Archaeological Operations

Chapter 4 abstracts and summarizes the very copious field data from the three lengthy field seasons at Chocolá, including the specific evidence obtained about the very extensive water control system that was discovered. Intensive grid excavations were undertaken in five operations: Mound 15, the northernmost part of the elite north sector, Mounds 6 and 7, in the southern part of the north sector, Mound 2, in the central administrative sector, and Mound 5, in the south sector. Accordingly, our three field seasons provide the specific evidence and artifacts we have been able to use to understand the clearly hierarchical structure of the ancient society and city. Of particular importance for a better understanding of the material underpinnings of Chocolá is our research at Mound 5, in the south, where we believe cacao arboriculture was developed for long-distance trade in the Preclassic period.

The Ceramics of Chocolá

Chapter 5 provides, in summary form, the first detailed account of Chocolá’s ceramic pottery. For the first time, the wares and figurines of the ancient city are described for the benefit of other Maya and Mesoamerican researchers. This includes a type-variety system and the first tentative ceramic sequence for the ancient city.

Materialist Factors

This chapter details the two principal materialist research foci of the project, water and cacao. Water control systems in Mesoamerica and at ancient Maya cities are reviewed in order to set the discoveries at Chocolá in context in an attempt to understand both functional and ideological meanings of water control at the ancient city. Chocolá’s hydraulic engineering, including stone conduits and canals, closely resembles the systems at Takalik Abaj and Kaminaljuyu, suggesting a deliberate sharing of technology and underscoring the likelihood of links between these three ancient cities and polities. Similarly, the context of cacao in ancient Mesoamerica and specifically in the ancient Maya world is explained, leading to the hypothesis of intensive surplus arboriculture—large cacao groves—that, it is proposed, underlay Chocolá’s rise to wealth and power as a complex society. In addition, a “mystery tale” is recounted, in which one of the most stunning carved monuments of the Southern Maya Region, the so-called Shook Altar, plays a central role in the authors’ theory of surplus cacao production at Chocolá and long-distance trade of the commodity.

The Monuments of Chocolá and Nearby Sites

Chapter 6 provides the first catalog of a corpus of sculpture hitherto limited to one (a fragment of the magnificent stela, Chocolá Monument One) and expands it to more than thirty. Also discussed is the diaspora of probably many other carved monuments from Chocolá. As with Chocolá’s near neighbor city and polity, Takalik Abaj, both Olmec or Olmecoid and clearly Maya sculptures and motifs, such as Kaminaljuyu Stela 10, are represented in Chocolá’s corpus. As a result of what the research project has recovered and from information about other monuments, additions now to the corpus include another well-carved stela, Monument 22, a potbelly monument, and a “capture” monument, as well as many examples of pedestal monuments and “cupule” altars, whose function may be related to water worship. Also, the likelihood that the extraordinary circular monument known as the “Shook Altar” was carved at Chocolá is explained.

Physical Environment and Cultural Ecology

Chapter 2 defines the physical environment and cultural geography of Chocolá and the econiches it occupies. The major flora and fauna are described, as are the soils, the extraordinary volcanoes and other plate tectonics of Chocolá’s geological setting, and the similarly extraordinary water resources of Chocolá’s piedmont rainforest—the highest rainfall in Central America, two rivers, several streams, and at least nine natural springs.

Ethnohistory and History of the Southern Maya Region, Suchitepéquez, and Chocolá

For the first time, the ethnohistory of Chocolá and the Guatemalan piedmont—from the Conquest to the colonial period to the postcolonial present day—is provided in some detail, shedding light on the modern factors that impacted the site and led to the gigantic modern-epoch coffee farm at Chocolá and the village of the Maya (primarily K’iche’- and Kaqchikel-speaking) workers attracted, or coerced, to labor on the farm.

Conclusions

In addition to summarizing our research at Chocolá, in this final chapter the problematic issues challenging archaeologists working in the piedmont and the Southern Maya Region as a whole are reviewed—a far more difficult situation for archaeological research than in the Lowland jungles to the north. A stress is put on the likely great archaeological riches remaining to be discovered in the Guatemalan piedmont and coast, but, at the same time, the urgency of the threat to these riches from the enormous pressures of modern development as Guatemala continues its largely unplanned urban, suburban, and industrial expansions through the otherwise plantation-rich south. Because archaeology in the Lowlands has more or less always been well funded, and with no shortage of archaeologists focused on the Lowland Maya, present and future researchers are urged to “look south” for future research in hopes of salvaging for study and for world heritage what remains of a region still little studied but, from all evidence, one that was seminal to later developments in Maya civilization and wider Mesoamerica.

Introduction and Historical Context

This chapter explains why the archaeological project was created and in so doing details the research context of Chocolá, both the modern small village and the large ancient city lying beneath and around it. The history of Maya archaeology is reviewed, emphasizing the long-believed-seminal but ironically little studied Southern Maya Region in which Chocolá sits so centrally, including the efforts, in the 1920s, by Robert Burkitt, the first to excavate at the site. The other major southern area sites are described, as is a “German factor” in the South—the particularly strong presence of Germans in Guatemala in both the postcolonial epoch of coffee production and in the early archaeology of Great Southern Maya sites. Throughout, reference is made to a debate about the relative importance of the Southern Maya Region as compared with the northern Petén for the emergence of Classic Maya civilization in the Lowlands.