and other symbols is an important partof ordinary people’s consecration of their living spaces in contemporaryMaya practice (e.g. Gillespie, 2000; Hanks, 1990; Vogt, 1976).

Although certain parallels can be drawn between the CN5 river cobblecache and Classic period ritual practices of Maya nobility and subsequentritual practices of modern farmers, the CN5 cache offers unique evidenceof a precise color-direction association in the Classic period situated in thecontext of a farmer’s house dedication ritual. While cardinal-directionalprinciples were important in Classic Maya noble ritual, there is littleevidence for standardized color-directional symbolism in the Classic period.Later post-Classic sources do note color-directional symbolism, but thereis variation in terms of what color goes with what direction. These associ-ations become more standardized during the period of contemporaryethnographies (e.g. Hanks, 1990; Vogt, 1976). The CN5 cache is a trace ofthe history of these later practices, rooted in the specific time, place andactivities of the residents of farmstead CN5. CN5’s farmers are amongst theClassic period actors who, through their practices, made what became thehighly conventionalized structures of ritual practices in much later periods.

The more geometrical/cosmological conceptual ordering of the place offarmstead CN5 constructed in ritual practice contrasts with farmers’ prag-matic ordering of their homes and fields in relation to knowledge aboutlocality and agricultural work. Perhaps this is unsurprising because ritualpractice is exactly the locus where one might expect the greatest constrainton contingency in practice. Chan Nòohol’s lack of on-the-ground geo-metrical/cosmological spatial ordering is indeed typical of Classic Maya

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commoner and non-royal noble settlements (e.g. Ashmore, 1981; Hendon,1997). Contrasting with these more pragmatic constructions of place,Classic Maya royalty built their cities to manipulate and display directionalprinciples such as cardinal directions, up/down, and left/right (e.g. Ashmore1991, 1998; Folan et al., 2001; Joyce 1996, 2000; Robin, 2001a, c). Again thisseems unsurprising because, as Pierre Bourdieu (1979) noted, it is societies’upper echelons who are most invested in and able to emulate and controltheir social world along the distinctive conventions of their society.

The parallel timing of Chan Nòohol’s occupation and Xunantunich’s riseto regional power indicates the interconnectedness of activities at ChanNòohol and those of the broader Classic Maya world, interconnectionswhich CN5 residents made manifest through their manipulation of morebroadly shared ritual constructs in their house dedication ritual. Within thisinterconnected world, farmers’ use of pragmatic principles in the planningof Chan Nòohol points to the social distance between Chan Nòohol’sfarmers and Xunantunich’s royalty and farmers’ abilities to plan their livesand living spaces beyond the top-down social control of society’s upperechelons (compare Joyce and Hendon, 2000 for similar comments aboutfarming communities in Honduras).

Living the space of Chan Nòohol

The ordered (pragmatic and conceptual) construction of the place of ChanNòohol provided a framework that only came into being as residents trans-formed Chan Nòohol from an ordered place to a living space. I had initiallythought that the lack of concrete architecture at Chan Nòohol might limitmy social and experiential analysis of the community because archaeolo-gists typically look to elaboration and division in architecture to accesssocial issues (e.g. Blanton, 1994; Steadman, 1996). But this lack of archi-tecture ended up being a blessing in disguise, because the entwined pathsof people walking, working and cleaning around Chan Nòohol left visibletraces (in terms of trampled artifacts and soil chemistry) in the porous soilsurfaces of the outdoor spaces.

Within each farmstead at Chan Nòohol, farmers conducted a similar setof tasks on a day-to-day basis: they prepared food, cooked, ate, stored theirpossessions, produced stone tools and cloth, observed rituals, slept and, ofcourse, farmed. High frequencies of artifacts and activity areas associatedwith the food-production process, from sowing to serving, coupled with lowfrequencies of artifacts associated with other activities, indicate that foodproduction was the primary activity for Chan Nòohol residents. While stonetool and cloth production was undertaken for household-level provision-ing, agricultural produce was most likely the only item – beyond labor itself– exported from the settlement.

