ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses religion as implicated in political change in Formative Period Honduras (ca. 1600–400 B.C.). I argue that the materiality of religious practice is both a productive site for recommitting to existing beliefs, and provides the only medium through which to transform beliefs. By examining media marked with representational imagery usually seen as indications of the spread of an ideology from the Gulf Coast of Mexico that occur in Honduras, I reconstitute a sense of religious practice as lived experience. I examine how ritualized practices shaped the political economy, giving value to certain things, and created beliefs that would be recognized as religious doctrine. I suggest that the nature of religion made it easier to promote social change through religious innovation than to institute political change and then retroactively sanction it.
