Transforming bodies, transforming identities: A consideration of pre -Columbian Maya corporeal beliefs and practices

Abstract

Through space and time bodies present alternative surfaces upon which to inscribe social norms and personal predilection. This dissertation establishes a humanistic bioarchaeological framework for investigating the body and its intentional manipulation in life and after death. Past examinations have been fraught with misunderstanding or over-simplification of corporeal modifications. To move beyond past studies, I apply bioarchaeological frameworks and social theories. Cross culturally, alterations are informative about belief, experience, and practice. I argue that for the pre-Columbian Maya intentionally changing bodies of the living and the dead facilitated (re)construction of identity. Just like life, death is presented as a variable, extended process of social transformations, which are realized by bodily transformations. I also argue that identity constitution, in which corporeal change is implicated, structures ritual and quotidian practices and grounds embodied experience. To identify that which is often deemed archaeologically ephemeral, I examined pre-Columbian Maya burials from the Programme for Belize. At the writing of this dissertation, 132 individuals had been uncovered at sites ranging in size from Major Centers to House Ruins. The sample comprises a cross-section of society—from ruler to rural farmer. Burials primarily date to the Classic period (ca. A.D. 250–900), though a portion of the sample pertains to the Late Preclassic period (ca. 400 B.C.–A.D. 250). Critically applied ethnohistories and ethnographies further ground inferences about Maya peoples' constitutions of identity via body changes. In the case of corpses, I argue that bodies' modification speaks to the patterned processing of decedents for desecration or ancestor veneration, as demonstrated by bundling, wrapping, dismemberment, and excarnation. Such evidence suggests that ritual activities structuring this type of identity constitution were operative at all social levels. For the living, physically shaping individuals reinforced concomitant cultural shaping, or socializing, as suggested by cranial shaping. Moreover, painful transformations of bodies, as in the case of dental modification and tattooing, provided the impetus for transformations of selves. Ultimately, shaping bodies engendered unified community identity, supplied a small space for individual predilection, and communicated important cultural values.