Pusilhá is an archaeological site in

Belize Belize is a country on the north-eastern coast of Central America. It is bordered by Mexico to the north, the Caribbean Sea to the east, and Guatemala to the west and south. It also shares a maritime boundary with Honduras to the southeast. P ...

. The location of this Late Classic

Maya Maya may refer to: Ethnic groups * Maya peoples, of southern Mexico and northern Central America ** Maya civilization, the historical civilization of the Maya peoples ** Mayan languages, the languages of the Maya peoples * Maya (East Africa), a p ...

urban complex, along the east and west flow of trade, made the city a major transfer point for economic activities in the whole region. In addition, the city gave archaeologists a historical view of a secondary Maya site. Large and extended excavation efforts have changed the overall picture of Maya social and political relationships between larger and smaller cities and challenged the prevailing view of conquest and absorption of smaller cities into the larger cities in the region. The research conducted at Pusilhá began in 1927 and continues to this day.

Location

The site of Pusilhá is located in the Toledo district of

in the town of San Benito Poité. Situated between the Poite and Pusilha rivers that run east and west, this may have impacted why the

urban complex was built there. The site is also located favorably between the Caribbean to the south and the Maya Mountains to the east. Pusilhá was also situated in the region to facilitate flow of goods and ideas from the central lowlands and southeastern periphery located in Honduras. With the major Maya urban sites of the central lowlands at

Caracol Caracol is a large ancient Maya archaeological site, located in what is now the Cayo District of Belize. It is situated approximately south of Xunantunich, and the town of San Ignacio, and from the Macal River. It rests on the Vaca Plateau, ...

and

Tikal Tikal (; ''Tik'al'' in modern Mayan orthography) is the ruin of an ancient city, which was likely to have been called Yax Mutal, found in a rainforest in Guatemala. It is one of the largest archaeological sites and urban centers of the Pre-Col ...

and the southern lowland site of Copan, Pusilhá was possibly a major transfer point for economic activities in the whole of the lowland region.

Excavation

The initial site survey was conducted in 1927 by archaeologists from the

British Museum The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...

Expedition to British Honduras, led by Thomas Joyce. The survey led to the removal of the best-preserved

stelae A stele ( ) or stela ( )The plural in English is sometimes stelai ( ) based on direct transliteration of the Greek, sometimes stelae or stelæ ( ) based on the inflection of Greek nouns in Latin, and sometimes anglicized to steles ( ) or stela ...

from Pusilhá to the

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

. The survey yielded dates and calendrical glyphs that were included in Sylvanus G. Morley's discussion work, ''The Inscriptions of Petén''. Thomas Joyce also conducted an extensive ceramics evaluation in 1929. In the intervening 70 years very little research has been done in Pusilhá. This state of affairs has changed with research and excavations carried out by Geoffrey Braswell and the Pusilha Archaeological Project beginning in 2001. The excavation that has continued to present has exposed three major areas at the center of Pusilhá to archaeological interpretation.

History

Pusilhá has a series of confirmed occupation dates. It is known through ceramic analysis that this site is dateable to the late classic. A stela found on site indicates a late classic occupation. According to Braswell, the current excavator of the site, "Stela P begins with the initial series date of 9.7.0.0.0 and contains a historical retrospective date of 9.6.17.8.18 (A.D. 570), implying that the kingdom was founded shortly before the beginning of the Late Classic period". He does state that excavations from surrounding residential areas away from the complex center seem to indicate an early classic occupation, but additional excavation is required to confirm this for the rest of the site. Transitions in ceramics, burials and construction, coupled with the usual cessation of inscriptions on stelae, indicate continued occupation at Pusilhá through to the post-classic. The last official date, which is a calendar round date, occurs at 9.18.7.10.3, or A. D. 798.

Political

The initial excavation and surveys seem to show that politically, Pusilhá was a second-tier polity. The ceramics evidence showed that there were ties to Copan and Quirigua. It also seems likely that there were connections between Tikal and Caracol as those polities rose to prominence in the Petén. Based in part on the favorable location of Pusilhá along both east and west corridors of trade and the north and south axis of influence that had Caracol to the north and Copan to the south it seemed likely that the polity was politically dependent on one of its larger neighbors. However, the current archaeological evidence indicates that Pusilhá maintained its independence.

Ruling Elite

The archaeological evidence indicates that Pusilhá was a traditional Maya "elite" led urban complex. There are eight rulers known to be associated with the Pusilhá emblem glyph from the late Classic period with two possibly additional from the Terminal Classic. In total, 39 named individuals have been discovered by the epigraphers in the hieroglyphic record. Of note is an individual who at first was linked as a ruler of Copan based on the artifactual record of that polity. K'ahk' Uti' Chan is the name of Ruler B of Pusilhá as well as Ruler 11 at Copan and was first ascribed to be the same individual. Further research has shown that they were contemporaries to each other and had different known parentages.

Site Significance

The site of Pusilhá has one representation of bridge construction that has survived to modern times. The polity of Pusilhá also offers a look at the quantity and quality of the stelae available for study from a secondary urban complex. This site may represent an alternative method of looking at how the Maya used to govern themselves, which is contrary to the prevailing view of conquest and absorption of smaller cities into the larger cities in the region. Some say that research and excavation are at a very early stage and that more work is required to understand the place that Pusilhá holds in the greater Maya world.

Footnotes

References

* * * * * * * Culbert, T. Patrick, and Don S. Rice (eds.). 1990. Precolumbian Population History in the Maya Lowlands. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press * Foias, Antonia E., 1996, Changing Ceramic Production and Exchange Systems and the Classic Maya Collapse in the Petexbatun Region. PhD. Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University, Microfilms, Ann Arbor. * * Sheptak, Russell N., 1987 Interaction between Belize and the Ulua Valley. In Interaction on the Southeast Mesoamerican Frontier: Prehistoric and Historic Honduras and El Salvador, edited by Eugenia J. Robinson. BAR International Series 327, Oxford. * Thompson, John 1928 Some new dates from Pusilha. Man xxviii:95. * *

External links

*Raz jade mask, Pusilha http://www.wayeb.org/drawings/raz_jade_mask.png *Stele http://www.wayeb.org/drawings/pus_st_d.png *Pusilha Archaeological Project (PUSAP) http://dss.ucsd.edu/~gbraswel/pusap.html {{authority control Maya sites in Belize Former populated places in Belize Toledo District Mesoamerica Classic period in the Americas Pre-Columbian cultural areas Indigenous peoples of Central America History of Petén Maya sites that survived the end of the Classic Period