Publications

Chunchucmil (northwest Yucatan, Mexico) and other large Maya sites from the Classic period often do not exhibit clear edges. Though clusters of massive architecture define the center of these sites, delimiting the extent of settlement sometimes requires arbitrary judgments. Yet many issues depend upon where those edges are and what they are like. For example, identities that may be shared, contested, and imagined in the social and physical construction of boundaries within and around sites. Research at Chunchucmil furnishes a number of lines of evidence for delimiting the edges of this city and the ways in which households beyond the edge affiliated themselves with the site. In other words, spatial concepts such as site and city are not necessarily isomorphic with relational concepts such as community. This paper presents the results of our fieldwork at the edges of Chunchucmil and discusses the kinds of difference that constitute community identity.