LAND, PEOPLE, AND PRACTICE

The meanings of the terms borders, frontiers, and boundaries are sometimes confusing since they are often used interchangeably and because different disciplines, from anthropology to geography, may use them in contradictory ways. Geographers, historians, and Classical archaeologists, in particular, have focused on the territorial dimensions of frontiers, such as political divisions between two states or as physical zones between settled agrarian societies and mobile peoples (Anderson Reference Anderson1996; Feuer Reference Feuer2016; Prescott Reference Prescott1987). Anthropologists, sociologists, and anthropological archaeologists have often incorporated a territorial aspect into their meaning, but focus more on boundaries and frontiers as social and political identities, as “us” vs. “them,” and as social, political, and economic practices of affiliation and belonging that create divisions that may or may not relate to the physical landscape (Alvarez Reference Alvarez1995; Barth Reference Barth1969; Fassin Reference Fassin2011; Lamont and Molnár Reference Lamont and Molnár2002; Schlegel Reference Schlegel1992). Political and social identities have the potential to be deterritorialized. At the heart of such ambiguities, however, is an inherent tension in how divisions, limits, and points of convergence manifest since human practices and interactions not only transpire as part of a physical landscape but also as part of ongoing material practices, imagined communities, and situated understandings of self. They are relational, dynamic, mutually constituting, and entangled (Ashmore Reference Ashmore2002; Hodder Reference Hodder2011; Hutson Reference Hutson2009; Smith Reference Smith2003).

To more clearly describe these entanglements and tensions, however, we draw from the terminology of Parker (Reference Parker2006:79), in which “borders” are linear dividing lines in the landscape and “frontiers” are interstitial zones of interaction between political, administrative, and cultural entities (also see Iannone Reference Iannone2010:353). While both concepts may entail spatial relationships, borders have a more clearly marked manifestation, and frontiers are zones or regions, and as such, are more porous. For example, while precise borders may be a product of “18th-Century absolutism” (Wendl and Rösler Reference Wendl, Roesler, Rösler and Wendl1999:7) and the rise of the contemporary nation-state (Parker Reference Parker2002:327; Prescott Reference Prescott1987:1; Ratzel Reference Ratzel1897), there are examples of incipient borders as early as 1290 b.c. when a formal treaty between Hittites and Egyptians legally recognized the territorial jurisdictions of the two states (Pritchard Reference Pritchard1969:199).

In contrast, the term “boundary” is more general and signifies the bounds or limits of anything. As such, it encompasses both borders and frontiers. The term boundary has limitations in that it is more ambiguous and can apply to different types of interactions and different ways to conceptualize and divide people and places. Nonetheless, flexible terms are heuristically useful, as seen with recent discussions of “communities,” which are dynamic social formations that operate on multiple, overlapping levels and that include ideological, material, spatial, and practice-based manifestations (Canuto and Yaeger Reference Canuto and Yaeger2000; Varien and Potter Reference Varien and Potter2008).

In the Maya area, scholars have debated whether polities were defined through the physical landscape or through relationships of debt, obligation, alliance, and hierarchy between people. Hammond (Reference Hammond and Culbert1991:275–281), for example, argued that Classic Maya polities were not forged by high degrees of boundary maintenance or through clear territorial divisions. Likewise, Graham (Reference Graham2011:29–39) has asserted that pre-Columbian polities were defined principally through relationships among people, particularly patron-client relationships that dictated the tribute and labor obligations peoples had to rulers, and in return, the responsibilities of rulers to their communities. During the Colonial period, the Spanish often designated political units based on señoríos, the domain of a lord, and the encomienda system, in which primarily Spanish and Creole men were given tribute rights over particular peoples and their labor (Farriss Reference Farriss1984:38). Among Colonial Quiche Maya speakers, for example, vinak literally meant “people,” but was also used to refer to Quiche and Cakchiquel polities with territorial extents (Hill Reference Hill1996:63–64), further underscoring the dialectics between land and people.

Research on pre-Columbian Maya market systems suggest that the distribution of goods was characterized more as overlapping market spheres than isolated “solar” markets centered at polity capitals (Eppich and Freidel Reference Eppich, Freidel and King2015; Masson and Freidel Reference Masson, Freidel, Hirth and Pillsbury2013). Markets and gift exchanges helped create economic and cultural interaction spheres that were reinforced and cross-cut by community, lineage, linguistic, polity, and regional affiliations (Fox et al. Reference Fox, Cook, Chase and Chase1996; Smith and Berdan Reference Smith and Berdan2003). For example, network analyses have the potential to show how economic interactions cross-cut or reinforced polities and how such economic interactions had their own boundaries or limits (Golitko and Feinman Reference Golitko and Feinman2015; Meissner Reference Meissner2017, Reference Meissner2020). The circulation of both quotidian and precious objects, however, was part of the place-making of communities, regions, and polities as people moved and brought precious objects with them, journeyed to and from market centers, and traveled afar with gifts to cement diplomatic and social ties between families and polities (Halperin Reference Halperin2014).

