Multi-locality of an Ancient Maya City.

The anthropological study of place often finds that the shaping of landscapes is a continual process implicating many hidden actors whose traces persist centuries beyond their lifetime. This is especially true of places valued for their historical narratives, such as archaeological sites. In this paper, we consider the construction and shaping of the ancient Maya city of Palenque (Chiapas Mexico), as the result of a process involving many generations of indigenous Maya who worked together for a common purpose. We argue that the majority of laborers weren’t professional workers but commoners who dedicated part of their time to the shaping of the urban landscape. The history of those who physically shaped, built and signified the Classic Palenque cityscape (300-900 CE) is often absent from the archaeological narratives, which tend to focus on the design of major buildings and central plazas. As archaeologists we may find ourselves confronted with multiple, overlapping, sometimes competitive interests for the place we call an archaeological site. An archaeological “site” exists through a history with many narratives. As a place declared a UNESCO world heritage site, the ancient Maya city of Palenque has been deemed important not only to local Mexican citizens, but to the world. We consider how places are politicized, how they are made sacred, and how an ancient city can serve as a powerful monument to contemporary identity narratives. Archaeology tends to take a position of authority in “speaking for” a place, but as others have argued, places are not only academic creations, they are created and experienced by many. This paper follows others that suggest concepts such as multivocality and multilocality are essential for understanding just how a single place can evoke multiple meanings, emotions, and memories. For archaeologists, Palenque is an archaeological site, to be studied, to local indigenous Maya communities, some of which form the bulk of labor that excavate and reconsolidate its buildings, it is a family tradition, for local taxi drivers, vendors, and tour guides, it is a source of income, for tourists it may be the vestiges of a long lost, mysterious civilization, made all the more mysterious by popular media. With this paper, we attempt to move beyond the typical archaeological narratives of Palenque that tend to focus on the histories of those most visible in Palenque’s landscape, the kings and queens carved into the palaces and temples, to consider the ancient Maya laborers, architects, and commoners responsible for the construction of a stone built city that would serve as one of the most powerful political centers in the Western Maya lowlands. But as a city that is in a constant state of becoming, we also consider the indigenous Maya that continue to labor in this city. Both in the past and in the present, these communities, whose labor is primarily responsible for the landscape we know today, continue to be rendered invisible.