Tulane Maya Symposium Abstracts

The Maya ruins of La Corona (ancient Saknikte’) sport an unusually large textual and historical record. The site’s inscriptions, despite their highly fragmented and incomplete state, present epigraphers and archaeologists with a detailed account of a royal family that ruled there at least from the 6th to 8th centuries. Excavations in the last several years have revealed many more inscribed sculptures. This forum will focus on the distinctive characteristics of La Corona as a literate community of the Classic period, highlighting aspects of dynastic history, ritual subject matter, textual presentation, and language, all of which provide important cultural and political contexts for understanding La Corona in the wider world of the lowland Classic Maya. More broadly, we discuss the continuing emergence of a historical methodology in the theory and practice of Maya archaeology.

Just as the celebration of 20-year cycles was important to the ancient Maya, this talk summarizes the results of the La Corona Regional Archaeological Project over its first two decades. A joint effort of Tulane University and Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, the project stands among the most notable projects in 21st-century Maya archaeology, in large part because it has investigated one of the least-known regions of the Maya area. Its multidisciplinary team has gathered new data that establish the ancient city of La Corona and its surrounding region as one of the most strategically important areas in Classic-period geopolitics. Over the last two decades, excavations at La Corona have recovered more hieroglyphic inscriptions than at any other Maya site, and the region was among the first areas in which lidar technology was applied, revolutionizing our understanding of settlement patterns. For these and many other reasons, the project has had a lasting impact on Guatemalan archaeology and on the conservation and protection of heritage in the Maya Biosphere Reserve.

La Corona and its dynasty developed in a landscape that was already thick with history—even if it was never thick with people. This talk sketches that history and provides an account of how we know what we know about it. Northwest Petén has always been a place at the margins: first of an innovative tradition of monument building in the Middle Preclassic, then of the Maya Lowlands’ first wave of complex urban polities during the Late Preclassic, then of a second wave of polities whose conflicts and alliances defined Classic Maya geopolitics. Precisely because it was on the margins, thinly occupied yet with abundant water and ample room to maneuver, Northwest Petén attracted the attention of powerful Maya polities during the Preclassic and the Classic periods, and its history was shaped by the articulation of local demographic processes and regional political machinations. We know this history thanks to work by PRALC archaeologists and epigraphers, not only at La Corona but also at El Achiotal, La Cariba, El Jobillo, and numerous sites farther afield.

After more than two decades of research at La Corona, it is clear that various commensal events played an important role throughout the site’s history. Indeed, the preparation and presentation of food, along with the associated sensory experiences, serve as a powerful means of communication, not only evoking emotions and memories but also contributing to the cohesion of communities while at certain times accentuating social division. This talk will reveal that examining the archaeobotanical evidence obtained from these contexts, spanning the Early to Terminal Classic periods and including urban, peri-urban, and rural areas, can shed light on ancient Maya foodways but also provide valuable insight into their rituals, medicine, and the functional use of their natural resources. Furthermore, through this presentation, I will propose how this lowland community may have developed a unique culinary tradition and a distinct sense of place by leveraging a diverse array of locally available plants and potentially incorporating non-local species. These data, which are often invisible to the naked eye, further highlight La Corona’s uniqueness within the ancient Maya world.

Why did La Corona, a Maya center in northwestern Guatemala, become indispensable to one of the ancient Americas’ most powerful dynasties? Originally named Sak Nikte’, La Corona occupied a strategic corridor between the Maya heartland and western river routes. Archaeology, hieroglyphic texts, and lidar reveal that its importance rested not on population or monumental scale, but on connections among people, places, and political ambitions.

This talk traces how La Corona developed from a community of founding families into an ally—and eventually a colonial extension—of the Kaanul, or “Snake,” dynasty. Sixth-century royal marriages, courtly visits, military obligations, imported wealth, and religious innovations deeply transformed local authority. Yet Kaanul control remained uneven. Lidar shows a compact, court-centered nucleus and strategically positioned elite nodes along communication routes, surrounded by dispersed farming communities that were never fully integrated into a territorial state.

When Kaanul power collapsed in the eighth century, La Corona did not simply disappear. Its rulers rearranged and preserved older monuments, converting memories of subordination into resources for renewed autonomy. La Corona therefore reveals how Maya hegemony worked: through relationships, selective control, and local adaptation rather than uniform conquest—and how small communities could help build, endure, and outlive great powers.