Migration is also a critical factor in the making and unmaking of borders and boundaries. Recent isotopic analyses have underscored that Maya peoples were highly mobile, but with the large majority of movements within an individual's lifetime as occurring between regions rather than long distances (Freiwald Reference Freiwald2011; Freiwald et al. Reference Freiwald, Arnauld, Beekman and Pereira2020; Price et al. Reference Price, Burton, Fullagar, Wright, Buikstra and Tiesler2008, Reference Price, Burton, Sharer, Buikstra, Wright, Traxler and Miller2010, Reference Price, Nakamura, Suzuki, Burton and Tiesler2014; Somerville et al. Reference Somerville, Schoeninger and Braswell2016). Unlike the hyper-policing and surveillance of twenty-first century borders (Fassin Reference Fassin2011), pre-Columbian polities, as in Colonial times, likely had relatively little control over the migration of their constituents (Inomata Reference Inomata, Lohse and Valdez2004). The isotopic identification of who is considered “foreign” and “local” based on geological and environmental variation over a given area, however, often differs from boundaries identified by ceramic production and distribution spheres, architectural styles, or even biological affinity. Despite these discrepancies, it is clear that demographic shifts constantly altered polity sizes and power structures and, in turn, helped forge new social and cultural affiliations and senses of place.

Nonetheless, ethnohistoric, ethnographic, and archaeological evidence also suggest that the Maya were known to have created physical borders in the landscape and, in some cases, engaged in heavy boundary maintenance practices (Iannone Reference Iannone2010:353; McAnany Reference McAnany1995:87). Boundaries and frontiers were most often demarcated using prominent features on the landscape, such as caves or springs, or by erecting shrines or artificial mounds (Marcus Reference Marcus, Sabloff and Henderson1993:126; Pohl et al. Reference Pohl, Monaghan, Stiver, Smithers, Sosa and Baracs1997:208–214; Roys Reference Roys1943:181, 192). There are rare cases of cities with defensive features and walls that delimit the capital, such as the Classic-period Tikal earthworks, the wall encircling the Postclassic city of Mayapan, the defensive moat around Classic-period Becan, and the agave palisade and moat around the Chinamita town of Tulumci (Puleston and Callender Reference Puleston and Callender1967; Marcus Reference Marcus, Sabloff and Henderson1993:124; Masson et al. Reference Masson, Hare, Lope, Schartz and Nichols2006; Webster et al. Reference Webster, Murtha, Straight, Silverstein, Martinez, Terry and Burnett2007). Large investments were made to create defensive features in the valley zone between El Zotz and Tikal, underscoring regional geopolitical border maintenance practices (Garrison et al. Reference Garrison, Houston and Firpi2019). Classic-period defensive features between Yaxchilan and Piedras Negras also reveal that the two competing political centers vied for control over riverine and land routes of exchange and were also heavily concerned with marking territories within and between the two regions (Davenport and Golden Reference Davenport, Golden, Kurnick and Baron2016; Golden et al. Reference Golden, Scherer, Munoz and Vasquez2008; Golden and Scherer Reference Golden and Scherer2013).

Contemporary nation-state border issues provide some reflection for these archaeological border maintenance practices. The desire among some U.S. political officials to create larger and longer physical barriers between the U.S. and Mexico serves as much as a symbolic divide between types of people on racial, criminal, and economic grounds as a concerted effort to block the northward movement of people (Dick Reference Dick2019), and it points to potentially multilayered meanings and purposes of ancient border practices. Immigrants embody the articulation of territorial borders and social boundaries since they cross borders to settle within a new community, but also often encounter new social boundaries in the different ways they are treated in their new homelands (Fassin Reference Fassin2011:215). Likewise, the recent vote in Belize in May of 2019 to ask the United Nations to settle the border territory dispute in which Guatemala claims 11,000 km² of Belizean territory (Sanchez Reference Sanchez2019) underscores the ways in which borders are never fixed, but in a constantly shifting state of negotiation and contestation. Houk and Bonorden's (Reference Houk and Bonorden2020) article in this Special Section on the San Pedro Maya from the Kaxil Uinic village document that this territorial dispute has existed longer than the establishment of the country of Belize and even the colony of British Honduras. They argue that borders are manifestations more of political aspirations than lived experiences of belonging.

