Journal of Social Archaeology

ARTICLE

Copyright 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 2(2): 245268 [1469-6053(200206)2:2;245268;023397]

Outside of houses
The practices of everyday life at Chan Nohol, Belize
CYNTHIA ROBIN
Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, USA

ABSTRACT This article examines the social construction and experience of everyday life in one socially salient place, the late Classic Maya farmsteads of Chan Nohol, Belize. Men, women and children worked around the house and the domestic and agricultural domains were neither socially or spatially segregated. Nor was everyday life a strictly inside or outside, private or public affair. These points underscore the fact that rigid Western taxonomizing is inappropriate for understanding life cross-culturally. Beyond farmers houses and agricultural terraces, Chan Nohol was largely devoid of the physical surface traces that archaeologists often excavate. But this lack of architecture ended up being a blessing in disguise, because the entwined paths of people left visible traces in the porous soil surfaces. The imprints of peoples daily walking and working documents some of their diverse lifeways and experiences. By integrating an analysis of the social construction of place with an analysis of living experiences, this article seeks to move beyond the impasse of theoretical polarities that have historically divided our eld.

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KEYWORDS domestic archaeology q feminist theory q Maya q Mesoamerica phenomenology q practice theory q social organization q spatial analysis

s INTRODUCTION
It is indeed the dwelling, as a silent and determining memory, which is hidden in the theory . . . and which, moreover, gives the supposition a certain referentiality, an appearance of reality. (de Certeau, 1984: 58)

Archaeologists tend to focus on residential structures when they study the domestic world. This is perhaps unsurprising, because the remains of ancient buildings (i.e. mounds, tells, hyks, tepes) often are the most visible features we encounter on the contemporary land surface (see reviews on structure-centrism in archaeology in Pyburn [1989], Steadman [1996]). But any built environment consists of much more than buildings, as built places comprise all spaces that people construct, use and conceptualize (e.g. Ashmore and Knapp, 1999; Bender, 1993; Erickson, 2000; Low, 1996). Maintaining archaeologys traditional focus on particular cultural fragments structures may inhibit our ability to identify important loci and meanings of ancient lives. To illustrate this point, this article examines the social construction and experience of everyday life in one socially salient place, the late Classic Maya farmsteads of Chan Nohol, Belize, which beyond farmers houses and agricultural terraces were largely devoid of the physical surface traces that archaeologists often excavate.

s BEYOND HOUSES IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE DOMESTIC DOMAIN

Anthropological studies of the domestic domain in the 1970s initially posited the universality of a contemporary Western division between domestic/house (inside)/private/female/consumption/passive and the active public exterior world of male politics and production (e.g. Rosaldo and Lamphere, 1974). In so doing, spaces, especially houses (structures) vs. exterior spaces, were construed as xed and unproblematic containers for certain kinds of social actions and interactions that were seen as private and enclosed or public and exposed in relation to the type of spatial container where they occurred. Over the past few decades archaeologists and anthropologists alike have critiqued this position from the perspectives of feminist

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and domestic studies. Feminist scholars were amongst the rst to begin documenting how domestic and public spheres as isolated social and spatial domains were constructs of particular historical scenarios, such as certain contexts in the development of Western capitalism (e.g. Gilchrist, 1999; Hendon, 1996; Joyce, 2000; MacCormack and Strathern, 1980; Moore, 1996; Tringham, 1991; Wall, 1999). Particularly relevant to the Chan Nohol case, Classic Maya domestic places cannot be dened as non-public places because public ritual performances and political meetings occurred in these places (e.g. Hendon, 1997; Inomata, 2001; Joyce and Hendon, 2000; Yaeger, 2000). Classic Maya domestic places could also be key locations for extra-household production (e.g. Folan et al., 2001; Hendon, 1996; Shafer and Hester, 1983). Historical and contextual studies, such as these, relieved domestic spaces of their passive abilities to contain particular types of activities (e.g. private vs. public activities) that reected rigid Western taxonomies. Anthropologists and archaeologists began illustrating how space only became a meaningful social entity as people constructed, used and reused it. In a similar vein scholars working on issues of domestic life have shown how the constellation of anthropological concepts domestic, household, and house are historically dened, not universally dened. Crossculturally, domestic domains as well as houses may comprise interior and/or exterior places, public or private venues, etc. (e.g. Gillespie, 2000; Helliwell, 1992; Sandstrom, 2000; Vom Bruck, 1997; Wilk and Ashmore, 1988; Yanagisako, 1979). One example which is particularly relevant to the Chan Nohol case study is the difference between the meaning of the English term house and the Maya term nah which is glossed in English as house. The term nah was used in the Classic Maya period (AD 250900) and is used in a number of contemporary Maya languages. In contemporary Yucatec Maya, nah refers to a complex of core domestic and work spaces that are sources of knowledge about the world, including houses, yards and elds, or, in other words, sleeping spaces and habitual workspaces (Hanks, 1990; see Gillespie [2000] and Vogt [1976] for similar notions of houses from other contemporary Maya areas). This house concept is equated with habitually used interior and exterior spaces as well as domestic and non-domestic work spaces. It is not the structure we would refer to as a house in the west. A lexical similarity between the Classic Maya and contemporary Yucatec term for house does not imply an equivalency of meaning for these two terms. The contemporary meaning of nah illustrates the diversity of cultural meanings of houses and domestic places. From these multifaceted critiques new directions in domestic studies have emerged. 1 Houses as structures (or any other space for that matter) are not passive containers housing people and their actions, nor are they the

