7
The Archaeology of Place in Ebtún, Yucatán, Mexico

Population Circulation and Resilience

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, place making among the descendant communities of Chichén Itzá was inextricably tied to the process of population circulation (see Schachner 2012 for the American Southwest)—the intraregional and multiscalar movements of households and individuals across the landscape, known in Yucatán as dispersal, drift, and flight (Alexander 2006; Farriss 1978, 1984). Changes in an individual’s or a group’s residence underwrote access to land, resources, and redefined kin and community obligations (Quezada 2014; Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934; Roys 1939). Population circulation typically transforms the relationship between people and space, resulting in subtle shifts in the composition of social groups, interactions, leadership, and the reproduction of social memory. By using written evidence to map out who lived where in space and time, it is possible to understand how past shifts in social configurations underpin representations of both tangible and intangible heritage for contemporary stakeholder communities.

Questions about the cultural changes produced by population movements in the wake of Yucatán’s Caste War challenge established explanations for cultural continuity developed for traditional Maya-speaking peasant communities in my study area. Today the narrative of Maya cultural continuity in the face of overwhelming global pressure has a new name—smallholder resilience (Alexander 2012b). Smallholders are autonomous agriculturalists who practice intensive and sustainable cultivation on their own land for their own subsistence and for sale in local or regional markets (Netting 1993). Smallholding agricultural systems are resilient because they have the capacity to cope with political uncertainty and environmental change in ways that are sustainable over the longue durée (Holling and Gunderson 2002; Scarborough and Burnside 2010). Yet, this does not mean they are unchanging and immutable. Over time smallholders create distinctive landscapes recognizable across the globe, which are characterized by high levels of biodiversity and are maintained through careful micromanagement of the environment. Smallholding landscapes owe their longevity to sustained transmission of traditional ecological knowledge that integrates both social and environmental learning (Netting 1993; Stone 1996, 2007; Wilk 1991). Moreover, continuities in the transmission of ecological knowledge clearly depend on the ways that population movement reconfigures residence, place, and the composition of social groups.

Two things especially underwrite resilience among smallholders—stability of land ownership and autonomy of local leadership (Netting 1993). The corpus of Maya-language documents known as the Titles of Ebtun (Roys 1939), which basically defines this study, attests to constancy of native leadership and landholding throughout the colonial period for Ebtún and the related communities of Cuncunul, Kaua, Tekom, and Tixcacalcupul (figure 7.1). It is important to note that notions of land ownership do not follow European norms (Quezada 2014). Rather, security of usufruct depended on the historically contingent interplay among patronym groups, residence, kin and community obligations, and place, which were expressed in oral tradition, in Maya- and Spanish-language documents, and in the material record. An important accomplishment of Roys’s research was to document long-term continuities in land use that linked patronym groups (chibal) to new colonial settlements (cah) and to places and locations mentioned in the documents (cenote² [natural water source], kax [forest], chen [well], labcah [abandoned or rotted town]) from 1600 to 1833. Yet, for the era following Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821, historians point to instability of both native leadership and landholding as causes of the Caste War (Cline 1947; Dumond 1997; Reed 2001; Rugeley 1997). In the area around Ebtún, the violence of the revolt resulted in drastic population decline, settlement aggregation, population movement, and political-economic reorganization.

Figure 7.1. Locations of sites in the study area in Eastern Yucatán.

It is possible to ascertain how the relationships between people and place shifted over time by reading the evidence gleaned from Yucatán’s detailed nineteenth-century censuses against the archaeological record. Below, I scrutinize the written evidence from the AGEY censuses for stability in landholding and leadership before and after the 1847 revolt. I begin with an outline of the social and spatial transformations that occurred after the Spanish invasion. Next, I analyze changes in population, settlement, and household size to reveal variation in their composition over time. I compare the distribution of surnames among settlements before and after the Caste War to reveal changes in the stability of leadership. My results show how population movement created different trajectories in the ways communities were tied to place, which are manifest in both tangible and intangible expressions of historical memory (Alexander 2012a). Finally I consider how nineteenth-century population movements and Caste War experiences are reflected in the material record. A discussion of the occupation history of two land parcels, the cenotes of Tzaab and Bubul, in comparison to Chan Kom illuminates the connections between the past and the present. Place making at both Tzaab and Bubul stand in stark contrast to the migration narrative of the founding of Chan Kom (Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934)—an “ethnographic past” (Chance 1996) that has long been considered the archetypical model for intraregional population movement in this region (see Alexander 2006, 2012a).