Much of Chan Nòohol residents’ work happened outside, in agricultural

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spaces and exterior work areas, the latter used for food preparation andstone-tool making. Small ancillary substructures were also used for foodpreparation and stone-tool making. Spinning and weaving certainlyoccurred at most farmsteads, but I do not know where these activitieshappened because the only evidence for spinning and weaving was foundin refuse deposits.

Farmers’ activities organized the space and time of people’s existence –the temporal rhythms of a day, the seasonal cycles of work, and the livedspaces of the land. Figure 2 shows the traces of the meandering paths thatresidents took into and out of their houses (white shaded areas). Althoughpaths are not typical features recorded by archaeologists, routine patternsof walking do leave material and chemical signatures (Barba and Ortiz,1992; Middleton, 1998; Robin, 1999). The pathways that feet inscribe intothe ground through highly regimented movement will be more archaeo-logically recoverable than less traveled or less regular paths. At ChanNòohol paths were documented leading up to the fronts of houses and ontopatios where people’s walking was synchronized in relation to theseconstructions. The traces of people’s footsteps disappear as they movedfurther away from the house and their daily paths disperse into the variableand multiple routines and uses of everyday life.

Throughout Chan Nòohol’s exterior spaces the impressions of pathways,agricultural areas (light gray shaded areas), work areas (medium grayshaded areas) and refuse areas (dark gray shaded areas) (see Figure 2)remain embedded in the ground surface and are identifiable based ondistinctive artifact, ecofact and soil chemistry signatures. Each farmsteadgroup created and used these same types of exterior activity areas throughtheir repetitive everyday work practices and pragmatic understandings ofthe use and meaning of farmstead space. People worked on food and stonetool production in outdoor spaces within 20 m from their residences. Peopleswept and cleared their garbage to locations beyond the perimeter of theirwork areas. Agricultural areas were located interspersed between andbeyond these work and refuse areas. There was no spatial segregation of‘domestic’ from agricultural life and work at Chan Nòohol.

Despite certain broad similarities in the way farmers constructed andused Chan Nòohol, it was far from a homogeneous space. As people livedat Chan Nòohol, they socialized and spatialized the place of Chan Nòohol.The palimpsest of daily walking across the community is too diverse andcommingled to discern the paths of specific individuals at Chan Nòohol.Still, we can assess aspects of people’s diverse and often entwined lifewaysand experiences, particularly in terms of familial, gender, age, work andstatus differences.

In terms of the people who used Chan Nòohol’s spaces, there is exten-sive Classic period data to suggest that, at least as an ideal, women preparedfood and wove (Hendon, 1996, 1997; Joyce, 1993, 1996, 2000). Men, women

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and children variably worked on the many tasks that comprised the agri-cultural production process (Robin, 1999: 317–339; 2001b). It is plausiblethat men, women and/or children made and used stone tools because thereare no gender-linked images of people making tools, and stone tools havebeen found with male, female and juvenile interments during the Classicperiod (e.g. Welsh, 1988; also see Gero, 1991 on interpreting the gender ofprehistoric stone tool production). Implementing a phenomenologicalapproach and putting the aforementioned people back into Chan Nòohol’sspaces we can examine their interactions and interrelations as they livedand worked around their farmsteads.

The spatial imprint of movement and work around Chan Nòohol (seeFigure 2) indicates that the people who were making tools and the peoplewho were preparing food were doing these activities in the same space,regardless of whether or not they were the same people or were workingthere at the same time. Similarly, the people who were involved in agricul-ture were working within visualizing, talking or yelling distances of thepeople who were preparing food and making stone tools. As domestic andagricultural activities were largely undertaken in outside spaces, thisallowed communication between persons working on these activities.

At times, the gender- and age-work relations in particular spaces mayhave looked quite different at Chan Nòohol. For instance, when peoplewere working together on a harvest, gender- and age-related work waslikely harmonized together in space (e.g. a field), but at other times, whenwomen were at work on one task and men at work on another, people’swork would have been differentially situated in space. This differentiationwould have allowed for the development of both gender- and age-specificidentities as well as collaborative understandings of human relations.

