Where Voices are Heard: Historic Archaeology at the 19th Century Refugee Village at Tikal, Guatemala

In the late nineteenth century Maya refugees fleeing the violence of the Caste War of Yucatan (1847-1901) briefly reoccupied the ancient Maya ruins of Tikal. Unlike the numerous Yucatec refugee communities established in British Honduras, those who settled at Tikal combined with Lacandon Maya and Ladinos from Lake Petén Itza to form a small multiethnic village in the sparsely occupied Petén jungle of northern Guatemala. This dissertation directly investigates the materiality of the refugee experience and demonstrates methods in which archaeology can aid and inform the growing field of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies. The relatively short occupation span combined with archaeologically intact households and depositional areas make the historic Tikal village the opportune location to directly explore the exploitation of frontier zones by refugee populations. A copious and varied assemblage of mass-produced consumer goods from around the globe was found in the houses and vast midden deposits of the Tikal village which reveals its interconnectedness to local, national, and international exchange markets as the historic inhabitants of Tikal were experiencing and actively engaging in incipient global capitalism (globalization) from the relative safety of the jungle frontier zone. How globally produced consumer goods were distributed and consumed by different societies in and around the frontier zone of nineteenth-century Petén elucidates patterns of economic choice and changing ethnic identities which is witnessed in refugee behaviors in the modern era.