Maya Social Organization

In Yucatán, as in other Mesoamerican regions, place—rather than language, class or ethnicity—is the idiom for expressing sociocultural identity (Berdan et al. 2008). The Titles of Ebtun (Roys 1939) and other Maya-language colonial documents describe a range of social units that also have spatial referents (Hanks 2010; Okoshi Harada 2006, 2009, 2011; Quezada 1993, 2014; Thompson 1999) (table 7.1). In ad 1450 Yucatán’s farming communities were organized under numerous, autonomous political jurisdictions or city-states. Some were politically centralized and ruled by a halach uinic (great lord, king); others were collections of towns ruled by batabs (governors) (Okoshi Harada 2006; Quezada 1993, 2014; Roys 1943, 1957,). The towns united under the Cupul polity—which later included Ebtún, Cuncunul, Kaua, Tekom, and Tixcacalcupul—were governed by batabs who were consanguineally related (Quezada 1993, 2014; Roys 1957). The batab was a political leader and member of a noble house who administered various cuchteel, a social unit composed of extended or multifamily households, including consanguineous and affinal kin, who recognized a local leader and who often lived contiguously in the same residential unit or ward. The cuchteel also functioned as a corporate unit, providing for cooperative labor arrangements and mutual aid. Households known as otochnalob (householders; the suffix –ob is plural in Yukatek/Yucatec) also belonged to a patronym group (chibal). In addition, householders were identified as native to specific towns (Okoshi Harada 2009; Quezada and Okoshi Harada 2001; Roys 1939; Thompson 1999). Families were identified with particular places, often described as kax (forest), dzonot (cenote), chen (well), labcah (abandoned town), and col (milpa), which became the basis for claims of usufruct, community rights, and land tenure in the late sixteenth century.

Since these and other Maya-language terms have come down to us from sixteenth-century and later documentary sources, debates center on how social organization was altered after the Spanish invasion (e.g., Farriss 1984; Okoshi Harada et al. 2006; Quezada 1985, 1993, 2014). In the wake of demographic decline wrought by the disastrous introduction of European pathogens, the Spaniards implemented a forcible resettlement policy known as congregación, whereby people living in small, dispersed settlements were relocated to planned towns. The inhabitants of the city-state of Cupul who moved to the new communities of Ebtún, Cuncunul, Kaua, Tekom, and Tixcacalcupul retained the right to cultivate lands near their previous residences (labcah—abandoned towns) (Roys 1939:10). In addition, they recorded which families had previously resided in specific places and to which of the congregación towns they had moved. Specific cuchteels became established in named barrios or wards of congregación towns, often maintaining a degree of political autonomy as a parcialidad (ward, barrio). For example, in Tixcacalcupul, the parcialidad of Tahtun is still recognized as a separate barrio surrounding the cenote of Tahtun today. Thereafter, the cah (community), the chibal (patronym group), and the household (otochnal) became the principal units of social organization (Farriss 1984; Restall 1998).

Demographic information from the early colonial period suggests that households may have ranged in size from two to eleven persons who resided in two–three structures grouped around a patio within a solar or house lot (Restall 1998:3).³ Spanish authorities also tried to split up large extended and multifamily households and resettle them as nuclear family units, though some evidence suggests that extended family organization persisted, particularly in areas of lax ecclesiastical supervision (Roys et al. 1959; Roys et al. 1940; Scholes and Roys 1948; Weeks 1988). The fate of the chibal (patronym group) is particularly murky. In the early colonial period, patronym groups held land; marriage was exogamous; and people of the same chibal living in different villages recognized a social connection (Farriss 1984; Okoshi Harada 2011; Restall 1998; Roys 1943; Thompson 1999). Yet, by the eighteenth century the chibal had become shallower (Thompson 1999:77). Among some patronym groups, there was a tendency for community endogamy, but it is a common misconception that patronyms are exclusive to specific towns or regions in Yucatán. Some patronym groups dominated the leadership of specific towns over long time periods (Okoshi Harada 2009, 2011; Roys 1939). For example, many batabs of Ebtún were drawn from the Camal patronym group from the sixteenth century to the present (Roys 1939:48–49). Today, we know that people construct identities around place, especially the cah (town) and the household, but patronym groups are still pivotal to understanding shifts in political authority and place making.

It is important to point out that the colonial congregación orders entailed much more than the movement of people from one place to another. According to William Hanks (2010:xiv, 7), congregación was a means of coordinating the transformation of space, but the total project of reducción (forced resettlement) purposefully reformed conduct and language as well as space and place. Settlement aggregation and changes in town layout went hand in hand with the Franciscan missionaries’ efforts to instill Christian civility, correct behavior, and governance among the native population, which in turn were shaped by the transformation of Maya language, grammar, and notions of proper speech (Hanks 2010:4; 2012). Resettlement was coordinated with systematic attempts to alter meanings and usages in the Mayan language, but the consequent landscape transformations did not simply replace older meanings with contemporary ones. Instead, reducción added new semantic values to places, “layering perspectives” in the community’s collective memory (Hanks 2010:306).