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sum total of what should be studied in the domestic or any other domain. 2 Unexamined notions of the existence of domestic and public spaces impede our understandings of particular historically and culturally contingent situations. 3 People actively construct and experience meaning (unconsciously and consciously) through their construction of places and experience of spaces. Thus the beginning point for the analysis of the domestic world has reverted from universal theoretical formulation to investigations of specic historic, contextualized case studies of people and the places and meanings they construct, inhabit, and experience.

s PLACE, SPACE, AND EVERYDAY LIFE

Time-space geography and space and place studies have consistently scrutinized the contextual relationships between people, space and meanings (e.g. de Certeau, 1984; Giddens, 1985; Lefebvre, 1991; Low, 1996; Moore, 1996; Pred, 1990; Soja, 1989). As this literature focuses on time and space, dimensions that have historically constituted archaeological analysis, archaeologists interested in developing lived understandings of the past have found time-space studies particularly appropriate for archaeological research (e.g. Gilchrist, 1999; Gosden, 1999; Hutson et al., 2000; Joyce and Hendon, 2000; Love, 1999; Thomas, 1996; Tringham, 1991). These archaeological and non-archaeological authors reject notions of humanspace relations which dene space as passive backdrop or container for action. Rather than seeing space as something abstracted from human lives, spaces come into being as they are lived, constructed and experienced by people. Studies of space are also inseparable from studies of time. From the longue dure (sensu strictu Braudel, 197273) to the short-term movements of people going in and out of places, place has a history and memory and spatial meanings change as the people moving through them change. From the diverse group of space and place writers, in this article I highlight the work of de Certeau (1984) on the spatiality of everyday life. De Certeau (1984: xv) noted how all practices in the world are indeed spatial practices, and from such a perspective we can move the study of peoples practices squarely into the domain of a spatial archaeology, instead of conceptualizing archaeological evidence as the impoverished residues of the people and practices we cannot access directly. De Certeaus focus on the contexts of practices (1984: 33) and the relationships between the traces of practices and the practices themselves (1984: 97) again makes his work particularly

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amenable to an archaeological endeavor which examines contexts and traces of practices. De Certeau developed two interrelated concepts place and space with a particular focus on the analysis of everyday life (de Certeau, 1984: 91130). De Certeaus rst concept, place, refers to the ordered settings which people create and give meaning to and which subsequently inuence peoples lives. Places organize an ensemble of possibilities for people (e.g. a wall that prevents a walker from going farther). De Certeaus second concept, space, refers to the multifaceted experiences of being and doing in a place which may or may not conform to previously constructed and/or conceived meanings and which continue to constitute and reconstitute the meanings of places. Spaces are the diverse walkers who bring places into existence and who work through the possibilities of place by following certain possibilities, disregarding others and inventing new possibilities. Place and space are only extricable in our own analytical abstractions as the two depend on each other for their operation. Space does not exist outside of place, nor does place have any meaning until activated by space. Neither place nor space comes into being outside of the historical and contextual locus of their production and reproduction. Thus the street geometrically dened by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers (de Certeau, 1984: 117). Operationalizing conceptual tools like de Certeaus place and space, which interrelate the ordered worlds which humans construct with their lived experiences of being in that world, provides one way out of the impasse of theoretical polarities between studies of the social structure and studies of practice and experience. As Sherry Ortner (1984) brought home in her seminal article on anthropological theory, throughout the history of anthropology there has been a polarization between the study of social structures and the study of practices. As Ortner also noted, a new symbol of anthropology emerged in the 1980s which she referred to as practice but which actually incorporated a diverse range of interests in practice, praxis, action, interaction, activity, experience and performance (Ortner, 1984: 144). Practice approaches sought to bridge the social structure/ practice divide by showing the recursive relationship between the two (e.g. Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1984; Sahlins, 1985). In addition to the theorists Ortner discussed, phenomenologists and ethnomethodologists have also sought to achieve a similar goal (e.g. Garnkel, 1984; Scott, 1985). Despite advances derived from these approaches, archaeologists are currently underscoring the need to bridge social structure and practice in archaeological research as an important but neglected point in recent studies (Dobres and Robb, 2000; Gillespie, 2000; Johnson, 2000: 213). In part, both practice and phenomenological/ethnomethodological approaches and their applications have been critiqued for either focusing too heavily on social constructionism or social experience (see Dobres and Robb, 2000;

