ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to examine the "royal court" at the Classic period Maya city of Caracol, Belize. Iconography provides some additional information on the Caracol royal court. The chapter suggests that a specific cultural identity was cultivated among the site's populace in order to foster the expansionist goals of its various sovereigns. It focuses on Caracol's centralized organization, its administered economy and its expansive midlevel society. The site of Caracol has many palace compounds. Palaces themselves are also often devoid of human skeletal remains. It thus becomes more difficult to talk about the people who may have lived in stone buildings. The very identifiable central unit of long single-room range building was excavated and produced a single room through which all traffic into the South Acropolis must have passed. Barrio's eastern palace is almost a mirror image of the southern building. The evidence for the people utilizing palaces at Caracol comes from a variety of data classes.