I suggest that this layering of geopolitics, kin politics, and household organization provided the basis for negotiating leadership and landholding before and after the Caste War. My evidence for who lived where comes from a remarkable series of censuses in the Archivo General del Estado de Yucatán,⁴ which list all towns and affiliated outlying communities in my study area and the names of residents with their sex, age, and marital status, grouped into household units for the years 1841, 1883, and 1890 (figure 7.2).⁵ The analysis is informed by the results of my 2006 archaeological survey, which relocated many of the places described in the Titles of Ebtun and on the censuses (Alexander 2012a; Alexander et al. 2008; Roys 1939) (see figure 7.1).

Figure 7.2. A page of the padrón of Kaua in 1841 showing household divisions.

Population and Household Organization

The analysis of nineteenth-century censuses indicates that household size and composition shifted markedly during the Caste War. Unlike most regions in Mexico, native people in Yucatán retained Maya surnames. Every resident listed on the nineteenth-century censuses had a single patronym, and women did not take their husbands’ names upon marriage. Kinship was bilateral with a strong preference for patrilocal residence after marriage. At least, that is how the census takers saw things; we do not know how many individuals, households, or communities may have resisted inventory.

In the Titles of Ebtun, households and families are associated with specific places, but the documents provide no information about their composition and size. Otochnalob (literally, homeowners) is most often translated as “natives of / natural de” a specific congregación town, whereas places from which people were resettled (e.g., lab cah Panba / the old town of Panba) are associated with a pluralized patronymic (e.g., Tunob), translated as belonging to the Tun family (chibal) and their ancestors (kilicabil, patriclan) (Roys 1939:121–25, see also Quezada and Okoshi Harada 2001).⁶ Clearly, this is an example of the layering of perspectives about the associations between domestic groups and places. The form and size of coresidential units, however, are variable in time and space; they are sensitive indicators of how families organize day-to-day activities, as well as how family cycles unfold over time (see Fortes 1958; Netting et al. 1984; R. Wilk 1991). Because most of the nineteenth-century censuses from the study area are organized by household, it is possible to discern variation in household form and size during a period of drastic population decline and among different kinds of settlements.

The 1841 censuses reveal that before the onset of the Caste War, rural populations were large, and settlement was dispersed among cabeceras (administrative seats), towns (pueblos), ranchos (small communities of maize farmers, or small private parcels used for apiculture and raising pigs and goats), small haciendas (cattle estates with resident workers owned by Spanish creoles), and sitios (agricultural parcels). By contrast, the 1883 censuses indicate that in the Caste War’s aftermath, settlement was aggregated and overall rural populations had declined by 72 percent (table 7.2).

The 1890 census suggests that redispersal occurred quickly.⁷ Most haciendas had been abandoned, and smallholders developed new sites as ranchos and sitios. Generally, the households and patronym groups that resided in specific ranchos in 1841 were not the same patronym groups or descendants who reoccupied them in 1883.

Household size and form are also variable before and after the revolt. Among all households in the study area, household size, mean age, the number of generations, and the ratio of dependents are significantly different before and after the Caste War (table 7.3). Household size and the number of generations increased as the revolt subsided. Mean age increased temporarily, falling back to twenty-two years by 1890, while the ratio of dependents (measured here as the percentage of adults) decreased. The statistical patterns suggest that in 1883, households were composed of older adults with more children, and population recovery resulted in a decrease in mean age by 1890.

Further, if one examines household variation among different kinds of settlements (pueblos, ranchos, and haciendas), the 1841 census clearly shows that before the Caste War, settlements of all sorts were composed of nuclear families (table 7.4). There are no significant differences in household size, mean age, the number of generations, or the ratio of dependents among towns, ranchos, and haciendas in 1841. In 1890, however, the censuses show that household size among all settlement types is significantly larger. Yet, among the few surviving haciendas listed in 1890, household size and the number of generations is significantly smaller than in pueblos and ranchos, and mean age is higher. Hacienda laborers did not own their land (i.e., they were not smallholders), and this pattern may suggest that the estates were hiring more single and able-bodied adults with nuclear families, rather than larger extended families and households.

