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Shared identities create deep historical ties to community spaces and can facilitate or constrict political expansion. This research examines the relationship between the ways in which families engaged local landscapes and developed shared identities at Actuncan, Belize, during the Terminal Classic period, a time when the city experienced population growth as surrounding centers declined. The nature and location of activity patterns in and around three residential groups allow inferences about shared practices and the expression of identities that those activities enabled and constrained. Importantly, this research includes investigations of both residential groups and architecturally free areas. It uses multiple methods to explore activities and to produce overlapping datasets, including excavation and analysis of macroartifacts, microartifacts, and soil chemical residues. The results suggest that Actuncan residents used not only the formal patio spaces of residential groups but also the interstitial spaces between them. Moreover, one residential group, Group 1, appears to have been a locus for distinct activities including sequential burials and, possibly, affiliative ritual practices connected to ancestral landscape use. Understanding relationships among residents is an important foundation for exploring broader political dynamics, including relationships between residents and rulers and how rulers created, legitimized, and maintained power and authority.

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The Global Citizens Project (GCP) is a university-wide global learning initiative at the University of South Florida, aimed at enhancing undergraduate students’ global competencies through curricular and co-curricular experiences. The GCP uses the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework for these experiences. Understanding the SDGs allows students to expand their ideas on issues that exist in the world and how we might respond to the challenges. The purpose of this article is to provide a case study showing how the GCP has introduced students from all disciplines and undergraduate degree programmes to the SDGs through interdisciplinary workshops, with the aim of helping them to better understand the SDGs and connect global issues to their academic goals, professional objectives and everyday experiences. To determine whether the aims of the workshops were met, qualitative content analysis is employed to analyse the constructed responses of students who attended them. The results of the study suggest that the SDGs provide a relevant and sufficiently robust framework for guiding undergraduate students in their thinking about global issues as well as their relationship with these issues.