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Gillespie, 2001; Johnson, 2000; Ortner, 1984; Oudemans, 1996; Yaeger, 2000). De Certeaus relational notion of space and place draws from both practice and phenomenological approaches (among others), and as such illustrates the important complementarity of these two perspectives in a unied analysis of social structure and social practice. From a temporal perspective, if the places and meanings people constructed in the past inuence peoples subsequent actions (place), then it should also be so that peoples ongoing actions (the way people use space) continue to construct and reconstruct spatial meanings (space). As de Certeau would argue, how could we possibly understand the social construction of social structure without simultaneously understanding social experience and vice versa? Although not necessarily working through the ideas of de Certeau, or framing anthropological debates in terms of practice and phenomenological perspectives, a number of archaeologists have recently pointed out the importance of integrated analyses of social constructionism and social experience (e.g. Dobres, 2000; Gilchrist, 1999; Gosden, 1999; Hutson et al., 2000; Joyce and Hendon, 2000; Love, 1999; Meskell, 2001). In the following analysis I operationalize de Certeaus concepts of place and space to illustrate the interpenetration of social construction and social experience in the everyday lives of Maya farmers at Chan Nohol, Belize.

Figure 1

Location of Chan Nohol and Xunantunich in west-central Belize

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s EVERYDAY LIFE AT CHAN NOHOL, BELIZE Background to Chan Nohol

Chan Nohol is a cluster of seven farmsteads located on gently undulating limestone uplands in the Mopan and Macal river interuvial of the Belize River valley in western-central Belize (Figure 1). The Chan Nohol farmsteads were part of a larger farming village called Chan (Ehret, 1998). They were located south of the village center (nohol is south in Yucatec Maya). The history and internal dynamics of the larger village is the current research project of the author.1 Here I focus on the Chan Nohol farmsteads, which were excavated between 1996 and 1997 (Ashmore et al., forthcoming; Robin, 1999, 2001a, b). Chan Nohols seven farmsteads were located approximately 50 to 100 meters from one another (Figure 2; farmsteads are identied by the notation CN1CN7). Each farmstead consisted of agricultural areas surrounding one to two primary residences and in some cases other ancillary buildings. The one natural water source at Chan Nohol was a stream,

CN1 CN7

CN6

CN4 CN3 CN2

CN5

N
0 50 m

House Pathway/ Entryway Agriculture

Ancillary Str. Work Area Refuse

Figure 2

The Chan Nohol Settlement Cluster

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now running only intermittently. An articial reservoir (aguada), located at farmstead CN1, may have augmented the water supply for at least some residents. As the Chan Nohol area is 3 to 4 km away from a major river and half a kilometer from a subsidiary drainage, these water resources would have been of clear importance for farmers. The occupation of Chan Nohols seven farmsteads was quite shortlived, restricted largely to the late Classic Hats Chaak phase (AD 660790).2 During this time period many other small clusters of farmsteads like Chan Nohol were constructed and occupied throughout the environs of the civic-center of Xunantunich, the political capital of the region at this time, which was located 4 km west of Chan Nohol. This temporal correlation between the construction and occupation of numerous farmstead clusters like Chan Nohol and Xunantunichs regional political orescence is not surprising because the scale and intensity of construction at Xunantunich certainly required a large labor force. Possibly even more critical here, this part of the Belize River valley area had always been an important site for agricultural production in ancient Maya society (Ashmore et al., forthcoming; Fedick and Ford, 1990; Willey et al., 1965). Given the proximity of Chan Nohol and Xunantunich, Xunantunich was most likely the center of major ceremonial celebrations and other political and administrative activities for the residents of Chan Nohol. Each day, from their homes and elds, the residents of Chan Nohol could see the central temple-pyramid at Xunantunich on its imposing hilltop in the distance. As they viewed this temple-pyramid each day, Chan Nohols farmers would have had a constant reminder of the broader society in which they were participants. This distant image of monumental construction, which was unlike any construction at Chan Nohol, may also have reminded Chan Nohol residents of the limits of their social world and of the social differences that existed in their society. The archaeological research at Chan Nohol discussed here was part of the larger Xunantunich Archaeological Project directed by Richard Leventhal and Wendy Ashmore between 1991 and 1997, which investigated the interrelationships between the civic-center of Xunantunich and the surrounding settlement (e.g. Ashmore, 1998; Ashmore et al., forthcoming; Leventhal and Ashmore, forthcoming).

