HOUSEHOLD RESILIENCE: RESULTS OF THE 2022 AND 2023 RESEARCH AT AVENTURA

This article explores Aventura as a resilient and persistent place for Maya people. We engage new household excavation data from 2022 and 2023 research at Aventura to view the people who inhabited this Maya urban center. Summer 2023 was the final year of a decade-long investigation (2014-2023) into Aventura’s urban households located within a 1 km radius of its civic-ceremonial center. Urban households anchor our research and situate the daily lives of the city’s heterogenous residents. We contextualize the new household excavations within a decade of research to develop three arguments about household resilience. First, resilient households are not static, but they change through time. Second, heterarchical socio-economic and environmental relationships can foster resilience. Third, Aventura was and is a spiritually meaningful place for Maya people undergirding its persistence. Through our investigation of Aventura’s households, we center Indigenous Maya resilience.