Shifts in household size and composition provide clues to changes in the boundedness of social units and smallholder labor organization, as well as social reproduction and meaning. According to Richard Wilk (1991), household size and form depend on the organization of household labor and the degree to which simultaneous scheduling of tasks requires formation of intermediate-size work groups, which help avoid risks and shortages triggered by bottlenecks in the agricultural calendar. Where household strategies are diversified, agricultural tasks are most likely to involve complicated simultaneous scheduling and larger work groups, and settlements tend to be composed of household clusters that facilitate labor sharing above the nuclear household level. In situations where the domestic agricultural calendar follows a simpler, linear schedule, settlements tend to be composed of nuclear families.

Before the Caste War, then, it is likely that rural communities of all sorts were sufficiently large to permit simpler, linear agricultural schedules, and diversification of agricultural produce was achieved through exchange and local markets. Intermediate-size labor groups could be organized easily among nuclear family households, especially with consanguineous or affinal kin in larger settlements, to cope with short-term scheduling bottlenecks and shortages. Households of the same patronym group often resided in particular barrios or sections of towns, which facilitated labor sharing. Yet, with the drastic population decline and settlement aggregation during the most violent years of the revolt, local markets were disrupted, and farm produce was often appropriated by rebel Maya and Yucatecan militias (Dumond 1997). These conditions inspired a range of social coping strategies that included remarriages, adoptions, and single adults who moved in with kin (see also Bricker and Hill 2009). Larger households were advantageous for coping with bad year economics, because fewer opportunities for labor sharing and exchange were available in small shrunken communities. Larger household size offered opportunities for subsistence diversification and greater efficiency and flexibility in labor scheduling.⁸

Leadership and Landholding

Changes in the size and household structure of smallholder households and communities had a profound influence on leadership. In the early colonial period, households were grouped into a community (cah) and governed by the República de Indios (town council, cabildo) after the congregación orders were implemented in the sixteenth century. The structure of town governance was based on the batabil, and formal positions in the cabildo included a batab (governor), escribano (scribe), alcaldes, regidores, and other assorted lower-rank offices (Thompson 1999:19, 49–54). One of the principal functions of the República de Indios was to notarize all transactions involving property within the town boundaries and defend the community’s land rights. As a result, continuity of landscape knowledge was tied to the stability of local administration. According to Thompson (1999:283), the batab’s term was twenty years (one katun within the Maya calendrical system) and was legitimized as hereditary rule within an elite group, and sometimes within a single chibal. The batab and other cabildo offices were chosen from a pool of elite families with privileged access to political office within the town (Restall 1997: 65, 73–78, cf. 61–64).

The República de Indios constituted the crucial interface between the town and all other economic and political institutions of the colony. Therefore, it is not surprising that colonial authorities meddled in local affairs and attempted to limit the power of the batabs from the sixteenth century onward (see Thompson 1999:38–45). Under the Bourbon political reforms, colonial authorities became a significant and interfering presence in rural communities. By the early nineteenth century, the powers of the República de Indios were progressively limited, first with the implementation of the Cortes de Cadiz (1812–14) and most severely after independence (1821), as nonnatives gained control of political positions in local rural government (ayuntamiento) (Güemez Pineda 1994, 2005; Rugeley 1997). The República de Indios and native ruling elites forged new factions and alliances with creoles, clergy, and government authorities, especially in the east around Valladolid (Rugeley 1997:94,162).

The nineteenth-century censuses are not the right sorts of documents for tracking changes in village leadership and political organization, but they offer key insights into the composition and size of the pool of elite patronym groups from which local political officials were selected. In 1841, before the onset of the Caste War, the total number of distinct surnames for all male household heads in the study area was 148, but during the aftermath in 1883 and 1890, the number of patronyms had shrunk to 65 and 68 respectively. The distribution and size of the largest patronym groups, measured as the number of male household heads who shared the same surname, also changed between 1841 and 1883. For the 1841 census, it is possible to compare the distribution of male patronyms (number of household heads) among the towns of Ebtún, Kaua, Tekom, and Tixcacalcupul. Table 7.5 shows that households belonging to the largest patronym group could top 16 percent of all households in the community. Yet, a range of several influential patronym groups who shared or competed for leadership positions were situated in each town. The batab was not always a member of the most numerous patronym group, but he was always from one of the larger ones. Further, a simple tally of male and female patronyms by household shows that members of the largest patronym groups intermarried, though people with Spanish surnames tended to marry their distant cousins of the same patronym (table 7.6) (see Thompson 1999:212). Nevertheless, there are exceptions to this tendency. At least one influential patronym group, the Koh from Tixcacalcupul, showed no preferential marriage pattern. It may indicate that the Koh were forging alliances broadly, with as many different patronym groups as possible. Overall in 1841, the recruitment pool for leadership positions was diverse. Individuals could be tapped from six to ten different patronym groups that consisted of more than ten households within each community (table 7.5).

