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Between 1984 and 1989, the San Diego State University Mopan-Macal Triangle Project carried out six extended seasons of fieldwork oriented toward documenting the internal sociobehavioral structure and organization of a representative Classic period community in the southern Maya Lowlands. The project also undertook to delineate the spatial boundaries of several such contiguous communities and to test a selected set of alternative models for Classic period political organization at the local and regional levels. This article summarizes our approach to understanding political organization and presents our preliminary conclusions: a model of the so-called segmentary state type as recently espoused by several researchers best approximates the reality of internal political organization at the single polity level during the Late Classic period of the southern Maya Lowlands.Since 1984, the San Diego State University Mopan-Macal Triangle Archaeological Project has examined the interrelated issues of Late Classic Lowland Maya community form, structure, and political organization within the upper Belize Valley zone of central western Belize. In pursuing these issues, we have employed a strategy composed of four basic methodological and theoretical elements. Individually, these have been (1) a full-coverage regional research strategy, (2) a focus on a region characterized by comparatively small major centers and lower order sites, (3) an emphasis on the extensive stripping and point-plot recording of numerous complete Late Classic depositional contexts and their contents, and (4) a test model based on the work of urban anthropologist, Richard G. Fox (1977). ' We intended originally to examine the qualities of structure and organization at the community level only. However, our results pointed toward wider implications concerning political organization above the local community as they began to support functional identification of the Late Classic period MopanMacal centers with Fox's regal-ritual urban type and its generally associated form of political integration, the segmentary state (Fox 1977:41-43). Further supporting these findings were a gradually demonstrated functional redundance among the sev-1 Unlike other applications of the Fox and antecedent Southall (1956) models to Mesoamerica (Fox 1987; Marcus 1983b; Sanders and Webster 1988), our approach involved reformulating the models as a series of hypotheses and then designing a program of field investigations to recover data suitable for testing these (Ball and Taschek 1986). Thus, rather than using the Fox models to "explain" our data, we sought to acquire data with which to test the appropriateness of those models.

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Despite more than two decades of extensive and highly productive research programs by a series of institutions and individuals focusing specifically on the Preclassic archaeology of the Belize River Valley, understanding and appreciation of the region's ceramic tradition and interpreted culture history today effectively remain based on, and dependent on, unmodified conceptual formulations from the 1940s through the 1960s. These incorporate a view of the zonal Preclassic ceramic sequence as the physical embodiment of a uniform and even unitary local producer-consumer system tied directly and genetically to the later Classic and Postclassic Maya inhabitants of the region. In this paper, we question both these assumptions and the soundness of the conceptual constructs (ceramic complexes) and framework (ceramic sequence) on which they are based. We examine the content and analyze the composition of the Belize Valley Middle and Late Preclassic ceramic complexes as dynamic, composite, producer-consumer circulation assemblages rather than as static, synthetic archaeological units, and we conclude that they reflect a much more complex socioeconomic, cultural, and sociopolitical landscape than has yet been recognized and appreciated by other investigators. We propose the presence and interaction within the valley during the Middle and Late Preclassic of at least two distinct dialectal, ethnic, or ethnolinguistic groups, and we argue that the local cultural tradition emerging in the area by the ceramic Protoclassic represented a ranked amalgamation of these. The paper also presents the first comprehensive and complete type-variety typologies for the Middle through Late Preclassic ceramic complexes of the upper Belize Valley, incorporating both new data from the 1980s and 1990s and substantive revisions of earlier work by

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