Past Maya economies provide information about how peoples across socio-economic classes interacted. Lithics, or stone tools, provide a unique view into past Maya economies, as they preserve well archaeologically and are reductive, allowing us to trace their production, use, and discard across the landscape. As such, we can use investigations of lithic production to shed light on aspects of past Maya economies. Investigations at La Corona and in the surrounding region provide an opportunity to examine the lithic economy within the site and to explore how political relationships among La Corona and nearby sites impacted their participation in regional economic networks. In this talk, I evaluate the role of residents of the La Corona region as producers and consumers of lithics produced on local and non-local raw material, using these data to place La Corona within lowland Maya economic networks.

As quintessential political landscapes, ancient regal palaces may be studied as the blueprints of past regimes. Sak Nikte’s palace is the polity’s largest building, with six construction phases (spanning ca. 500–830 CE) that reflect its evolving regimes: from humble beginnings to a Kaanul fief and, eventually, a more independent Later Classic polity.

This presentation focuses on Sak Nikte’s transition away from the Kaanul hegemony after 750 CE and its subsequent reinvention as a regime of its own. In the regal palace, this transition is reflected in the closure of important buildings and the construction of a new royal court. Detailed architectural, artifactual, and geoarchaeological data illuminate how the late Sak Nikte’ ruling family designed a functional royal court organized around effective political communication, administration, and economic activities. Far from subdued, this later royal court harnessed its rich Kaanul heritage and expanded its regional network.

This talk ends with an overview of how this palace was abandoned, as the site’s political gravitas waned and it followed many of its neighbors into the Classic Maya collapse.

In May 2005, archaeologists from the El Perú-Waka’ Regional Archaeological Project (PAW) and Wildlife Conservation Society personnel arrived at the little-known archaeological site of La Corona in northwestern Petén, Guatemala with the intent of identifying and matching on-site limestone monument “carcasses” to looted carved monument surfaces from the then-unlocated “Site Q.” While this initial five-day expedition failed to identify any monument carcasses, we did confirm La Corona as the ancestral Maya center of Sak Nik’ Te’, and the original home of many “Site Q” monuments.

In part due to this shared research history and in part due to their spatial proximity, archaeological investigations at Waka’ and Sak Nik’ Te’ have since witnessed considerable collaboration between the two projects. This ongoing intellectual exchange has yielded detailed insights not only into the historical and political interconnections between these places through their shared relationships with Kaanul dynasts, but also into broader economic and cultural ties among communities in western Petén. This paper will examine material similarities and differences between these two Classic Maya kingdoms to better situate both within the wider Maya world.

Lidar has revealed dispersed populations connected through diverse forms of infrastructure, yet material evidence provides a detailed perspective on how communities were socially and economically interconnected. This talk examines lifeways across the sparsely populated region of La Corona during the Late Classic period (ca. AD 600–900). Drawing on spatial, material, sourcing, macrobotanical, and zooarchaeological datasets, this talk examines three middle-scale communities situated within heuristically defined urban, peri-urban, and rural zones to explore mechanisms of socioeconomic cohesion at multiple scales. The results reveal broad similarities in socioeconomic organization, alongside meaningful differences in access to resources, participation in exchange networks, and craft activities. Most notably, the rural community exhibited a distinctive lifeway compared with the urban and peri-urban communities. These findings demonstrate that communities across La Corona’s dispersed landscape maintained interconnected but locally distinctive lifeways, highlighting settlement density as a socially meaningful dimension of Lowland Maya lifeways. More broadly, the results shed light on how Maya populations structured social networks and maintained regional cohesion across dispersed landscapes beyond physical infrastructure alone.

This presentation explores recent epigraphic discoveries at La Corona, Guatemala, and the many ways in which these have contributed to the ongoing refinement of Maya historical narratives, highlighting the contingent nature of epigraphic discovery. Unexpected textual finds not infrequently require revisions to previously established political histories and royal nomenclatures. A key example includes the phonetic reevaluation of a ruler’s name, illustrating how advanced decipherment directly impacts historical interpretation. These ongoing discoveries illuminate La Corona’s complex geopolitical ties to the Snake dynasty and confirm that archaeological unpredictability ensures Maya history remains a dynamic, self-correcting field of study.

This 2-hour workshop will focus on La Corona Panel 2 and its complex narrative of power dynamics in the mid-seventh century. At a time when the seat of power of the Kaan hegemony was shifting, succession at La Corona (known anciently as Sak Nikte’) was also fraught. Brief forays into related texts from La Corona and elsewhere will bolster our understanding of this ancient history, highlighting tensions between Kaan kings and La Corona elite, as well as within La Corona’s own dynastic line. Additionally, linguistic details on Panel 2 lend nuance to the narrative of power dynamics, indicating that, in at least some respects, the La Corona elite had substantial autonomy despite their subordination to the Kaan kings. Following a traditional workshop format, participants will decipher the inscription using provided resources (i.e., a syllabary, logogram dictionary, and calendrical tools), as well as their own keen observation and deduction skills.