October 12, 2024 Dr. Stanley Walling, Community College of Philadelphia/Project for Belize: “Ancient Maya Commoner Settlement, Ritualism, and Celestial Alignment in the Rio Bravo Basin, Belize.”
Recent investigations of small ancient Maya communities have revealed unexpected levels of cultural complexity. At one of these communities, in a previously unexplored region of Northwestern Belize, several lines of archaeological evidence suggest that the site’s commoner inhabitants practiced sophisticated ceremonialism. The most surprising discovery at this Late Classic rural community, a stone-walled ritual ballcourt, is an anomaly in such a humble architectural setting. Also anomalous is the perfect East-West alignment of this ballcourt with a possible ballcourt in a small Late Classic hamlet some 3 km distant. Such an inter-site solar alignment is unique in the Maya lowlands. The previously-unappreciated commoner regionalism it indicates, at least with respect to ritual performance, raises the question of to what degree commoner regionalism extended beyond the realm of ceremony.
Stanley Walling received his B.A. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and his M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from Tulane University. His experience as a graduate student mapping and excavating Preclassic and Classic-period commoner communities at Pulltrouser Swamp, Belize inspired his continued interest in documenting the lives of the humblest ancient Maya, with a particular eye to defining the sophistication of their settlement organization, environmental manipulation, and ritual practice. In the course of his career, in addition to his research at Pulltrouser Swamp, Stan carried out archaeological settlement investigations at Sayil, Mexico and Rio Azul, Guatemala. Currently, he serves as the Associate Director of the Programme for Belize Regional Archaeology Project and the Director of the Rio Bravo Archaeological Survey in northwestern Belize. He is an Associate Professor of anthropology at the Community College of Philadelphia and a Research Fellow at the Center for Archaeological and Tropical Studies at the University of Texas in Austin. His field research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, The National Geographic Society, and the Arts and Culture Division of Google Corporation. His publications focus on the complexity of ancient Maya commoner culture. He is currently preparing an edited volume on investigations in his research zone in Belize to be published by the Center for Archaeological and Tropical Studies at the University of Texas.