Late Classic Maya Water Management and Community Organization at Copan, Honduras

AbstractRecent research on prehispanic water management throughout the Americas has made significant contributions to our understanding of the diversity of adaptive systems employed in regions where water is seasonally scarce, such as the Maya Lowlands. Since much of this workfocuses on large-scale technologies, the political and economic consequences of these systems for smaller social units remain poorly understood. Social dynamics associated with less-intensive forms of water use and control are investigated at Late Classic (A.D. 600–900) Copán, in a water-rich setting of western Honduras. Ethnographic, iconographic, and archaeological datasets suggest that lagoons located in Copán’s urban residential sectors may have been conceptualized, utilized, and maintained as communal property with ancestral ties by the inhabitants of surrounding domestic groups. By shifting the scale of analysis from the polity to the community level, these lagoons can be viewed as forms of communal property that created an economic and ideological basis for local social integration but offered limited opportunity for the centralization of power through monopolistic control. Yet, toward the end of the Late Classic, the appropriation of water-related dynastic symbolism and possibly ritual seems to have provided nonroyal elites with a means for creating local social identities, which undercut and eroded royal authority.