European Beads from Spanish-Colonial Lamanai and Tipu, Belize

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers Volume 6 Volume 6 (1994) Article 5 1-1-1994 European Beads from Spanish-Colonial Lamanai and Tipu, Belize Marvin T. Smith Elizabeth Graham David M. Pendergast Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/beads Part of the Archaeological Anthropology Commons, History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons, Science and Technology Studies Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Repository Citation Smith, Marvin T.; Graham, Elizabeth; and Pendergast, David M. (1994). "European Beads from SpanishColonial Lamanai and Tipu, Belize." BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers 6: 21-47. Available at: https://surface.syr.edu/beads/vol6/iss1/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers by an authorized editor of SURFACE. For more information, please contact . EUROPEAN BEADS FROM SPANISH~COLONIAL LAMANAI AND TIPU, BELIZE Marvin T. Smith, Elizabeth Graham and David M. Pendergast Excavation of the contact-period components of the Maya sites of Lamanai and Tipu in northern and west-central Belize, respectively, have yielded moderate collections of European glass and other beads. The archaeological data are augmented by ethnohistorical documentation regarding the length of Maya/Spanish interaction. Contexts do not provide unequivocal stratigraphic evidence of sequential bead importation, but known dates of bead varieties assist in refining both site chronology and the understanding of bead use. As the first Central American collections. to be analyzed, the two assemblages offer an initial glimpse of one aspect of European impact on native material and non-material culture. INTRODUCTION Excavation of the Spanish Colonial portions of Lamanai, in north central Belize, and Tipu, near the country's western border (Fig. 1), has provided the first archaeological documentation of 16th- and 17th-century Maya life in the southern lowlands. The work at Lamanai, begun in 1975 and completed in 1986 (Pendergast 1981, 1986a-b, 1990, 1991), comprised full excavation of every identifiable residential structure of the colonial settlement, as well as the two sequent Spanish churches and several non-structure-associated refuse dumps of the period. One of the two contact-period cemeteries was completely excavated, whereas the second (and probably later of the two) saw only the most minimal sampling (Pendergast 1986b:4). In contrast, the Tipu project has, since its initiation in 1980, involved excavation of the single identifiable church and its more than 600 associated burials (Cohen, Bennett and Armstrong 1989), as well as investigation of eight colonial residences (Graham 1991; Graham and BEADS 6:21-47 (1994) Bennett 1989; Graham, Jones and Kautz 1985). Insofar as the church and Spanish-period cemetery are concerned, the sample of the colonial remains at the site is largely complete; only a portion of the sanctuary was left unexcavated. Of what we estimate to be the ·colonial community, less than one-third has been excavated. Despite the differences in sample size and character at the two sites, there is a strong suggestion that colonial-period material culture contrasts between Lamanai and Tipu are more than an artifact of excavation. The contrasts .are, in fact, very likely to reflect significantly different relations between Maya and Spaniard in communities that played largely separate roles on the early colonial stage (see Graham, Pendergast and Jones 1989). Although the archaeological record from the two communities includes parallels in some areas of European material culture, the contexts and types of glass beads at the two sites overlap only partially. The differences in extent of excavation ·o f the sites may have some degree of bearing on this aspect of sample comparability (Pendergast 1991:350), but there is very good reason to suppose that imported beads were utilized at Lamanai in ways different from those that characterized Tipu. In addition to their value as sources of information regarding native status arid European economic impact in the two communities, the Lamanai and Tipu bead collections are the first from Central America to be analyzed. They are, therefore, useful as evidence of the bead varieties that figured in early contact in the area. The grave-lot associations at Tipu also bear on bead chronology, and some suggestions regarding chronology are made in this paper. It is important to note, however, that the details of burial sequence 22 BELIZE •Modern Settlements 10 0 5 ml1Un: 1 1'11'11'1 10 5 0 10 I 10 20 I 20 I 30 Figure 1. Map of Belize showing the location of Lamanai and Tipu, as well as other archaeological sites (drawing by D. Findlay). 23 Figure 2. Structure Nl 1-18 at Lamanai, the source of most of the site's beads and probable home of the community's alcalde (photo by D. Pendergast). derive from a wide range of data and cannot be worked out in full until all analyses are completed. Full discussion of the Tipu and Lamanai assemblages will appear in excavation reporting, but we present here a summary of the contexts in which the two bead collections were encountered. Most of the beads are glass, but some jet and amber are also included. The bead descriptions, the type and variety designations and the dating based on typology are the work of Smith; the discussions of the archaeological contexts, associated artifacts and the probable significance of the two collections were written by Graham (Tipu) and Pendergast (Lamanai). THELAMANAIBEADSAMPLE:CONTEXTS With a small number of exceptions, the 16th-century Lamanai glass beads come from a restricted but, nonetheless, complex context: a residence designated Structure Nl 1-18 (Fig. 2) (Pendergast 1991 :348-350, Fig. 16-4). Together with a variety of other European goods, the beads serve to identify with virtual certainty the principal Spanish colonial-period Maya residence, presumably the home of the settlement's alcalde (mayor) (Pendergast and Graham 1993). One of the two principal lots of beads (18 specimens; see Table 1), was recovered from a large midden that abutted the north face of the structure. The second lot consists of 20 beads, 14 of which were scattered over the interior of the house, a context that yielded a broad range of other European goods (Pendergast and Graham 1993:345-351), with the remaining six distributed on exterior floor surfaces at the front of the structure. The beads' presence immediately atop floor ballast and other building surfaces leaves no doubt that they were strewn throughout the structure as part of a deposition of wealth/status items that must, given the context, have been among the last acts that preceded abandonment of the residence. The meaning of the effort cannot be fully reconstructed, but it is highly likely that the discarding of previously va (...truncated)