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Potographies and Biographies: The Role of Food in Ritual and Identity as Seen Through Life Histories of Selected Maya Pots and People

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Pre-Columbian Foodways

Abstract

The centrality of food, drink and feasting in religious and ceremonial activities of the Lowland Maya, especially the nobility, is well recognized, and has also been tied to political economies (see Foias 2007). Numerous representations of drinking, serving and storage vessels appear in historical and mythological scenes depicted on figure-painted polychrome vessels and other media. These depictions testify to the integral role of consumption, offering and sharing of food and drink in religious and ceremonial proceedings. These ritual acts and forms of reciprocity signified, solidified, symbolized and reinforced conventional and appropriate social practices – proper and a distinctly Maya way of conducting affairs. Such practices, however, were not confined to the face-to-face interactions of the living but also played an important role in funerary and mortuary rites, and in ancestor veneration, when they would symbolize and reinforce relationships between the living and the dead, and among the ancestors and their descendents.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The burial vessels included in this study were analysed as part of a larger project investigating the stylistic, technological and provenance characteristics of the late Late Classic to Early Postclassic ceramic assemblage at Lamanai (Howie 2005). This study examined the stylistic characteristics of over 2000 individual vessels deriving from burials, offerings and midden deposits. Over 700 of these vessels were analysed petrographically (in plane- and cross-polarized light at magnifications between 25x and 100x) and compared to fired samples of 35 different local clays and numerous rock samples. Provenances of “non-local” pottery fabrics (pastes) were ascribed using a broad range of comparative geological information, including maps, published descriptions of formations and sediments and geological specimens. For detailed descriptions of the different fabric (paste) types discussed here, as well as the regional and local geology see Howie (2005).

  2. 2.

    2 – We have purposely not used established Type:Variety designations in referring to the vessel styles that occur in the Lamanai burials to avoid any unsubstantiated interpretive implications concerning compositional equivalency and origin of manufacture.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the following individuals for their contribution to this study: Elizabeth Graham and David Pendergast for their meticulous excavation and documentation of the building groups and for allowing us to study the burial assemblages; Jaimie Awe and the Institute of Archaeology of Belize for permission to take and export samples for analysis; Grace Yau for sample preparation, and Cliff Patterson for his assistance with some of the figures. We are also grateful to the following funding bodies for their generous support: The Canada Research Chairs program, The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and The Association of Commonwealth Universities.

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  1. The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

    Linda Howie

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  1. Linda Howie
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  2. Christine D. White
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  3. Fred J. Longstaffe
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  1. Dept. Anthropology, Field Museum, S. Lake Shore Dr. 1400, Chicago, 60605-2496, U.S.A.

    John Staller

  2. Florida State University, Tallahassee, 32306, U.S.A.

    Michael Carrasco

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Howie, L., White, C.D., Longstaffe, F.J. (2010). Potographies and Biographies: The Role of Food in Ritual and Identity as Seen Through Life Histories of Selected Maya Pots and People. In: Staller, J., Carrasco, M. (eds) Pre-Columbian Foodways. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0471-3_15

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