Abstract
Political boundaries and frontiers are often construed as places of precarity and danger, where hegemons seek to extract resources or control communities at the edge of their influence. Conversely, these spaces may be understood as places of opportunity or refuge from coercive political mechanisms. Scholars studying ancient Maya political dynamics have debated the relative centralization or decentralization of ancient Maya kingdoms across the Northern and Southern Lowlands, thus highlighting the importance of investigating the plural spaces between these structures. This dissertation approaches the study of communities occupying the borderlands and frontiers of ancient polities from the level of an archaeological community located at the spatial interstices of three competing dynastic capitals. Archaeologists have long studied the shifting dynamics between ancient Maya royal courts, their subsidiary centers, and rivals as a defining characteristic of ancient Maya political economies. This study is situated to explore the shifting political dynamics that characterized the Classic Period (AD 250-900) of the Southern Maya Lowlands, where an array of competing political structures governed by dynastic lineages vied for control of the landscape, establishing territorial borders and engaging in generations-long conflicts between royal courts and their allies. While the effects of these conflicts are well documented among Maya royal elite, less is known about the real impact of these conflicts on smaller communities. I address this issue through a conjunctive framework, contextualizing changes in material assemblages and exchange economies with regional political changes as understood through the epigraphic corpus, and previous research in the Usumacinta River Region. Supported by survey, excavation, and material analysis of archaeological assemblages recovered from El Jovero, Chiapas, Mexico, a small community located between the ancient Maya kingdoms of Piedras Negras, Yaxchilán, and Lacanjá Tzeltal-Sak Tz’i’, I present a distinction between borderlands and frontiers as they relate to the integration and articulation of ancient communities with regional exchange networks and political systems. El Jovero provides an apt opportunity to explore these themes and understand how these shifting alliances affected and influenced communities between polities, where geographic and social frontiers emerged as places of social transformation and resistance.