Dearly De-Parted: Ancestors, body partibility, and making place at Dos Hombres, Belize

Abstract

Interments of Ancestors linked past peoples with the living. However, less attention has been given to secondary burials and their role in social memory and placemaking. Given these ties between Ancestors, the living, and the landscape, Ancestors may have been brought when descendants moved from place to place. I applied biogeochemical methods to address questions about movement, placemaking, and ancestry. In this paper I present isotopic data from a non-elite Late Preclassic (300 BCE – 250 CE), simple, co-burial from the archaeological site of Dos Hombres, Belize. Archaeological evidence indicates multiple ancestral veneration practices were associated with this burial. I measured oxygen and strontium isotopes to assess whether individuals were born where they were buried and to gauge how bodies may have been used to make and claim place. Strontium isotope ratios and δ¹⁸O values suggest the primary individual was local to Dos Hombres; however, the secondary individuals have strontium isotope ratios which fall outside the local range, indicating these individuals were non-local. In this paper, I argue that the practice of removing and reburying pieces of Ancestors’ bodies was used by the ancient Maya at Dos Hombres to claim and make place.