After the Caste War the 1883 census shows that the largest patronym groups of 1841 were still dominant, but a much narrower range of other influential patronym groups remained within each community (table 7.7). In Tekom, the Batun and Tec patronym groups displaced the Cocom and Chulim patronym groups that were more numerous before the Caste War. A shuffling of rank order in the number of households belonging to each patronym group is apparent in Ebtún in 1883. A comparison of tables 7.5 and 7.7 clearly shows that some towns experienced greater continuity in the pool of leaders (Ebtún, Kaua), whereas others underwent more disruption (Tekom, Tixcacalcupul).

In addition, a tally of the incidence of male and female patronyms for each household in 1883 suggests shifts in alliances and factions, and more intermarriage among people belonging to the same patronym group (table 7.8) (see Thompson 1999:206–12). The marriage pattern is undoubtedly the result of fewer choices of potential spouses. Yet, possibly the pattern indicates that the reshuffling of village leadership was accompanied by forging marriage alliances among families of the same patronym, which may have streamlined inheritance and strengthened the wealth and position of some groups.

The censuses make it possible to map the spatial distribution and density of any patronym group for 1841, 1883, and 1890. Although the analysis of these data is not yet complete and an in-depth discussion of population movement is beyond the scope of this brief chapter, a few trends are worth mentioning. First, for all census years, some patronyms (e.g., Batun, Camal) cluster in one or two towns, whereas others (e.g., Canul, Poot) are found in all of them. There is no pattern of increasing compartmentalization of patronym groups in distinct geographic locations as a result of the Caste War. In 1841, the largest patronym groups within each town were widely distributed among haciendas and ranchos of the region. Yet, connectedness was variable. A few influential patronym groups, such as the Noh from Ebtún and the Tec from Tekom, were found in a narrower range of settlements. Also, members of all patronym groups could be found in the city of Valladolid and the parish seats of Uayma and Chichimila.⁹ This suggests that the patronym groups that comprised the leadership pool enjoyed broad intraregional connectedness across the study area.

Second, by 1883 the most prominent patronym groups still resided in towns, but a few surnames were widely distributed among rural settlements. For example, households of the Noh and Poot patronym groups, previously among the most numerous from Ebtún, dispersed to reside on a number of haciendas and ranchos by 1890. A process of dispersal to new ranchos, sitios, and haciendas rearranged the relative frequencies of patronym groups in the towns and suggests that village factionalism was resolved through movement in the aftermath of the revolt. Yet, households belonging to specific patronym groups did not reoccupy the same places where they had resided before the Caste War, nor did whole patronym groups up and leave town for the forest in 1890.

Third, movement of patronym groups to new geographic locations was not always accompanied by severing political ties or kin obligations in the parent community. In many cases dispersal to rural settlements and movement to larger towns and the urban center of Valladolid enhanced both the community’s and the patronym group’s economic potential and political connectedness. Although post–Caste War population movement is exceedingly complex in this region, the towns of Tekom and Tixcacalcupul experienced more movement of patronym groups than Ebtún and Kaua, which led to greater instability in the leadership pool. These landscape shifts set the stage for changes to smallholders’ livelihoods that occurred with the push for modernization in the twentieth century.

Reconfiguring Place after the Caste War

Changing relations between people and place, described above, had a profound influence on the structure of landholding and leadership that emerged out of the Caste War and into the postrevolutionary agrarian reform of the 1930s and 1940s. The migration narratives for individual patronym groups are clearly rooted in post–Caste War experience (see Armstrong-Fumero and Hoil Gutiérrez, this volume) and are further reflected in the development or lack of development of the built environment (Alexander 2012a). As Elizabeth Brumfiel (2003) observed, the construction of social identity is rooted in people’s understandings of the past, which are frequently reinforced by interpretations of material remains. In my study area, place-making negotiations that resulted from the tensions of population movement are expressed through variable combinations of written, oral, and material media. The following examples from Tzaab, Bubul, and Chan Kom highlight how place making produces variation in the social reproduction of tangible and intangible heritage.

Tzaab

Yucatán’s Caste War resulted in the creation of a new religion centered on the cult of the speaking cross with its own priesthood and religious practices (Bricker 1981; Dumond 1997; Rugeley 1997, 2009; Sullivan 1989). Arguably, the conflict also is the source of a new Maya “cruzob” identity, which traces its roots to the rebels—or cruzob—of Noh Cah Santa Cruz, the first seat of the talking cross (Gabbert 2004). The movement created a political divide on the peninsula between communities who supported the rebellion and adopted the new religion and those who did not. The schism is still expressed in the distribution of “dressed” crosses (wooden crosses covered with an embroidered cloth huipil [woman’s blouse]) across the landscape (Dumond 1985, 1997:plate 4).