One way that pre-Columbian Mesoamerican borders were reaffirmed was through ritual circuits, in which groups of people encircled settlements, communities, or regions in their pathways to and from shrines and key landmarks, such as caves, mountain tops, and springs (Garcia-Zambrano Reference Garcia-Zambrano, Roberston and Fields1994; Halperin and Hruby Reference Halperin and Hruby2019; Hill Reference Hill1996; Reese-Taylor Reference Reese-Taylor and Stone2002; Tozzer Reference Tozzer1941:139). Community leaders also regularly surveyed territorial limits using these processions to (re)confirm both natural and artificial features as legitimate territorial markers (Iannone Reference Iannone2010:355; McAnany Reference McAnany1995:87; Roys Reference Roys1943:181, 192). Contemporary and historic data indicate that ritual circuits undertaken as part of annual New Year ceremonies or to establish settlements often began at the center of the community and followed a counter-clockwise direction around it. The shrines and landscape features visited along the way served not only as zones between earthly and otherworldly realms, but as ways to create and reinforce divisions between people and places.

MULTIPLE, OVERLAPPING, AND DYNAMIC BOUNDARIES

In the same way that social identities are situated, multiple, and dynamic, boundaries should also be viewed as multiple, overlapping, and constantly shifting. While one spot may mark the heartland for some, that same spot may encompass a hinterland for others. For example, today's Hong Kong is both a modern world metropolis and a peripheral Chinese city (Tenzin Reference Tenzin2017:551) whose political status and incorporation into mainland China has been increasingly contentious with the protest over the Fugitive Offenders bill in 2019–2020. In turn, political, economic, ideological, military, social, demographic, and geographic boundaries may correspond closely with, and dialectically create one another, while other boundaries may vary substantially from one another as contradictory to, nested within, or cross-cutting one another (Alvarez Reference Alvarez1995; Campbell Reference Campbell2009; Hegmon Reference Hegmon and Stark1998; Parker Reference Parker2006; Rodseth and Parker Reference Rodseth, Parker, Parker and Rodseth2005). Likewise, Smith (Reference Smith2005) argues that ancient states should not be conceived as homogenous and uncontested territories. Instead, she contends, a focus on multiple, shifting networks, as seen through the development of interconnected roads or the distribution of state-sponsored inscriptions, allow us to rethink how boundaries transpired from the perspective of overlapping and uneven connections rather than a homogenous territorial division (see also Martin and Grube Reference Martin and Grube2000:21; Munson and Macri Reference Munson and Macri2009). As such, it is imperative to consider multiple scales of analyses whereby placing-making, social memory, and practices of affiliation forge uneven and intersecting senses of belonging.

Epigraphic research in the Maya area, for example, reveals that some places, as identified by place names, may overlap with emblem glyphs (royal titles), as in the examples of Yaxha, K'anwitznal (Ucanal), and Lakam-ha (Palenque) (Stuart and Houston Reference Stuart and Houston1994:3–10). Not all emblem glyphs, however, evoke toponyms, and as dynasties splintered or migrated, such royal titles were associated with new peoples, deities, and places, such as the Mutul dynasty at Tikal that fragmented in the early seventh century with the foundation of a splinter polity in the Petexbatun region. Likewise, new epigraphic readings suggest that multiple polities may have forged together to form regional group identities. While such formulations sometimes evoked the quadripartite directions (Marcus Reference Marcus1976:16–17; Rice Reference Rice2004), royal titles also included the Huk Tzuk (Seven Divisions) and Huxlajuun Tzuk (Thirteen Divisions) titles that may reference a geopolitical group of multiple royal families or an ethnic identity that cross-cut polities (Tokovinine Reference Tokovinine2013:98).

Likewise, ethnohistoric data indicate that ethnicity sometimes overlapped with political boundaries, such as the Kowoj and Itza Maya who occupied the Peten Lakes region during the Postclassic period. These two ethnic groups spoke the same Maya language, but possessed different origin stories, had different architectural styles and ceramic production communities, and ultimately considered themselves enemies (Cecil Reference Cecil, Rice and Rice2009; Cecil and Neff Reference Cecil and Neff2006; Jones Reference Jones1998; Pugh Reference Pugh2003; Rice and Rice Reference Rice and Rice2018). Yet when the Kowoj were annexed into the larger Itza kingdom, the Itza kingdom encompassed multiple ethnic groups, including not just the Kowoj, but also the Tuluncies (enemies who were referred to as na uinicob or “not men”; Marcus Reference Marcus, Sabloff and Henderson1993:127), and the Mopan Maya, who spoke a different Yucatecan Maya dialectic (Jones Reference Jones1998:19–22).

