Maya Roads as <i>Kuxansumob</i> : Analyzing an Intrasite <i>Sak-Be</i> Assemblage at Punta Laguna, Yucatán, Mexico

Abstract In the early nineteenth century, foreign explorers traveling throughout Mexico and Central America began documenting sites, structures, and monuments then unknown in the United States and Europe. These explorers depicted the ruins they encountered as deserted and lifeless and suggested that the passage of time had rendered them ineffective. This article challenges such a Western, Romantic understanding of Maya ruins. Drawing on ruination studies and the material turn, it argues instead that Maya ruins are affective, consequential, and shape human actions. To do so, the article briefly considers the utility of assemblage theory and Indigenous ontologies to archaeological interpretations of ruins. It then takes as a case study an intrasite sak-be at Punta Laguna, Yucatán, México, and interprets it as a kuxansum— an Indigenous Maya concept of a living rope of blood that, even when seemingly severed, continues to connect spaces, human and other-than-human entities, and various temporalities. This interpretation encourages scholars to question whether broken or seemingly abandoned ruins such as roads must always be interpreted as functionally obsolete or whether new meanings are often made from the old.