Since the majority of people’s work took place in spaces that wereneither rigidly enclosed nor divided by great distances, people’s separate aswell as collaborative daily work was organized spatially in such a way thatcould facilitate interaction and communication rather than division (even,as previously noted, when they were undertaken in ‘enclosed’ pole andthatch buildings). Even when people were working in different spaces, thepeople who were preparing food and making stone tools and the peoplewho were involved in agricultural production would have been able to talk,shout or at least hear one another and in many cases directly view oneanother. The spatial and social commingling of agricultural and domesticwork created through people’s practices promoted situated experienceswhere work around the house would have been ‘domestic’ and agricultural,male and female, old and young. These living and working practices wouldhave fostered experiences of human relations as coordinated unificationsof difference.

As the length of Chan Nòohol’s habitation progressed, two farmingfamilies (CN5 and CN7) achieved enhanced socio-economic status,

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probably through their farmwork.4 These two families were the onlyfamilies to gain access to non-local, possibly luxury items, such as objectsmade of greenstone and marine shell, mostly Strombus sp. Later in theHats’ Chaak phase these families reconstructed their social difference intothe community at Chan Nòohol by building new and larger houses and stan-dardizing the external appearance of their homes in ways that were moretypical of higher status architecture at Xunantunich and throughout theMaya area. Albeit not a very grand modification, they used uniform, cutlimestone facing stone to standardize the outward appearance of thefacades of their house platforms in a manner similar to the use of cut stonefacings on houses of higher status members of Maya society (compare whatYaeger [2000] calls practices of affiliation). In so doing they re-inscribedtheir difference from other members of Chan Nòohol and their similarityand expanded links to outsiders onto the place of Chan Nòohol.

The residences at CN5 and CN7 were both the highest at Chan Nòoholand were constructed on stone patios which added to their height. Turningfrom enhanced status to a most mundane aspect of everyday life – dumpinggarbage: in addition to dumping their garbage beyond work areas, CN5 andCN7 residents dumped garbage behind their elevated houses. Had the resi-dents of Chan Nòohol’s lower houses, which were built directly on theground, dumped garbage beside their houses, this garbage would haverapidly risen up along the pole walls of their houses. Re-constructing theplace of their farmsteads provided new possibilities not only in terms of theobvious display, but in terms of the routines of everyday life. This distinc-tion in refuse dumping practices has implications for archaeologicalmethods. Often Mayanists place post-hole tests around a structure whenlooking for refuse, because, based on studies of larger residences (oftenthose of noble families), these are the locations where ancient peopledumped their garbage (e.g. Puleston, 1973). This assumed typical ancientMaya pattern of garbage dumping beside a house may not be typical of allmembers of ancient Maya society, just typical of those able to constructtheir houses on taller platforms.

Re-conceptualizing the place of Chan Nòohol: public ritual

Just as ‘domestic’ and agricultural work was not distinct within ChanNòohol’s farmsteads, neither were public-oriented and family-orientedaffairs. As mentioned above, Chan Nòohol’s water resources were econ-omically important for the farming community, and one of these keyresources was a water-hole located within farmstead CN1 (see Figure 2).

Although all farmers performed some type of ritual within their farm-steads, the only farmstead to hold small-scale ritual feasts was the small andunassuming single-residence farmstead CN1. In addition to conventionallycited archaeological markers of feasting – conjoined higher frequencies of

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serving vessels, ritual items and animal bone (LeCount, 1999; Yaeger, 2000)– farmstead CN1 had a greater spatial extent of work areas (see Figure 2)and higher density of refuse per cubic meter than other single-residencefarmsteads. The latter two remains seem to be the spatial imprinting ofgroup work and participation in communal feasting at CN1, that trans-formed CN1 at moments in its history from a conventional farmstead to asite of community-wide ritual. Supporting this assertion, my ethnoarchaeo-logical study at a modern farming community in Yucatán5 illustrated thatcontemporary households that hosted communal feasts had larger exteriorwork areas than other households, because communal feasts involve largerwork groups and participatory groups than does day-to-day familial work.The higher densities of refuse per cubic meter at CN1 may point to theother end of the feasting process, the greater amounts of debris that wouldaccumulate from feasting when compared to day-to-day familial eating.