In my study region, all named locales—including unoccupied cenotes, rejolladas (sinkholes), and wells—are marked by wooden crosses set in stone footings, called mojoneras. These crosses were established in the early colonial period but have become new emblems for signaling the community’s relations with the past. Cruzob identity is marked spatially in the region by the distribution of dressed crosses (with a cotton cloth or embroidered huipil spread over the crossbeam) that mark the entrances to communities (figure 7.3). Today, Tixcacalcupul, Tekom, and all of their dependent settlements—including land parcels, wells, cenotes, haciendas, and ranchos—have dressed crosses at settlement entrances. By contrast, the inhabitants of Ebtún, Kaua, Cuncunul, and Chan Kom erect plain crosses at the entrances to their pueblos or dependent communities. The maintenance of dressed crosses for dependent settlements of Tixcacalcupul and Tekom is an important aspect of historical identity that commemorates community experience during the Caste War.

Figure 7.3. A shrine at Tzaab.

Yet, Tekom and Tixcacalcupul also experienced the greatest disruption to leadership during the mid-nineteenth century. New politicoreligious identities and ideologies, visibly expressed as dressed crosses, clearly tied dependent ranchos, haciendas, and sitios to new political authority in the parent towns of Tekom and Tixcacalcupul. The rancho Tzaab is a good example of the material expression of intangible Caste War heritage that also recalls the early colonial period resettlement of patronym groups from pre-Hispanic sites (labcah) to congregación towns (Alexander et al. 2008). A small community of maize farmers (pop. thirty-four, nine households) reestablished itself at the pre-Hispanic site situated around a large, deep cenote in 1841. The settlement was abandoned during the Caste War but was reoccupied in the twentieth century by different patronym groups whose patron saint was Santa Cruz. After Hurricane Gilberto in 1988, they returned to Tixcacalcupul, and at least one family from Tzaab held a leadership position in town in 2006. Families still return to Tzaab on May 2 to celebrate the feast of Santa Cruz. Today they maintain a shrine to Santa Cruz, with elaborately dressed crosses oriented east-west, situated on top of one three-meter-high pre-Hispanic structure (figure 7.3).

Bubul

Migration narratives about how and why new communities were founded in the first half of the twentieth century became enshrined in the ethnographic cannon with Redfield and Villa Rojas’s (1934) publication of Chan Kom. Yet by the time Chan Kom had become politically independent from its parent community of Ebtún, population movement and dispersal had been ongoing for over fifty years (Alexander 2006). Between 1890 and 1905, families from Ebtún resettled sixteen ranchos, haciendas, and sitios.¹⁰ To show how post–Caste War dispersal layered additional meanings on the landscape, I situate the founding of Rancho Bubul in a comparative context.

Bubul is a dependency of Ebtún, the most politically stable town in my study region. Material expression of politicoreligious affiliation or dependency is not evident at the site, as it is at Tzaab. Instead, Ebtún’s place-making negotiations involving Bubul were conducted with the power of the pen and by linking colonial-era primordial titles to the petitions for ejido (collective land grant) lands during the Cardenist agrarian reform. The history of landscape transformation at Bubul diverges sharply from the story of Chan Kom and offers an alternative perspective on the Maya ethnographies produced during Mexico’s agrarian reform (1924–40) (Redfield 1941, 1950; Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934; Steggerda 1941; Villa Rojas 1978; see also Armstrong-Fumero 2007, 2013; Castañeda 1996; Re-Cruz 1996; Strickon 1965).

First and foremost, Bubul (like Tzaab) is a cenote located eighteen kilometers northwest of Ebtún (figure 7.4; see also figure 7.1). The name Bubul means half filled with water, which is an apt description since water is found only on one side of the twenty-meter-deep cylindrical depression at the base of a steep vertical limestone wall. Water is only accessible by lowering a jar or bucket on a rope from a wood platform or scaffolding perched on the edge. There is a well located a short distance away from the cenote, known as Txeth. Dense primary and high secondary forest vegetation and large mamey (Pouteria sapota) fruit trees are associated with the cenote. The trackway to the cenote is marked by a plain, undressed wooden cross set into a stone base, and the surrounding land is used for milpa cultivation.

Figure 7.4. The cenote of Bubul.

