FRAYED AT THE EDGES: COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND HISTORY ON THE BORDERS OF CLASSIC MAYA POLITIES Charles Golden Department of Anthropology, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, 02454 Abstract This article explores social memory and history as they pertain particularly to secondary political centers on the edges of the Classic Maya kingdoms of Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan. Over the course of the Late Classic period (a.d. 600–900) the rulers of Maya polities in the Usumacinta River basin increasingly relied on the subordinate lords who governed these secondary centersto patrol and control the boundaries of their territories. For the rulers of any state, formulating an appropriate and coherent history to guide social memory is a critical political act for maintaining the cohesion of the political community. But as the Classic period progressed, client lords were increasingly permitted aformerly royal prerogative; they were accorded their own inscribed monuments. The monuments, together with associated ritual performances, were an integral part of the construction of history and collective memory in local communities and allowed secondary nobles to restructure social memory for their own interests. This trend, in turn, increased the potential for royal history and authority to be contested throughout the kingdom. Through several case studies this paper examines the ways that subordinate nobles could contest social memory and history sanctioned by primary rulers and the ways in which kings acted to maintain the reins of history and memory. Over the course of the Classic period, from about a.d. 350 to 900, the rulers of Maya polities in the Usumacinta River Basin sought to expand the range of their authority and the integrity of their territor- ial control. For the rulers of the kingdoms centered on what are now the archaeological sites of Piedras Negras, Guatemala, and Yaxchilan, Mexico, this expansive power was achieved in no small part through patron-client relationships with subsidiary noble lords who patrolled and controlled the boundaries of their ter- ritories (Figure 1). Throughout most of the Classic period, public monuments and the inscriptions they bore were the sole prerogative of royal personages. But by the Late Classic period (ca. a.d. 600–900) the power and authority of client lords had grown such that they were accorded their own inscribed monuments. These monuments together with associated ritual performance must have formed an integral part of the construction of history and collective memory for multiple social segments within the kingdom. As the complexity of the political system grew, this dissemina- tion of authority to shape official history and transform social memory increased the potential for signs of royal authority to be contested through competing historical narratives. Rather than merely reflecting a polity-wide history, the increasing presence of the subordinate nobility in public performances of memorialization raised the possibility for these nobles to use architecture, texts, and ritual performances to re-create history and shape collective social memory in their own image and for their own interests. In the limited space provided in this forum, I will briefly outline my under- standing of social memory as a political tool, and I will illustrate with just a few examples how the governors of secondary political centers along the boundaries of the Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan kingdoms might have challenged royal authority by reshaping social memory and how paramount rulers may have acted to restrain them. SOCIAL MEMORY: A DEFINITION OF TERMS Before I address the data I must clarify my use of several terms. First and foremost, I use the terms social memory and collective memory interchangeably throughout this paper. Maurice Halbwachs (1992 [1925]:43) contends that “[n]o memory is possible outside fra- meworks used by people in society to determine and retrieve their recollections.” I would alter this slightly and say that individual memory is possible on the basis of unique sensory experiences. People are not born with “social” or “collective” memory, but (except in those rare cases when wayward children are raised by wolves) people begin to make sense of those memories and learn to express effectively and communicate an understanding of the world in terms of those memories by interacting socially with other people. Of course, individuals within the group may retain and recall very different memories. Collective memory, in a critical sense, must be understood as shared individual memory (Hirst and Manier 2008:186), and the transmission of memories among members of the group inherently entails changes in the significance of those memories (Meskell 2003:36). But if we are to make sense of ourselves to others, the memories of things past that structure our present necessarily include and express a sense of the corporate (Connerton 1989:1). Indeed, for collective memory to exist there must be convergence of individual remembrances such that some 373 E-mail correspondence to: cgolden@brandeis.edu Ancient Mesoamerica, 21 (2010), 373–384 Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2011 doi:10.1017/S0956536110000246