Cycles of defence on the Piedras Negras kingdom periphery: landscape patrimony at the fortified hilltop community of El Infiernito, Chiapas

ABSTRACT

The modification and reuse of defensive features is a form of landscape patrimony, in which the built environment influences practices of warfare over time, redefining or solidifying the peripheries of political entities or communities. Some Classic period (AD 250–900) Maya kingdoms, including the royal dynasty based at Piedras Negras, Guatemala, relied on local governors and communities to defend peripheral areas and buffer zones between adjacent kingdoms. These boundaries, however, were constantly in flux, and different communities would have played variable roles in defence across time. The fortified hilltop site of El Infiernito, Chiapas, Mexico shows evidence of this practice from its founding as a small, Late Preclassic period (300 BC–AD 250) political centre to its reoccupation as a peripheral hamlet in the Piedras Negras kingdom during the Late Classic period (AD 600–900). This archaeological evidence has implications for how peripheral communities participated in regional political conflict.

KEYWORDS:

• Landscape archaeology
• Maya
• fortifications

Acknowledgments

I thank Proyecto Arqueológico Busiljá-Chocoljá co-directors Charles Golden and Andrew Scherer, Socorro Jiménez Álvarez (director of the ceramics lab at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Mérida), and Eric Pérez González, Juan Carlos Pérez, the ejido of La Selva, Ocosingo, Chiapas and the Consejo de Arqueología of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico who granted permission to conduct this research.

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest has been reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Rust Foundation, Sigma Xi, Penn Teece Fellowship, Kolb Foundation, Penn Museum, Penn Latin American and Latino Studies, and Lisa Lynn Brody Foley Fund.

Notes on contributors

Whittaker Schroder

Whittaker Schroder is a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Florida in the Center for Latin American Studies and the Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience. His current research involves remote sensing and landscape archaeology of the Maya focusing on human-environment dynamics. He directs the Lower Lacantún Archaeological Project in Chiapas, Mexico, a regional survey that approaches topics of urban and community resilience across a 2,000-year period of land use change.