Abstract
In a series of eighteenth-century treaties, Spain granted British companies a concession to cut logwood and mahogany along a portion of the western shore of the Bay of Honduras, in what is today Belize. The terms of these treaties, negotiated in far-away European capitals, set the stage for tensions between British woodcutters and long-term Maya residents living in the Yalbac Hills region adjacent to the concessions. Bilateral treaties signed in Europe did not reflect local geopolitical realities and the socio-political landscape in the southeastern portion of the Yucatán Peninsula. In practice, the western boundary of the British logging concessions was not a frontier with colonial New Spain or, subsequently, Guatemala, but with independent Maya groups that were effectively politically autonomous. In this paper we argue that various configurations of Maya polities in this region, from the late eighteenth through the late nineteenth centuries, consistently understood Black Creek and the New River lagoons to be their border with the British loggers and settlers operating to the east and, later, the colony of British Honduras. This framing leads us to a nuanced and de-colonized interpretation of the past of the Caste War era Maya village of San Pedro Siris in the Yalbac Hills. Maya strategies of occupation, strategic abandonment, and reoccupation are documented in archives, ethnography, and archaeology, and inform our archaeological and historical interpretation of the San Pedro Maya.
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Church, M.C., Yaeger, J., Kray, C.A. (2019). Re-Centering the Narrative: British Colonial Memory and the San Pedro Maya. In: Orser Jr., C. (eds) Archaeologies of the British in Latin America. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95426-4_5
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