As Marcus (Reference Marcus, Sabloff and Henderson1993, Reference Marcus, Feinman and Marcus1998; Iannone Reference Iannone2002) stressed in her dynamic model of ancient Maya polities, provinces expanded and contracted over time, a process of centralization and decentralization that constantly shifted political frontiers. While some provincial regions may have been highly controlled or tightly allied with dominant centers, such as Yaxchilan and its subordinate centers (Golden et al. Reference Golden, Scherer, Munoz and Vasquez2008:2), others may have been “semi-autonomous buffer states” (Braswell et al. Reference Braswell, Prager, Bill and Schwake2004:200; Iannone Reference Iannone2010) with only weak connections to more powerful centers. Alternatively, some provincial polities may have always been autonomous and never incorporated into larger political formations (Scarborough et al. Reference Scarborough, Valdez and Dunning2003). Michelet (Reference Michelet2012), for example, argues that, unlike most polities in the Maya area, the Rio Bec region during the Late and Terminal Classic lacked both a clear political frontier and a political center. Its “great houses” were numerous, but without the typical signs of centrality and hierarchy (no open central spaces, no ballcourts, and/or dispersed rather than nucleated monumental architecture).

In his study of African political formations, Kopytoff (Reference Kopytoff and Kopytoff1987) distinguished between external and internal frontiers. External frontiers were frontiers between complex political entities, such as expanding empires, and more sparsely populated areas with less complex societies. Internal frontiers, on the other hand, were interstitial zones between metropolises. Internal frontiers were often home to ethnically ambiguous, politically fragmented, and marginal societies that fell in between more powerful political entities (the “institutional vacuum”). They were also dynamic places where new political centers emerged as a result of people moving from the metropolis. The idea of the external frontier is difficult to apply to the Maya area, since Maya polities were not necessarily more populous or more politically complex than their neighbors (Goldstein Reference Goldstein, Robertson and Fields1994; Schortman Reference Schortman1989; Schortman and Urban Reference Schortman and Urban1994; Stoner Reference Stoner2012), and since pre-Columbian Maya peoples never considered themselves as a singular cultural or political entity (Beyyette and LeCount Reference Beyyette and LeCount2017; Hutson Reference Hutson2009). Nonetheless, the interstitial zones between dominant Maya political formations could aptly be considered as internal frontiers (Iannone Reference Iannone2010).

CULTURAL CREATIVITY, DIVERSITY, AND POLITICAL INNOVATIONS

One of the critiques of many previous core-periphery studies is the emphasis on the metropolis as the source of influences and migrants. In fact, many agency and postcolonial approaches have emphasized frontier zones as places of ethnogenesis, cosmopolitanism, cultural creativity, political innovations, and hybridity (Bhabha Reference Bhabha1994, Reference Bhabha, García-Moreno and Pfeiffer1996; Cobb Reference Cobb2019; Lightfoot and Martinez Reference Lightfoot and Martinez1995; Ogundiran Reference Ogundiran2014; Schortman and Urban Reference Schortman and Urban1994; Silliman Reference Silliman2015; Stein Reference Stein2002; Voss Reference Voss2005, Reference Voss2008). Despite their more peripheral status, frontiers are often places of contact for different cultural, social, and linguistic groups. Bhabba (Reference Bhabha1994), for example, argues that hybridity is a process in which different cultural forms and ways of being are mixed to create new subjectivities. It is from a marginalized position, in particular, that the mixing of and creative reworking of traits and dispositions take on new meanings and stimulate change.

Tenzin (Reference Tenzin2017) argues that borders and frontiers can be convergence zones, places of cultural hybridity, linguistic diversity, and fluid identities. It is not just the interstitial character of the frontier itself—and the institutional vacuum that it provides—that leads to the hybrid qualities that are often ascribed to frontier communities. The intermingling of local and immigrant cultures within frontier settings is equally important (Koptyoff Reference Kopytoff and Kopytoff1987:28–29). Despite their peripheral status, frontier settlements can be self-sufficient power centers. For example, in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, Tenzin (Reference Tenzin2017) finds that Qiangzu peoples take advantage of Tibetan unrest to advance their own political interests as they sit in the shadow of the Han and Tibetan states. In turn, both Gyalrongwa and Qiangzu communities in this borderland region position themselves as dynamic centers through historical narratives and origin stories, and both groups pick and choose different cultural traits from each other and from their more dominant neighbors to define their identities and assert their political and economic interests.

