ABSTRACT
While sedentism is often thought to accompany farming, we demonstrate structured practices of subsistence and sociopolitical relations that enabled flexible, strategic mobility within a region. In these landscapes of strategic mobility, combining extensive cultivation with sociopolitical networks, Yucatec Maya people could move nimbly in order to evade any number of colonial depredations. Paying little heed to the anticipatory borders that emerging republics in Central America were aiming to establish, at the height of the Caste or Maya Social War of Yucatán (1847–1901), the San Pedro Maya used this strategic mobility to cross the Mexican boundary southward into areas occupied by British settlements in the Bay of Honduras to escape the war, and a decade later, across the putative border with Guatemala to escape West India regimental troops. In this chapter, we illustrate how these structured practices of strategic mobility developed over time and how, despite the military context, the San Pedro Maya should be seen not as “refugees” but as deft navigators within a familiar region. Finally, we discuss the implications for archaeology of trying to identify mobile farmers.
