1 SAA 73rd Annual Meeting Vancouver, Canada, March 26-30th, 2008 Symposium Ancient Maya Economies of Power: Elite Production and Distribution A. Demarest and S. Jackson Elites in the Río Bec region: producing crops … and great houses Dominique Michelet* M-Charlotte Arnauld* Alfonso Lacadena** B. Vannière*** P. Nondédéo* Julie Patrois* Chloé Andrieu* * CNRS/University of Paris I, UMR 8096, Nanterre, France ** Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain ***CNRS/University of Franche-Comté, UMR 6565, Besançon, France Preliminary draft. Please do not cite Abstract — All Maya Classic sub-royal elites may not have shared interests with royal elites. Situations probably existed where elite interactions were intended not so much to enhance the king’s power, as to develop strategies to benefit sub-royal groups. In the Río Bec region, archaeological, iconographic and epigraphic data indicate that kingship had been weakly articulated alongside an active regional and agrarian elite. These elites created highly visible and prestigious houses which served the strategies of its factions and diffused architectural ideas over a wide area. Introduction Río Bec is not just an archaeological site. Quite early in the investigations (Sapper 1895, Périgny 1908, Merwin 1913, Thompson 1936, Ruppert and Denison 1943), the name was applied to the whole south-central region of the Yucatán peninsula, México, because of its particular architectural style which developed, during the Late-Terminal Classic (600-900 AD), between the Chenes style specific to the adjacent northern region and the Petén tradition to the east and south (Figure 1). The Río Bec architecture is recognizable from its long multi-room buildings (up to 60 m in size), and to its good-quality masonry with external veneer walls of large or small finely fitted cut-stone blocks. Many façades are decorated with stone mosaics, sometimes enhanced by stuccoed motifs. Some of these buildings have two high towers leaning against their front façade (with, occasionally, a third one against the rear façade) imitating pyramid temples with fake stairways, doors and superstructures (Gendrop 1983, Andrews & Gendrop 1991, Andrews 1999). Other characteristics of the Río Bec region include (see Nondédéo 2003) an almost complete absence of true pyramid temples, ball game courts or E-groups, a scarcity of stelae and altars along with associated glyphic inscriptions, and a specific iconography devoid of human figures representing rulers, with very few exceptions. And last, the Río Bec sites must be set apart from the majority of contemporaneous Maya settlements due to their overall pattern of scattered monumental groups and an