Political Identity and Archaeology in Northeast Honduras

Thomas Cuddy fills a substantial void in the scholarship on the origins of complex societies and the Central American political landscape, drawing on previously unexamined research conducted by anthropologist William Duncan Strong during a 1933 expedition to find the southern reaches of Maya culture. From AD 200 until the Spanish conquests of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Pech chiefdoms of north-east Honduras maintained their autonomy through tactful engagement with the powerful states and empires of Mesoamerica and increasingly large societies like the Greater Nicoya region of Costa Rica. Cuddy, working with Strong's untapped fieldwork, examines symbolic expressions to reconstruct the dynamic contexts that structured power in Central American prehistory and shaped the political identity of Northeast Honduras. By being similar to, but distinct from, their powerful neighbours, the polities of Northeast Honduras created their own senses of power and identity that served their continued growth while states and empires crumbled around them. The book suggests new avenues for understanding the structure and administration of chiefdoms by revealing the archaeological resources and rich ethnohistoric context of the area and the compelling history of its early scholarly explorations.