Given its unassuming architecture, CN1’s proximity to the water-holeseems to be the key to the presence of communal ritual activities at onlythis particular farmstead. Drawing upon Classic period representations ofwaterways and water rituals, Scarborough (1998) has illustrated that water-ways are often depicted as pivots between the earth and the underworldbelow and the upper world above. As such, water-holes were sacred portalslinking human beings to their ancestors and earth deities as they physicallyconnected the earth’s surface, the land of the living and the underworld,the land of ancestors and earth deities (also see Brady and Ashmore,1999).6

Chan Nòohol’s water-hole seems to be of ritual (as well as economic)import in that it established the community as a place of significance withrespect to its own history. Through repetitive enactment of ritual and, plau-sibly, local history and memory, the place of Chan Nòohol was constitutedand re-constituted in the ritual place of the water-hole. In light of the ChanNòohol water-hole rituals, it seems relevant to re-assess the significance ofresidents’ construction of their houses to face Chan Nòohol’s stream. Inaddition to relating to more pragmatic concerns about water, this orien-tation towards water may have had social significance in terms of linkingresidents to each other through the water of the place of Chan Nòohol.

Joyce and Hendon have recently drawn upon Paul Connerton’s (1989)concept of inscription to describe the way ‘social actors use materiality totransform fleeting identities into historical facts’ (Joyce and Hendon, 2000:154). In their study of communities in Honduras, Joyce and Hendon foundthat non-domestic architecture, particularly ball courts, were important inthe development and inscription of community identity at various levels ofcommunity across the landscape. The Chan Nòohol water-hole was asimilar social venue at the local level of community at Chan Nòohol.Beyond the ritual sanctifications of their community, the limits of ChanNòohol and its relationship with other communities would have been

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visible to all members of Chan Nòohol every day as they observed the 150-foot high main temple-pyramid of Xunantunich looking down upon themfrom its high hilltop to the west. That temple-pyramid was another focalpoint of community ritual, but for a much larger and more socially diversecommunity. Chan Nòohol residents participated in this larger community,but their participation was more socially and economically restricted therethan within their own community. The distant and spatially elevated imageof the temple at Xunantunich would have reminded Chan Nòohol residentseach day of their interconnections, differences and independence from thelarger Xunantunich regional community.

■ CONCLUSION

At Chan Nòohol men, women and children worked around the house andthe ‘domestic’ and agricultural domains were neither socially or spatiallysegregated. Nor was everyday life a strictly inside or outside, private orpublic affair. These points underscore that rigid Western taxonomizing isinappropriate for understanding life cross-culturally. This leads us to beginour archaeological investigations of the ‘domestic’ domain (or any other)from the perspective of historic, contextualized case studies. Understand-ing the domestic domain (or any other) requires attention to the wayspeople actively construct and experience meaning and a focus on all venuesof domestic life, not just particular cultural fragments – houses, or any otherfragment.

The architecture that often situates analyses about how people orderedand organized their world tends to hide the archaeological evidence for thepractices of living in that world. Ancient people often swept floors clean orremoved activity debris from buildings at or after abandonment. The exca-vation of Chan Nòohol’s exterior spaces inverted (and incorporated) afocus on architecture. The unintended outcome of this inversion was therecovery of the archaeological remains of the spatializing practices of livingin a place. These spatial practices were more visible in exterior spaces thaninterior spaces because people’s everyday movements are inscribed intopermeable dirt surfaces in more overt ways than they are onto permanentfloors. The empirical insights into spatial practices readily observable inChan Nòohol’s exterior places are becoming equally recoverable from thesurfaces of prepared floors through innovative new research in micro-artifact, micro-morphological and chemical analyses (e.g. Matthews, 1997;Middleton, 1998; Middleton and Price, 1996; Yener et al., 2000).

