One Foot Out the Door: Late Postclassic Zooarchaeology of Lake Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico.

The cosmology of Late Postclassic Maya living around the Lake Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico, embedded animal others in a subsistence strategy that maximized political and ecological flexibility. This flexibility allowed the Maya of Mensabak to determine the conditions under which they would allow or resist projects of political integration. I frame flexibility and political integration by uniting Niche Construction Theory with an analysis of Maya relational-ontology. In anthropology and ecology Niche Construction Theory recenters the role of mutualist behaviors between organisms as the primary driver of ecological stability or change. Some authors have taken this approach to recenter cultural practices as co-produced through reinforcing niche constructing behaviors in an assemblage of plants, animals, and human political organizations and institutions. From this framing, Postclassic Maya agriculture is a characterized by a combination of infields—which are generally more legible to centralized power—and outfields—mobile slash and burn plots. Historically, local Maya resistance to the colonial states favored outfields but their subsistence has always been a flexible hybrid. In this regard, the Late Postclassic Mensabak Maya's flexibility is a political strategy that keeps options for resistance available. The politics of flexibility also have an ideological component. Maya cosmology revolves around a relational-ontology, in which continuous interaction within a community of humans and non-humans produces personhood. In Maya cosmology, differential treatment of species is a material manifestation of ideological practices favoring flexibility. Here, zooarchaeological analysis of four contemporaneous habitation sites provided the bases for the discussion of local site-specific treatment of animals. I combine this zooarchaeological analysis with Niche Fidelity Analysis to reconstruct the ecological zones each site used. Through this analysis we can see that despite their local differences, all sites pursued a similar Niche Construction strategy that maximized ecological flexibility despite differences in site specific treatment of animals. Together, these two observations demonstrate the importance of relationships over species. It is not the particular plants or animals that are important to a political project, but the modes of relating between the plants, animals, and humans. And in the case of Mensabak these relations allowed Maya people to always have one foot out the proverbial door of the state