Constructing the place of Chan Nohol

For the initial inhabitants of the Hats Chaak phase of Chan Nohol, the Chan Nohol area was an abandoned landscape of a more limited preClassic settlement. The lling in process, actuated by Chan Nohols farmers expansion into then new lands, is a quite common settlement pattern during the late Classic population maximums in the Maya area (e.g. Fedick and Ford, 1990; Rice, 1993). At rst glance (see Figure 2), settlement at Chan Nohol may seem quite unorganized elds and houses

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haphazardly placed, at no set distances, following no uniform orientations. But moving beyond strictly geometrical notions of order and organization, Chan Nohols farmers seem to have constructed the place of Chan Nohol utilizing quite detailed cultural knowledge of agricultural practices and the intricacies of the land. Farmers at Chan Nohol constructed their farmsteads around and facing a stream (all house compounds, except CN7, faced the stream). They used the potential of the sloping terrain at Chan Nohol in both house and eld construction. Farmers selected and cleared low bedrock rises (and in one case an abandoned pre-Classic house platform) for the construction of house platforms, and the distances between these rises, in part, accounts for the different distances between house compounds. They built low stone retaining walls following the contours of the sloping land to create at terraced surfaces for agricultural production. The cultural construction of place at Chan Nohol was created and ordered by molding and extending a form that already existed in the topography of the land and the previously abandoned pre-Classic landscape. Farmers use of land in the construction of place at Chan Nohol, suggests that the natural and cultural worlds formed a continuum of difference rather than constituting the binary and opposed categories typical of contemporary Western cultural constructions (compare Ashmore and Knapp, 1999; Bender, 1993; Erickson, 2000; Thomas, 1996). As well, Chan Nohols farmers were not constrained by the same limitations that constrain the productivity of modern farmers in the region. Chan Nohols Vaca suite, Cuxu subsuite soils, are considered marginal under modern mechanized agricultural regimes (King et al., 1992). But Chan Nohols farmers transformed the land into a productive agricultural landscape by building terraces and adding fertilizer.3 They indeed created an anthropogenic landscape that supported over a century of habitation. Initially a single residence was constructed at each farmstead and, as I explore further, later the residents of farmsteads CN5 and CN7 added an additional residence. The construction of all original house platforms at Chan Nohol was quite variable as farmers largely used unshaped pieces of limestone or chert cobbles from the vicinity of Chan Nohol to build their house platforms. The initial house platforms at Chan Nohol were quite low, ranging in height from 0.3 to 0.8 m. These stone platforms would have supported pole and thatch superstructures as no stone and only one instance of bajareque (red clay walling material) was encountered at Chan Nohol (the lower section of the house at CN6 had a bajareque wall). In most of Chan Nohols houses a large part of the interior was taken up by a low bench, a seating or sleeping area. Much of the daytime living and working at Chan Nohol happened outside houses in outdoor spaces or within ancillary structures. The construction of Chan Nohols buildings was similar to the

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well-preserved pole and thatch buildings built by certain families at the farming village of Ceren in El Salvador which was covered by a volcanic eruption around AD 600 (Sheets, 1992). It differed from the largely bajareque and stone houses constructed by higher status commoner families (e.g. Sheets, 1992; Yaeger, 2000) and lower status noble families (e.g. Hendon, 1991). Contrasting with buildings made of solid stone or bajareque walls, people at Chan Nohol constructed buildings that were partly light-, sight- and sound-permeable. The interiors of Chan Nohols buildings would not necessarily have been so private for people immediately inside or outside the house, as these people could have peered and talked through openings between the pole walls. As Sweely (1997) also discussed at Ceren, and scholars have discussed cross-culturally (e.g. Helliwell, 1992; Weiner, 1991), the construction of pole and thatch houses enables a different set of possibilities in terms of visibility, audibility and privacy for those inside and outside a house than when houses are constructed of solid walls. Where there are multiple structures in a house compound, people inside pole and thatch houses could have overheard, or even participated in conversations with people in neighboring structures or immediately outside. For example, when the Foi of Papua New Guinea return to their longhouse villages for ceremonies, men stay in mens houses and women stay in womens houses (Weiner, 1991). While a strict geometrical or division-of-labor spatial analysis of this situation might lead one to suspect that Foi men and women lead quite socially segregated lives during ceremonial times, Weiner discusses how Foi men and women listen and even raise their voices to participate in each others conversations from within different pole and thatch houses. Communicating through permeable walls and across open spaces, Foi women and men experience a commonly-lived world. The permeability of sight and hearing through pole walls would have been different for those on the inside and those on the outside of these structures. People on the inside would have been able to see more of the lighter outside, and hear more of its noises, than would be possible for people on the outside looking in (at least during the day, with this situation being reversed at night). There likely would have been social conventions, which are now beyond our ability to reconstruct, that would have prohibited socially unacceptable people from walking right up to a pole and thatch house and peering in. From a greater distance the gures inside would appear to the outsider as only shadows and whispers, providing privacy for families from their neighbors or anyone socially dened as an outsider.

