Bridging the gap between archaeological and indigenous chronologies: An investigation of the Early Classic /Late Classic divide at Piedras Negras, Guatemala

Defining chronology as an interpretive framework that structures understandings of time/place/person relationships and facilitates the integration of social action with a history selected from available historical possibilities, this dissertation uses the site of Piedras Negras, Guatemala as a case study to examine several interrelated issues. First, it explores the history of chronologies in American archaeology to clarify the interpretive implications that different chronological schema impose a priori on the interpretation of material culture. Second, it explores the evidence for chronological practice among the Classic Maya to outline a method whereby archaeologists may reconstruct patterns of chronological juncture and disjuncture as they were meaningful to the Maya. An understanding of the variable ways in which different materials are ascribed chronological significance through practice is important for understanding the differential rates of change in architecture, ceramics, or other aspects of material culture used by archaeologists to define cultural historical phases. Largely because of their physical make-up and modes of production, different categories of material culture allow for different references to the past, present or future that occur at different moments and change at different rates. Finally, examining the data from excavations in the palace of Piedras Negras, as well as Tikal, Guatemala, Altar de Sacrificios, Guatemala, and Copan, Honduras, I offer a revised perspective on the divide between the Early and Late Classic periods based on the chronological practice of Maya rulers. In particular this work explores how Maya rulers engaged in chronological practice to guide their dynasties through an era of potentially devastating political upheaval. This dissertation concludes that as objects that participated in chronological practice, material culture and immaterial performances together constitute important signs of the relationship between person, temporality and place. The architectural and monumental changes evident at Piedras Negras and other sites during the mid-6th Century, are attributable to the needs of rulers to locate themselves in a place and time that substantiated their right to govern. Those who successfully negotiated this tumultuous period did so by creating what we see as the Early Classic/Late Classic divide