At Chan Nòohol farmers constructed their farmsteads drawing uponquite detailed cultural knowledge about agricultural activities and the landof Chan Nòohol. Constructed in the distant shadow of and in relation to the

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regional rise of Xunantunich, the place of Chan Nòohol offered certainpossibilities in terms of the types of working and living activities that farmerscould undertake and the social relations of visibility, audibility and privacyin these daily working and living activities. The ordered (pragmatic andconceptual) construction of place at Chan Nòohol provided a frameworkthat only came into being as people transformed Chan Nòohol from anordered place into a living space throughout their everyday lives. As peoplelived at Chan Nòohol, they socialized and spatialized the place of ChanNòohol. At Chan Nòohol the imprints of people’s daily walking and workingdocuments some of the diverse and often entwined lifeways and experiencesof different family, gender, age, occupation and status groups. In some casesthis spatialization led to the re-inscription of replicated meanings onto theplace of Chan Nòohol, as seen in the repetitive ritual enactments aroundChan Nòohol’s water-hole. In other cases this spatialization led to the re-inscription of new meanings onto the place of Chan Nòohol, as seen in thenew displays of status by the residents of CN5 and CN7. From place to spaceand back again, the Chan Nòohol case illustrates the interpenetration of theordered worlds which people construct and the practices and experiences ofliving in that world. Just as the places and meanings people construct influ-ence subsequent actions in the world, people’s ongoing actions continue toconstruct and reconstruct spatial meanings. As seen in the Chan Nòohol casestudy, both analyses of social construction and analyses of social experienceare important to develop an understanding of meaning in the past.

Acknowledgements

This article derives from my dissertation research at Chan Nòohol which was fundedby the National Science Foundation, Fulbright/IIE, and the University of Pennsyl-vania. Many people are due my thanks for this research: Wendy Ashmore andRichard Leventhal, directors of the Xunantunich Archaeological Project; JohnMorris, Alan Moore, Brian Woodye, and the late Harriot Topsey, Belize Archaeo-logical commissioners; and my American and Belizean project colleagues.Comments from Rosemary Joyce, Lynn Meskell, William Middleton, Nan Roth-schild, Mary Weismantel and several anonymous reviewers helped me clarify myarguments. I alone am responsible for errors.

Notes

1 http://chan.northwestern.edu2 Two episodes of pre-Classic (900 BC–AD 250) activity in the Chan Nòohol area

lack continuity in the later farmsteads.3 Fertilization has been identified through soil chemical analysis including in-field

phosphorous testing and laboratory analysis of a 12 element suite usingInductively Coupled Plasma/Atomic Emissions Spectroscopy at the Universityof Wisconsin, Madison, by William Middleton.

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4 The specific socio-economic mechanism through which these two farmingfamilies enhanced their status is not completely understood at this time. Theiraccess to elite-controlled distribution networks at Xunantunich was likelylinked indirectly to people at Xunantunich through their relations with Chancommunity leaders (e.g. Ehret, 1998). Understanding such relationships is afocus of my future work at Chan.

5 The name of this community is being withheld to protect the privacy ofcommunity members.

6 There is one often-cited case of modern water-hole rituals at Zinacantan inChiapas, Mexico (Vogt, 1969, 1976). Zinacantan’s water-hole rituals serve as afocal point for integrating distinct social groups within the larger community,and water-hole rituals highlight people’s incorporation into a group based ontheir links to water and land where they live and work. While the feasting nextto the Chan Nòohol water-hole may have served a similar social venue, ChanNòohol’s water-hole feasting was different from modern water-hole rituals atZinacantan. Unlike the Chan Nòohol case, at Zinacantan’s water-hole ritualsno drinking or eating was carried out at the sacred water-hole. The ritual feastsassociated with Zinacantan’s water-hole rituals were held in the home of thesenior Mayordomo (the highest ranking community official; Vogt, 1976: 101).

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CYNTHIA ROBIN is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at North-western University. Her research focuses on everyday life throughanalyses of households, settlements, space and place, gender, and class.She is an archaeologist and works predominately in the Maya region ofMesoamerica.[Email: [email protected]]

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Outside of Houses - Cynthia Robin