Conceptualizing the place of Chan Nohol: a family farmstead dedication ritual

A unique nd of a dedicatory cache offered following the construction of the rst house at farmstead CN5 illustrates how this family conceptualized

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the new place of their farmstead at Chan Nohol. At farmstead CN5 a deposit of ordinary river cobbles and a used and broken fragment of a greenstone axe was placed over a sealed miniature chultun (a subterranean chamber) located behind and at the rear axis of the rst house built at that farmstead. Residents placed the cobbles behind their house before inhabiting the farmstead because occupation-related refuse was discarded on top of it throughout the farmsteads use life, indicating a dedicatory role for the deposit. The cobbles had distinctive colorations. The north cobble had two white lines, the south cobble had one yellow line, the west cobble was half black and half red with the black half towards the west and the red half towards the east, and at the center of these was a broken and heavily battered fragment of a greenstone axe. I have interpreted this deposit of ordinary stones as an ordinary farming familys version of a dedicatory cache, which consecrated their farmstead as the center of the world axes. The cardinal directional symbolism evidenced in the CN5 cache was an important component of noble Classic Maya rituals, caches, and conceptual models of the organization of the world (e.g. Ashmore, 1991, 1998; Joyce, 1996, 2000; Robin, 2001a, c). As well, sanctifying ordinary house lots and elds in terms of cardinal world axes associated with specic colors and other symbols is an important part of ordinary peoples consecration of their living spaces in contemporary Maya practice (e.g. Gillespie, 2000; Hanks, 1990; Vogt, 1976). Although certain parallels can be drawn between the CN5 river cobble cache and Classic period ritual practices of Maya nobility and subsequent ritual practices of modern farmers, the CN5 cache offers unique evidence of a precise color-direction association in the Classic period situated in the context of a farmers house dedication ritual. While cardinal-directional principles were important in Classic Maya noble ritual, there is little evidence for standardized color-directional symbolism in the Classic period. Later post-Classic sources do note color-directional symbolism, but there is variation in terms of what color goes with what direction. These associations become more standardized during the period of contemporary ethnographies (e.g. Hanks, 1990; Vogt, 1976). The CN5 cache is a trace of the history of these later practices, rooted in the specic time, place and activities of the residents of farmstead CN5. CN5s farmers are amongst the Classic period actors who, through their practices, made what became the highly conventionalized structures of ritual practices in much later periods. The more geometrical/cosmological conceptual ordering of the place of farmstead CN5 constructed in ritual practice contrasts with farmers pragmatic ordering of their homes and elds in relation to knowledge about locality and agricultural work. Perhaps this is unsurprising because ritual practice is exactly the locus where one might expect the greatest constraint on contingency in practice. Chan Nohols lack of on-the-ground geometrical/cosmological spatial ordering is indeed typical of Classic Maya

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commoner and non-royal noble settlements (e.g. Ashmore, 1981; Hendon, 1997). Contrasting with these more pragmatic constructions of place, Classic Maya royalty built their cities to manipulate and display directional principles such as cardinal directions, up/down, and left/right (e.g. Ashmore 1991, 1998; Folan et al., 2001; Joyce 1996, 2000; Robin, 2001a, c). Again this seems unsurprising because, as Pierre Bourdieu (1979) noted, it is societies upper echelons who are most invested in and able to emulate and control their social world along the distinctive conventions of their society. The parallel timing of Chan Nohols occupation and Xunantunichs rise to regional power indicates the interconnectedness of activities at Chan Nohol and those of the broader Classic Maya world, interconnections which CN5 residents made manifest through their manipulation of more broadly shared ritual constructs in their house dedication ritual. Within this interconnected world, farmers use of pragmatic principles in the planning of Chan Nohol points to the social distance between Chan Nohols farmers and Xunantunichs royalty and farmers abilities to plan their lives and living spaces beyond the top-down social control of societys upper echelons (compare Joyce and Hendon, 2000 for similar comments about farming communities in Honduras).

Living the space of Chan Nohol

The ordered (pragmatic and conceptual) construction of the place of Chan Nohol provided a framework that only came into being as residents transformed Chan Nohol from an ordered place to a living space. I had initially thought that the lack of concrete architecture at Chan Nohol might limit my social and experiential analysis of the community because archaeologists typically look to elaboration and division in architecture to access social issues (e.g. Blanton, 1994; Steadman, 1996). But this lack of architecture ended up being a blessing in disguise, because the entwined paths of people walking, working and cleaning around Chan Nohol left visible traces (in terms of trampled artifacts and soil chemistry) in the porous soil surfaces of the outdoor spaces. Within each farmstead at Chan Nohol, farmers conducted a similar set of tasks on a day-to-day basis: they prepared food, cooked, ate, stored their possessions, produced stone tools and cloth, observed rituals, slept and, of course, farmed. High frequencies of artifacts and activity areas associated with the food-production process, from sowing to serving, coupled with low frequencies of artifacts associated with other activities, indicate that food production was the primary activity for Chan Nohol residents. While stone tool and cloth production was undertaken for household-level provisioning, agricultural produce was most likely the only item beyond labor itself exported from the settlement. Much of Chan Nohol residents work happened outside, in agricultural

