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Ritual or residential? An integrated approach to geochemical prospection for understanding the use of plaza spaces at Palmarejo, Honduras

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Abstract

Patios and plazas represent two of the most common types of open space found at ancient Mesoamerican settlements. Patios tended to serve as areas for household activities, while plazas were commonly the focus of community wide religious and political rituals. With the aid of geochemical prospection of sediments and plasters, archaeologists have been able to successfully identify and characterize these spaces at many archaeological sites in the Maya region of southern Mesoamerica. However, in communities located adjacent to the Maya world where cultural interactions between different ethnic groups were highly complex, it is difficult to understand the use, management, and meaning of open spaces, which often shifted over time. While geochemical studies in the region have been useful for detecting the locations of activity areas in open spaces, the structure and composition of these activities often remain challenging to interpret because they represent a palimpsest of different practices over time. In this paper, we examine the interplay of chemical residues with other sediment properties, including organic matter and potential hydrogen, with the greater goal of increasing the interpretive potential of geochemical data for understanding activity spaces at the site of Palmarejo in northwest Honduras (ca. AD 600–900). Using a mild acid extraction procedure and inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry, we chemically characterize anthrosols from a formally defined open space at the site, and analyze the data quantitatively and spatially using interpolation with Kriging. We then compare the spatial patterns of the chemical elements to the distributions of soil organic matter (loss-on-ignition) and soil pH (glass electrode), and evaluate the results with excavation data from the space. While the results are not straightforward, our research leads us to conclude that the area under investigation most likely served as a venue for ritual activities, a finding that is consistent with similarly structured areas in the community and the broader region. These results lead us to advocate for more integrated analyses of multiple sediment properties in archaeological prospection of complex spaces.

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Acknowledgments

The research reported here is part of the University of South Florida (USF) Palmarejo Community Archaeological Project (PCAP) and was conducted with the permission of the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia (IHAH). We appreciate the support and advice of Virgilio Paredes Trapero, Darío A. Euraque, Margarita Durón Meza de Galvez, Carmen Julia Fajardo, Eva Martínez, Aldo Zelaya, the late Juan Alberto Durón, and other staff at the IHAH. The PCAP is funded by the National Geographic Society, the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, and various granting agencies at USF, including the Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean and the Humanities Institute, among others. The ICP-MS analysis was conducted by the senior author at the Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH), with the guidance of Laure Dussubieux and with funding from the National Science Foundation awarded to the FMNH. Additional research was conducted in the Department of Chemistry at Southern State Community College under the supervision of Don Storer, and at the Laboratory for Archaeological Soils Research at USF under the supervision of Christian Wells. Finally, we thank Karla Davis-Salazar, Erin Kimmerle, Christopher Roos, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous versions and drafts of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Ave, SOC 107, Tampa, FL, 33620, USA

    Kara A. Fulton & E. Christian Wells

  2. Department of Chemistry, Southern State Community College, 100 Hobart Dr., Hillsboro, OH, 45133, USA

    Donald A. Storer

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  1. Kara A. Fulton
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Correspondence to E. Christian Wells.

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Fulton, K.A., Wells, E.C. & Storer, D.A. Ritual or residential? An integrated approach to geochemical prospection for understanding the use of plaza spaces at Palmarejo, Honduras. Archaeol Anthropol Sci 9, 1059–1076 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-013-0170-3

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