Bubul is also an archaeological site consisting of numerous pre-Hispanic structures, the largest of which are five to seven meters high. Architectural features and surface ceramics (slateware) indicate the site dates from ad 900–1200 and likely extends to the conquest. Surface artifacts (ceramics and metal) dating to the twentieth century were scattered on top of one of the pre-Hispanic structures, but generally the ruins are well preserved and have not been looted or stripped of stone for building material. It seems likely that Bubul’s inhabitants were resettled in Ebtún under the sixteenth-century congregación orders. The site is a labcah, though it does not appear in the earliest boundary survey in the Titles of Ebtun (Roys 1939).

Eighteenth-century documents from the Titles of Ebtun show that the lands around Bubul and Txeth had a checkered history of ownership, involving disputes with the batab of Uayma. Patronyms associated with the transfer of the property to Ebtún include Alcocer, Tus, Cime, Kak, Huh, and Kantun (Roys 1939:315). Although the town of Ebtún acquired these tracts from individuals who had inherited them in the eighteenth century (called kax cah [town’s forest] in the documents), they became private property afterward (Roys 1939:58, 272). Members of the Un and Couoh patronym groups inherited parts of the tract in 1812 and therefore held legitimate interests in Bubul, along with the town of Ebtún itself.

In 1890 Vicente Un appears to have been the senior household head of a group of twenty people who resided at Bubul. Households consisted of two multifamily groups, headed by men of the Un, Pat, and Noh patronyms and women of the Noh, Camal, and Ydzincab patronyms. They were composed of widowers, married couples, their children, and a widow caring for children whose consanguineous relationship with the family is unclear.¹¹ Since no members of the Couoh patronym group appear on the list, it appears that the links between place and patronym group were reconfigured in the aftermath of the revolt. The group became full-time residents of Bubul sometime after 1862, since both Vicente Un and his wife Martina Noh appear on Ebtún’s 1862 census.¹² The inhabitants remained at Bubul until after 1905, when the rancho is listed as having six houses and forty-six residents.¹³ Throughout this period, Bubul’s residents were identified as being from Ebtún.

In the years leading up to Mexico’s agrarian reform (1924–40), the new municipality of Chan Kom considered Bubul to be part of Ebtún’s “unduly large” ejido, yet the town of Cuncunul tried to claim the cenote and surrounding lands as part of their grant (Armstrong-Fumero 2007:139). In 1940 the people of Ebtún challenged Cuncunul’s ejido petition and produced a 1798 land title with its boundary survey establishing ownership of Bubul (Armstrong-Fumero, personal communication, 2010, 2013; Roys 1939:272).¹⁴ As the story goes (Alexander et al. 2008:128), a group of outsiders had already built a town hall, houses, and a school, but the Mexican army evicted them, forcing them to leave all their belongings behind, and transported them to Tihosuco (see Leventhal et al. 2012).¹⁵ In the second half of the twentieth century, Bubul was occupied for a stretch of eighteen years by a group of farmers from Ebtún, including members of the Un patronym group. They returned to Ebtún after Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, and Bubul remains the town’s forest (kax cah) today.

Chan Kom

In Yucatán, the relationship between population circulation and culture change were originally understood from within an acculturative framework—Robert Redfield’s folk-urban continuum—in which the village of Chan Kom was proposed as the archetypical example of Maya folk culture. Chan Kom: A Maya Village (Robert Redfield and Alfonso Villa Rojas 1934) became a touchstone for all subsequent ethnographic studies in Yucatán, as well as one of the principal sources of direct historical analogies for archaeologists. I offer the following comments only as a comparison to the archaeologies of place for Bubul and Tzaab; a complete analysis of Chan Kom’s founding and subsequent development is beyond the scope of this chapter.

Redfield and Villa Rojas (1934:34) described the founding of Chan Kom as a response to agricultural necessity, an explanation that is not supported by mine and others’ analyses of nineteenth-century demography and agriculture (Alexander 2006; Strickon 1965). It was an agricultural parcel containing a water source (kom) that was farmed by people from Ebtún. By 1918 it had over a hundred people (Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934:25–28). Once the place became permanently inhabited by several pioneer families, a community spirit developed, which led to political independence and local sovereignty from Ebtún, its parent community. Movement to milperías and rancherías such as Chan Kom was also an important safety valve for peasant communities—a way of resisting the worst exigencies of colonial and postcolonial regimes (Wolf 1957, 1990). Redfield and Villa Rojas predicted constant dispersal and down-the-line expansion of settlement—that Chan Kom would eventually establish milperío colonies of its own. Chan Kom’s break with its parent community came in 1923 when the population petitioned the government for an ejido grant. Under the leadership of Eustaquio Ceme, Chan Kom grew as it absorbed refugees from Yaxcabá, Kancabdzonot, and Yaxuna who fled the violence of the liberalist and socialist disputes in the region (see figure 7.1).