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spaces and exterior work areas, the latter used for food preparation and stone-tool making. Small ancillary substructures were also used for food preparation and stone-tool making. Spinning and weaving certainly occurred at most farmsteads, but I do not know where these activities happened because the only evidence for spinning and weaving was found in refuse deposits. Farmers activities organized the space and time of peoples existence the temporal rhythms of a day, the seasonal cycles of work, and the lived spaces of the land. Figure 2 shows the traces of the meandering paths that residents took into and out of their houses (white shaded areas). Although paths are not typical features recorded by archaeologists, routine patterns of walking do leave material and chemical signatures (Barba and Ortiz, 1992; Middleton, 1998; Robin, 1999). The pathways that feet inscribe into the ground through highly regimented movement will be more archaeologically recoverable than less traveled or less regular paths. At Chan Nohol paths were documented leading up to the fronts of houses and onto patios where peoples walking was synchronized in relation to these constructions. The traces of peoples footsteps disappear as they moved further away from the house and their daily paths disperse into the variable and multiple routines and uses of everyday life. Throughout Chan Nohols exterior spaces the impressions of pathways, agricultural areas (light gray shaded areas), work areas (medium gray shaded areas) and refuse areas (dark gray shaded areas) (see Figure 2) remain embedded in the ground surface and are identiable based on distinctive artifact, ecofact and soil chemistry signatures. Each farmstead group created and used these same types of exterior activity areas through their repetitive everyday work practices and pragmatic understandings of the use and meaning of farmstead space. People worked on food and stone tool production in outdoor spaces within 20 m from their residences. People swept and cleared their garbage to locations beyond the perimeter of their work areas. Agricultural areas were located interspersed between and beyond these work and refuse areas. There was no spatial segregation of domestic from agricultural life and work at Chan Nohol. Despite certain broad similarities in the way farmers constructed and used Chan Nohol, it was far from a homogeneous space. As people lived at Chan Nohol, they socialized and spatialized the place of Chan Nohol. The palimpsest of daily walking across the community is too diverse and commingled to discern the paths of specic individuals at Chan Nohol. Still, we can assess aspects of peoples diverse and often entwined lifeways and experiences, particularly in terms of familial, gender, age, work and status differences. In terms of the people who used Chan Nohols spaces, there is extensive Classic period data to suggest that, at least as an ideal, women prepared food and wove (Hendon, 1996, 1997; Joyce, 1993, 1996, 2000). Men, women

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and children variably worked on the many tasks that comprised the agricultural production process (Robin, 1999: 317339; 2001b). It is plausible that men, women and/or children made and used stone tools because there are no gender-linked images of people making tools, and stone tools have been found with male, female and juvenile interments during the Classic period (e.g. Welsh, 1988; also see Gero, 1991 on interpreting the gender of prehistoric stone tool production). Implementing a phenomenological approach and putting the aforementioned people back into Chan Nohols spaces we can examine their interactions and interrelations as they lived and worked around their farmsteads. The spatial imprint of movement and work around Chan Nohol (see Figure 2) indicates that the people who were making tools and the people who were preparing food were doing these activities in the same space, regardless of whether or not they were the same people or were working there at the same time. Similarly, the people who were involved in agriculture were working within visualizing, talking or yelling distances of the people who were preparing food and making stone tools. As domestic and agricultural activities were largely undertaken in outside spaces, this allowed communication between persons working on these activities. At times, the gender- and age-work relations in particular spaces may have looked quite different at Chan Nohol. For instance, when people were working together on a harvest, gender- and age-related work was likely harmonized together in space (e.g. a eld), but at other times, when women were at work on one task and men at work on another, peoples work would have been differentially situated in space. This differentiation would have allowed for the development of both gender- and age-specic identities as well as collaborative understandings of human relations. Since the majority of peoples work took place in spaces that were neither rigidly enclosed nor divided by great distances, peoples separate as well as collaborative daily work was organized spatially in such a way that could facilitate interaction and communication rather than division (even, as previously noted, when they were undertaken in enclosed pole and thatch buildings). Even when people were working in different spaces, the people who were preparing food and making stone tools and the people who were involved in agricultural production would have been able to talk, shout or at least hear one another and in many cases directly view one another. The spatial and social commingling of agricultural and domestic work created through peoples practices promoted situated experiences where work around the house would have been domestic and agricultural, male and female, old and young. These living and working practices would have fostered experiences of human relations as coordinated unications of difference. As the length of Chan Nohols habitation progressed, two farming families (CN5 and CN7) achieved enhanced socio-economic status,

