24 CAUSEWAY TERMINUS, MINOR CENTRE, ELITE REFUGE, OR RITUAL CAPITAL? KA’KABISH A NEW PUZZLE ON THE MAYA LANDSCAPE OF NORTH- CENTRAL BELIZE Helen R. Haines Located 10 km inland from the larger site of Lamanai, Ka’Kabish poses an interesting enigma for researchers of ancient Maya socio-political organization. Lamanai is one of the longest continually occupied Maya centres and considerable attention has been directed at the site over the past 30 years. In contrast, little is known about Ka’Kabish beyond a rudimentary map and brief survey conducted in 1995 that revealed the site possessed disproportionately large architecture for the size of the two central plazas. Originally anticipated to be a small, and somewhat insignificant secondary site, recent work at Ka’Kabish now calls this assumption into question. Ceramic and architectural evidence indicate that the site may have had at least two monumental structures in the Late Formative period. Other architectural and tomb evidence suggests that the site had an important elite occupation. This paper, while arriving at no definite conclusions due to the early stages of research at the site, investigates several potential models that may help to explain Ka’Kabish. Introduction Research at ancient Maya sites in northern Belize has been an ongoing endeavour since the end of the 19 th century when Thomas Gann first visited the site of Santa Rita Corozal (Gann 1900; Gann and Gann 1939). Despite over a century of, albeit sporadic, excavations in the region, large gaps still exist in our knowledge of this area. Archaeological research in this area has been conducted largely at primary or secondary sites (Lamanai, Cerros, Nohmul, and Cuello to name but a few), where investigations have been restricted almost exclusively to the area of primary occupation, with limited attention paid to sites in the periphery zone or inter-site relations at the polity level (Hammond 1973, 1991a; Pring 1976; Robertson and Freidel 1986). In the past decade, considerable research has been undertaken in the Orange Walk District to expand our understanding of smaller settlements. Most of this work has focused on the Three Rivers Region above the escarpment (Driver et al. 1997, 1999; Driver and Wanyerka 2002; Guderjan and Driver 1995; Hageman and Hughbanks 2002; Lohse 2004; Scarborough et al. 2003; Sullivan 2002; among others), although some studies of smaller secondary or tertiary settlements also have been done on the Belizean Coastal Plain (Baker 1995; Guderjan 1996; Hammond 1973, 1991a; Masson 2000; Pring 1976; Rosenswig and Masson 2001, 2002; Smith and McField 1996). Work on small centres forms an important balance to research conducted at larger centres as it informs our understanding of Maya social organisation on a broader multi-scalar level. Yet, this type of research is most valuable when it can be integrated into the discussions of core- periphery relations for a unified polity (Chang 1968, 1983; Willey 1983). Willey’s argument that “a king and his subjects may both be understood only in their relationships to one another” (Willey 1983:46) is equally important for understanding relations between sites in a single polity as it is for elucidating the relationships between individuals within a single centre, and may hold particular Research Reports in Belizean Archaeology, Vol. 5, 2008, pp. 269-279. Copyright © 2008 by the Institute of Archaeology, NICH, Belize.