ATTENTION: THIS MONTHLY MEETING HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO THE COVID-19 VIRUS. MONTHLY MEETINGS WILL BE SCHEDULED AGAIN WHEN IT IS SAFE TO RESUME GATHERINGS.

Conquest and Revival at Chiantla Viejo, Guatemala: The Transition of a Highland Maya Community to Spanish Colonial Rule by Victor Castillo, PhD candidate, University of Arizona and Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fellow

This meeting will be held at the Charles Sumner School, 17th & M Streets, N.W., Washington, D.C. Entrance located on 17th Street.

NOTE: Photo ID is required to enter the building.

The meeting will start with refreshments at 6:45 pm and the lecture will begin at 7:15 pm.

The ruins of Chiantla Viejo (photo by Victor Castillo)

This talk explores how religious change in small highland Maya communities offered a framework for negotiation between external innovations and traditional ritual practices during the Spanish conquest. Through a combination of archival research on early colonial Maya and excavations at Chiantla Viejo, in the Mam-speaking region of western Guatemala, the author proposes that immediately after the Spanish conquest a short but intense religious movement revived ancient ritual public architecture. Thus, ritual continuity in the Maya highlands during early colonial times happened not solely in hidden contexts, such as households or remote shrines as traditionally argued, but mainly in open public spaces.

Victor Castillo is a Junior Fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks and a doctoral candidate in archaeology at the University of Arizona. He holds a licenciatura in archaeology from Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala and an MA in anthropology from the University of Arizona. Since 2017, Castillo has been the director of the Chiantla Viejo Archaeological Project, an incipient effort to open new venues for archaeological research in an understudied region in the Maya area. He codirected the Región de Chaculá Archaeological Project in 2013 and the Ceibal-Petexbatun Archaeological Project in 2012, both in Guatemala.