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probably through their farmwork.4 These two families were the only families to gain access to non-local, possibly luxury items, such as objects made of greenstone and marine shell, mostly Strombus sp. Later in the Hats Chaak phase these families reconstructed their social difference into the community at Chan Nohol by building new and larger houses and standardizing the external appearance of their homes in ways that were more typical of higher status architecture at Xunantunich and throughout the Maya area. Albeit not a very grand modication, they used uniform, cut limestone facing stone to standardize the outward appearance of the facades of their house platforms in a manner similar to the use of cut stone facings on houses of higher status members of Maya society (compare what Yaeger [2000] calls practices of afliation). In so doing they re-inscribed their difference from other members of Chan Nohol and their similarity and expanded links to outsiders onto the place of Chan Nohol. The residences at CN5 and CN7 were both the highest at Chan Nohol and were constructed on stone patios which added to their height. Turning from enhanced status to a most mundane aspect of everyday life dumping garbage: in addition to dumping their garbage beyond work areas, CN5 and CN7 residents dumped garbage behind their elevated houses. Had the residents of Chan Nohols lower houses, which were built directly on the ground, dumped garbage beside their houses, this garbage would have rapidly risen up along the pole walls of their houses. Re-constructing the place of their farmsteads provided new possibilities not only in terms of the obvious display, but in terms of the routines of everyday life. This distinction in refuse dumping practices has implications for archaeological methods. Often Mayanists place post-hole tests around a structure when looking for refuse, because, based on studies of larger residences (often those of noble families), these are the locations where ancient people dumped their garbage (e.g. Puleston, 1973). This assumed typical ancient Maya pattern of garbage dumping beside a house may not be typical of all members of ancient Maya society, just typical of those able to construct their houses on taller platforms.

Re-conceptualizing the place of Chan Nohol: public ritual

Just as domestic and agricultural work was not distinct within Chan Nohols farmsteads, neither were public-oriented and family-oriented affairs. As mentioned above, Chan Nohols water resources were economically important for the farming community, and one of these key resources was a water-hole located within farmstead CN1 (see Figure 2). Although all farmers performed some type of ritual within their farmsteads, the only farmstead to hold small-scale ritual feasts was the small and unassuming single-residence farmstead CN1. In addition to conventionally cited archaeological markers of feasting conjoined higher frequencies of

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serving vessels, ritual items and animal bone (LeCount, 1999; Yaeger, 2000) farmstead CN1 had a greater spatial extent of work areas (see Figure 2) and higher density of refuse per cubic meter than other single-residence farmsteads. The latter two remains seem to be the spatial imprinting of group work and participation in communal feasting at CN1, that transformed CN1 at moments in its history from a conventional farmstead to a site of community-wide ritual. Supporting this assertion, my ethnoarchaeological study at a modern farming community in Yucatn5 illustrated that contemporary households that hosted communal feasts had larger exterior work areas than other households, because communal feasts involve larger work groups and participatory groups than does day-to-day familial work. The higher densities of refuse per cubic meter at CN1 may point to the other end of the feasting process, the greater amounts of debris that would accumulate from feasting when compared to day-to-day familial eating. Given its unassuming architecture, CN1s proximity to the water-hole seems to be the key to the presence of communal ritual activities at only this particular farmstead. Drawing upon Classic period representations of waterways and water rituals, Scarborough (1998) has illustrated that waterways are often depicted as pivots between the earth and the underworld below and the upper world above. As such, water-holes were sacred portals linking human beings to their ancestors and earth deities as they physically connected the earths surface, the land of the living and the underworld, the land of ancestors and earth deities (also see Brady and Ashmore, 1999).6 Chan Nohols water-hole seems to be of ritual (as well as economic) import in that it established the community as a place of signicance with respect to its own history. Through repetitive enactment of ritual and, plausibly, local history and memory, the place of Chan Nohol was constituted and re-constituted in the ritual place of the water-hole. In light of the Chan Nohol water-hole rituals, it seems relevant to re-assess the signicance of residents construction of their houses to face Chan Nohols stream. In addition to relating to more pragmatic concerns about water, this orientation towards water may have had social signicance in terms of linking residents to each other through the water of the place of Chan Nohol. Joyce and Hendon have recently drawn upon Paul Connertons (1989) concept of inscription to describe the way social actors use materiality to transform eeting identities into historical facts (Joyce and Hendon, 2000: 154). In their study of communities in Honduras, Joyce and Hendon found that non-domestic architecture, particularly ball courts, were important in the development and inscription of community identity at various levels of community across the landscape. The Chan Nohol water-hole was a similar social venue at the local level of community at Chan Nohol. Beyond the ritual sanctications of their community, the limits of Chan Nohol and its relationship with other communities would have been

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visible to all members of Chan Nohol every day as they observed the 150foot high main temple-pyramid of Xunantunich looking down upon them from its high hilltop to the west. That temple-pyramid was another focal point of community ritual, but for a much larger and more socially diverse community. Chan Nohol residents participated in this larger community, but their participation was more socially and economically restricted there than within their own community. The distant and spatially elevated image of the temple at Xunantunich would have reminded Chan Nohol residents each day of their interconnections, differences and independence from the larger Xunantunich regional community.

