Gradual Changes in Early Colonial-Period Maya Ceramics in Northern Yucatan

Indigenous pottery traditions and other material aspects of daily life in Yucatan were slow to change during the early colonial period. This conservativism reflects a gradual rate of social change at the community scale as Maya peoples contended with a Franciscan missionization program imposed on them from the mid-16th to 17th centuries. Ceramic assemblages from the rural visita sites of Hunacti, Yacman, and Tichac reveal divergent—and parallel—trajectories of household economies and footprints of social identity during the first century of Spanish rule. The quantity, kind, and distribution of indigenous pottery at these sites refines interpretations of late precontact, contact, and colonial-era ceramic traditions and the broader socioeconomic contexts that affected them. This study joins a robust literature from other places in the Americas that consider the complex manifestations of hybridity and ambivalence in colonial encounters.