Archaeological Research

Research Goals

Continuation of Project

Background and Significance

The Project (PACH)

2003 Field Season

2004 Field Season

2005 Field Season

Community
Development

Goals of the Chocolá Archaeological Project

The Chocolá Archaeological Project/Proyecto Arqueologico Chocolá (PACH) is committed to the twin linked goals of archaeological research and community development.

Archaeological Research
The project’s research focuses on a major, hitherto overlooked, and very long-lived ancient Maya city located in the heart of the seminal Southern Maya Zone (SMZ). At an elevation of from 550-1000 m HAE, Chocolá is located in the upper limits of the piedmont or Bocacosta of southwestern Guatemala. The remains represent an ancient city or of associated communities extending conceivably through 6 by 4 kilometers or more than 9 square miles.

Our research has been motivated to investigate, in general, the origins of Maya civilization and, particularly, the material and social-historical processes we hypothesize underlay early developments at Chocolá and as this city participated in seminal events in the Southern Maya area, including the development of Maya hieroglyphic writing, sacred governance, urbanism, and core Maya ideology. Formal research perspectives include ethnic processes, including Maya or proto-Maya/Mixe-Zoque (“Olmec”) interaction, the construction of a Maya identity, core-periphery economic systems, sophisticated hydraulics, and intensive cultivation and long-distance monopoly trade in cacao, a commodity of great importance throughout ancient Mesoamerica.

The project employs approximately 100 local persons, and oversees the advanced study of several graduate students from universities in the United States, Great Britain, France, Australia, and Germany as well as many students from Guatemalan universities. Through three seasons (2003-2005), the project has benefited from the assistance 159 Earthwatch (www.earthwatch.org) volunteers, and is anticipating a substantial number in 2006, to assist with essential tasks of reconnaissance, mapping, screening, washing, and marking. Dissemination of results for the benefit of scholarly colleagues will continue in the form of professional papers published and results presented at major venues for Maya and wider anthropological research, and of popular articles and television documentaries.

Click on the links to the left for more information on the Project's archaeological research.

Community Development
The philosophy of the project is that, ethically, epistemologically, and practically, the archaeological research cannot be separated from the life and continuance of the modern Maya community. Archaeology no longer can function to extract objects and knowledge from Third World ground for export, as “conquest knowledge,” or documentation of the booty of conquest, to the First World. By the same token, First World liberalist initiatives in the Third World cannot any longer function only to produce an ecological and cultural “park,” reifying or fixing in place, as if dead, Maya and other cultures for the enjoyment of First World citizens. A multivocal approach is necessary that seeks to integrate local indigenous knowledge, perspectives, history, and autonomy, into what otherwise must still attempt as possible to be an accumulative, science-based knowledge enterprise.

On a more practical level, helping the impoverished, marginalized townspeople find alternative development strategies that are sustainable, that is, that preserve local knowledge and cultural practices, is essential. Currently, unplanned and disordered growth of the town in the form of shack housing cutting into ancient mounds and destruction of archaeological remains occurs because the sons of small-plot farmers lack even the funds sufficient to escape their prison of unemployment, abysmal sanitation, and prospectless future. In many respects, but minus the individual suffering and the devastating impact of 500 years of history, the quandary mirrors the Locality vs Globalism dichotomy: one cannot have the one simultaneously while respecting and encouraging the apparently completely contradictory other.

Click on the links to the left for more information on the Project's community development.