Likewise, Ogundiran (Reference Ogundiran2014) considers Early Osogbo, Nigeria, as a dynamic internal African frontier during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather than passively emulating ceramic styles from Yorubaland, the metropolis from the northwest, Early Osogbo was a convergence of three different ceramic complexes: the local Osun complex, the Oyo complex from northwest Yorubaland, and the Ife ceramic complex from central Yorubaland, where different cultural expressions were displayed and negotiated in the context of food service and hospitality. In fact, the Early Osogbo ceramic assemblage was more diverse than those from the metropolis. Similarly, Halperin and colleagues (2020) have found that the Maya site of Ucanal did not blindly replicate the ritual practices and material culture of the larger polities of Naranjo and Caracol that dominated it during the Late Classic period. Rather, Ucanal took advantage of its frontier status between these political superpowers to eclectically incorporate influences and social practices of multiple regions and eventually to establish itself as a vanguard of Terminal Classic-period political changes. These and other archaeological examples point to the possibility that frontiers not only accommodated difference whereby diverse influences and ways of being co-existed, but could also be places of innovation and agency (see also Stein Reference Stein2002).

One way in which diversity and difference is mediated is through “boundary objects” that link different practices, values, and viewpoints. In applying Star and Griesemer's (Reference Star and Griesemer1989) concept of boundary objects, some archaeologists (Mills Reference Mills2018; Roddick and Stahl Reference Roddick and Stahl2016) have emphasized the bridging role of particular people, places, and things in translating and making connections between different communities and their practices. Boundary objects inhabit multiple social worlds and as such, destabilize the boundedness of social boundaries. Harrison-Buck and Pugh (Reference Harrison-Buck and Pugh2020) consider fine paste ceramic vessels as boundary objects that facilitated the interactions between diverse ethnolinguistic, regional, and social groups in the Maya lowlands during the Terminal Classic period. Such interactions were also fostered through elite women who intermarried into distant polities and communities during all time periods and who were integral in serving as intermediaries between regional differences.

Accommodations and negotiations of difference may also be highly situational. Schortman and colleagues (Reference Schortman and Urban1994, Reference Schortman, Urban and Ausec2001), for example, find that elites in the Naco Valley, a zone often considered to be the southeastern frontier between Maya and non-Maya peoples, drew on multiple political identities and practices of affiliation. They linked themselves to Maya elites to the northwest in their adoption of turban headdresses, use of Spondylus sp. shell in ceremonial contexts, and in their construction of monumental architecture as a means to legitimize their higher status while they simultaneously promoted a local regional identity in the construction and display of ceramic vessels and figurines that strategically cross-cut status divides to forge social solidarity among community members.

Iannone (Reference Iannone2010) incorporates many of these dynamic processes associated with internal frontier communities in his analysis of the “petty kingdom” of Minanha, a small capital city situated in what is now Belize's north Vaca Plateau, an area that was once located equidistant (25 km) between the two larger—and antagonistic—kingdoms of Caracol and Naranjo (see also Schwake and Iannone Reference Schwake and Iannone2010, Reference Schwake, Iannone, Iannone, Houk and Schwake2016). By taking into consideration Minanha's environmental setting, geopolitical location, and developmental history—alongside its architecture, artifacts, and ritual practices—Iannone (Reference Iannone2010:362–364) highlights several characteristics that are indicative of an internal frontier community. These include evidence for political volatility (the periodic destruction of stelae, buildings, and even the purposeful burial of an entire elite residential courtyard), hybridity (a site plan that reflects multiple, extraregional influences, and a comparatively intensive use of slate unlike that seen at either Caracol or Naranjo), emulation (evidence for caching behavior, mortuary practices, and both architectural and artifactual traits that are similar, albeit not identical, to those of Caracol), and negotiation (shifts in rulership and political affiliations that are suggestive of everchanging relationships with the Caracol and Naranjo polities). The tensions and tumultuous relationships between these two superpowers, as well as with Tikal and Calakmul, over the course of the Classic period are seen to varying degrees at other sites in the eastern lowlands, including Xunantunich (Awe et al. Reference Awe, Helmke, Slocum and Tilden2020), Ucanal (Halperin et al. Reference Halperin, Garrido Lopez, Salas and LeMoine2020), and Nakum (Źrałka et al. Reference Źrałka, Helmke, Hermes, Koszkul, Ting, Bishop and Bojkowska2020), providing, at the polity level, different perspectives of “the outside looking in.” Further explorations, however, are needed to examine how such relationships manifested at different social scales, such as the household level, whereby the potential for internal heterogeneity and unevenness in such tensions can be better understood.