s CONCLUSION
At Chan Nohol men, women and children worked around the house and the domestic and agricultural domains were neither socially or spatially segregated. Nor was everyday life a strictly inside or outside, private or public affair. These points underscore that rigid Western taxonomizing is inappropriate for understanding life cross-culturally. This leads us to begin our archaeological investigations of the domestic domain (or any other) from the perspective of historic, contextualized case studies. Understanding the domestic domain (or any other) requires attention to the ways people actively construct and experience meaning and a focus on all venues of domestic life, not just particular cultural fragments houses, or any other fragment. The architecture that often situates analyses about how people ordered and organized their world tends to hide the archaeological evidence for the practices of living in that world. Ancient people often swept oors clean or removed activity debris from buildings at or after abandonment. The excavation of Chan Nohols exterior spaces inverted (and incorporated) a focus on architecture. The unintended outcome of this inversion was the recovery of the archaeological remains of the spatializing practices of living in a place. These spatial practices were more visible in exterior spaces than interior spaces because peoples everyday movements are inscribed into permeable dirt surfaces in more overt ways than they are onto permanent oors. The empirical insights into spatial practices readily observable in Chan Nohols exterior places are becoming equally recoverable from the surfaces of prepared oors through innovative new research in microartifact, micro-morphological and chemical analyses (e.g. Matthews, 1997; Middleton, 1998; Middleton and Price, 1996; Yener et al., 2000). At Chan Nohol farmers constructed their farmsteads drawing upon quite detailed cultural knowledge about agricultural activities and the land of Chan Nohol. Constructed in the distant shadow of and in relation to the

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regional rise of Xunantunich, the place of Chan Nohol offered certain possibilities in terms of the types of working and living activities that farmers could undertake and the social relations of visibility, audibility and privacy in these daily working and living activities. The ordered (pragmatic and conceptual) construction of place at Chan Nohol provided a framework that only came into being as people transformed Chan Nohol from an ordered place into a living space throughout their everyday lives. As people lived at Chan Nohol, they socialized and spatialized the place of Chan Nohol. At Chan Nohol the imprints of peoples daily walking and working documents some of the diverse and often entwined lifeways and experiences of different family, gender, age, occupation and status groups. In some cases this spatialization led to the re-inscription of replicated meanings onto the place of Chan Nohol, as seen in the repetitive ritual enactments around Chan Nohols water-hole. In other cases this spatialization led to the reinscription of new meanings onto the place of Chan Nohol, as seen in the new displays of status by the residents of CN5 and CN7. From place to space and back again, the Chan Nohol case illustrates the interpenetration of the ordered worlds which people construct and the practices and experiences of living in that world. Just as the places and meanings people construct inuence subsequent actions in the world, peoples ongoing actions continue to construct and reconstruct spatial meanings. As seen in the Chan Nohol case study, both analyses of social construction and analyses of social experience are important to develop an understanding of meaning in the past.

Acknowledgements
This article derives from my dissertation research at Chan Nohol which was funded by the National Science Foundation, Fulbright/IIE, and the University of Pennsylvania. Many people are due my thanks for this research: Wendy Ashmore and Richard Leventhal, directors of the Xunantunich Archaeological Project; John Morris, Alan Moore, Brian Woodye, and the late Harriot Topsey, Belize Archaeological commissioners; and my American and Belizean project colleagues. Comments from Rosemary Joyce, Lynn Meskell, William Middleton, Nan Rothschild, Mary Weismantel and several anonymous reviewers helped me clarify my arguments. I alone am responsible for errors.

Notes
1 http://chan.northwestern.edu 2 Two episodes of pre-Classic (900 BCAD 250) activity in the Chan Nohol area lack continuity in the later farmsteads. 3 Fertilization has been identied through soil chemical analysis including in-eld phosphorous testing and laboratory analysis of a 12 element suite using Inductively Coupled Plasma/Atomic Emissions Spectroscopy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, by William Middleton.

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4 The specic socio-economic mechanism through which these two farming families enhanced their status is not completely understood at this time. Their access to elite-controlled distribution networks at Xunantunich was likely linked indirectly to people at Xunantunich through their relations with Chan community leaders (e.g. Ehret, 1998). Understanding such relationships is a focus of my future work at Chan. 5 The name of this community is being withheld to protect the privacy of community members. 6 There is one often-cited case of modern water-hole rituals at Zinacantan in Chiapas, Mexico (Vogt, 1969, 1976). Zinacantans water-hole rituals serve as a focal point for integrating distinct social groups within the larger community, and water-hole rituals highlight peoples incorporation into a group based on their links to water and land where they live and work. While the feasting next to the Chan Nohol water-hole may have served a similar social venue, Chan Nohols water-hole feasting was different from modern water-hole rituals at Zinacantan. Unlike the Chan Nohol case, at Zinacantans water-hole rituals no drinking or eating was carried out at the sacred water-hole. The ritual feasts associated with Zinacantans water-hole rituals were held in the home of the senior Mayordomo (the highest ranking community ofcial; Vogt, 1976: 101).

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CYNTHIA ROBIN is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on everyday life through analyses of households, settlements, space and place, gender, and class. She is an archaeologist and works predominately in the Maya region of Mesoamerica. [Email: c-robin@northwestern.edu]