Memory, Pilgrimage, and Social Life in an Ancient Maya City: Waka’s Fire Shrine as a Compendium of Political History

Abstract Long-term research at Waka’s City temple (Structure M13-1) demonstrates it was an important locale for ritual commemoration by local people as well as those from afar. Extensive and diversely constituted deposits throughout the building’s surface demonstrate it was venerated publicly by non-elites throughout Waka’s final occupations and gradual abandonment. Recent re-examinations of these materials confirm that they appear consistent with material assemblages from Waka’s domestic contexts. We can now also complement early insights that the building was important for Waka’s wider citizenry with deeper understanding of its earlier political significance and function; namely, that it formed a major component of the site’s political and ritual landscape for centuries, including playing a key role during the Early Classic Teotihuacan-Maya Entrada. Today the building’s fronting plaza continues as the locus for various pre-excavation ceremonies. Together, this paints a picture of a monumental center that remained vividly remembered for its political and ritual importance for centuries. In the context of the unifying theme of ruination studies and Indigenous perspectives on such landscapes, we consider this building to be an example of how landscapes remain animate and how memory is itself an animating force that sustains meaning and situates action.