This report describes the results of a geochemical analysis using a mild acid extraction and inductively coupled plasma-mass spectroscopy of 198 samples from plaster surfaces at the palace complex at Actuncan, a prehispanic Maya city located in a karst landscape of western Belize.Archaeologists working in the Maya region of Central America often refer to many different kinds of building complexes as "palaces" without a clear understanding of how they functioned.Often, the rooms inside these structures are devoid of features and artifacts, making it difficult to infer how they were used. Geochemical characterization of inorganic residues on plaster floors as a means of prospecting for activity areas is therefore critical for studying the function and meaning of ancient Maya palaces. At Actuncan, due to the high degree of preservation of many of the floors, overlying plaster surfaces were able to be sampled, thus informing not only how the buildings were used, but how their uses changed over time. Multivariate quantitative modeling and spatial interpolation of the chemical data demonstrate that a variety of domestic, ritual, and possibly administrative activities took place in the palace complex, a finding that challenges previous assessments of palaces as primarily royal residential compounds.

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Over the past few decades, archaeologists have increasingly viewed collective memory as critical to the establishment and legitimation of power relations. For societies in the past and present, collective memory can be drawn on to clarify group identity, justify or subvert hierarchies, invent traditions, and define behaviors. The contributors to this special issue focus on the process of remembering, how it produced multiple archaeologically visible understandings of the past, and how these viewpoints impacted power-laden social negotiations. To better elucidate this process, this introduction situates the concept of collective remembering within recent materialist frameworks that emphasize the integration of human and nonhuman actors into webs of interaction. We suggest that by viewing collective memory from the standpoint of interactions, multiple viewpoints can be recognized. We argue in turn that accounting for the diverse actors invested in memory production provides archaeologists a means to delineate how the past becomes a site of contested values that social groups are constantly reworking to define membership, justify social hierarchy, and validate resistance.On January 22, 2017, during an interview with Chuck Todd on Meet the Press (NBC News Productions 2017), Kellyanne Conway, Counselor to President Donald Trump and one of the public faces of the Trump administration, spoke of Balternative facts^as a way of explaining White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's contention that the media deliberately underestimated the size of the crowd at Trump's presidential inauguration. Conway claimed that Spicer had presented Balternative facts^as evidence for the large crowd size at Trump's inauguration. She was heavily derided for the use of the term Balternative facts,^with J Archaeol Method Theory (2017) . Conway and Spicer's statements were an active attempt to produce an alternative set of memories that contradicted other widely held recollections of the inauguration. These actions were clearly power-laden-those at the top of a power structure wished to perpetuate a more complimentary version of events, despite documentary evidence that this Balternative^account was fabricated. As of this writing, it is too soon to say how these two accounts of Trump's inauguration will fair over time. However, it seems likely that these Balternative facts^may survive and be remembered by groups who choose to believe in an alternative version of what happened. Narratives of the past have incredible influence on power dynamics. Over the past two decades, archaeologists have been increasingly interested in investigating how memories impacted social and political interactions in past contexts. Just as in the modern day, ancient institutions and identities were constructed on a foundation of collective memory-an understanding of the past shared by two or more people (see Halbwachs 1980Halbwachs [1950Halbwachs ], 1992Halbwachs [1925). Collective memory functions as a set of ideas that can be drawn on for many purposes, i...

To remain in place in the immediate aftermath of the ninth-century Maya collapse, Maya groups employed various resilient strategies. In the absence of divine rulers, groups needed to renegotiate their forms of political authority and to reconsider the legitimizing role of religious institutions. This kind of negotiation happened first at the local level, where individual communities developed varied political and ideological solutions. At the community of Actuncan, located in the lower Mopan River valley of Belize, reorganization took place within the remains of a monumental urban centre built 1000 years before by the site's early rulers. I report on the changing configuration and use of Actuncan's urban landscape during the process of reorganization. These modifications included the construction of a new centre for political gatherings, the dismantling of old administrative buildings constructed by holy lords and the reuse of the site's oldest ritual space. These developments split the city into distinct civic and ritual zones, paralleling the adoption of a new shared rule divorced from cosmological underpinnings. This case study provides an example of how broader societal resilience relies on adaptation at the local level.

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