Although the early history of Chan Kom is similar to Bubul’s and Tzaab’s, place making at Chan Kom involved a different set of strategies that link the town’s origin story and emerging political autonomy to its architecture and infrastructure. Compared to Tzaab and Bubul, Chan Kom’s foundational narrative reflects a divergent trajectory of development and the formation of a distinct political identity, which are clearly expressed in in the built environment (Alexander 2012a; Armstrong-Fumero 2013). Residents went on a building spree to commemorate their commitment to modernization, Mexico’s 1910 socialist revolution, and the subsequent agrarian reform.

Chan Kom no longer resembles the traditional farming village so carefully documented by Robert Redfield and Alfonso Villa Rojas (Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934; see also Goldkind 1965; Re-Cruz 1996). The success of the community’s bid for political autonomy is starkly reflected in the town’s buildings and layout. Chan Kom’s town center is dominated by a massive administrative building (palacio municipal) that faces a modest church with two bell towers across the main plaza. The middle of the plaza contains the cenote or kom, a collective and communal space improved with cemented pathways and retaining walls to permit easy access to the water. The original perishable constructions have been replaced by masonry and cement block buildings constructed in postrevolutionary style. Houses are laid out on a grid plan and are constructed of cement block, some with red tile roofs, and express variation in socioeconomic strata, in contrast to the perishable, pole-and-thatch single-room buildings that were already being replaced with masonry construction during Redfield and Villa Rojas’s time. The principal paved roads lead directly north and south from Chan Kom and connect it to Yucatán’s main east-west highway, not to Ebtún. Material expressions of the community’s earlier colonial history or Caste War experience are generally absent, as they are in Redfield and Villa Rojas’s (1934) ethnography (see Castañeda 1996; Strickon 1965). That is because Chan Kom’s claims for political autonomy were not legitimated by its past; rather, they were substantiated by a move toward modernity and progress (Redfield 1950).

Final Considerations

It is clear that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Ebtún and related communities were fully engaged in social dynamics that layered new perspectives, meanings, and social memories across a landscape that could hardly be described as static and unchanging. Analysis of nineteenth-century census records clearly shows that relations among space, place, community (cah), patronym group (chibal), and the household (otochnal) were reconfigured to address the demographic, political, and economic challenges of the Caste War and the agrarian reform of the twentieth century.

The dispersed settlement pattern of the early nineteenth century at first became more aggregated in response to Caste War violence. Yet, redispersal of settlement occurred in the last decades of the nineteenth century, which helped to mediate village factionalism caused by population decline and movement among towns. Population circulation reconfigured the size and composition of households. They increased in size and generational depth after the Caste War, and their age structure and ratio of the numbers of dependents were altered.

Nineteenth-century population movements caused shifts in the size and connectedness of prominent patronym groups, and the pool of potential village leaders remained more stable in some towns than in others. In most cases one or two patronym groups became notably dominant after the Caste War, whereas before the revolt leadership positions had been shared among a broader range of patronym groups. Marriage between members of the same patronym group became more common by 1883.

Rural landholdings were in flux in the late nineteenth century. Land parcels, haciendas, and ranchos were abandoned during the most violent years of the Caste War. But by the 1890s new multifamily households had moved away from the towns to form new rural communities. Dispersal to new locations after the Caste War was legitimated through a group’s affiliation to a town (cah) that had possessed political jurisdiction over the place, and usually not through claims of prior individual private ownership.

Finally, population movement altered the ways that communities were tied to place, which are manifest in both tangible and intangible expressions of historical memory (Alexander 2012a). Different histories of population movement for Tzaab, Bubul, and Chan Kom clearly influenced the strategies and choices of media (oral tradition, written records, or the material record) employed in the construction of heritage.

This study reveals that in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, social-organizational categories and their relationships to place were reformulated through population movement. It does not demonstrate static continuity of household structure, leadership, or stability of landholding. The landscape forged by Yucatán’s Caste War was markedly different from that of the colonial period, and it was remade again in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution and agrarian reform. It is this process of continual transformation of the relations between people and place—adjusting everyday practice to cope with political and environmental uncertainty—that attests to smallholder resilience in Yucatán.

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented in the symposium entitled “Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and Ethnoarchaeology of Space: Current Projects and New Directions” at the seventy-seventh annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, April 18–22, 2012, Memphis, TN. The archaeological survey and archival research on which this chapter is based were sponsored by a 2006 US Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad fellowship and the College of Arts and Sciences at New Mexico State University. I thank Fernando Armstrong-Fumero and Julio Hoil Gutierrez for their encouragement.