To be Born an Ancestor

This goal of this dissertation is to participate in the study of funerary ritual for the Classic Maya. My approach is to look comparatively at the seven royal mortuary contexts, from a single city, that of Copán, Honduras during a single time, the Classic period from the early 5th century to early 9th century CE, in order to draw out the ideas that infused the ritual behavior. It is concerned with analyzing the tomb as a ritual context that is a materialization of a community's ideas about death and the afterlife. The heart is the data gathered from my participation in the excavation of the Classic period royal tomb called the Oropéndola Tomb. In addition to the archaeological data, the project draws from ethnohistoric, ethnographic, epigraphic, and iconographic sources as important loci for ideas of how to interpret the archaeological data. The project stands at the intersection of the work by Patricia McAnany's (1995; 1998; 1999) on the role of ancestors in Maya life, James Fitzsimmon's (2002, 2009) comparison of mortuary ritual across sites, and Meredith Chesson's (2001) study on the relationship between social memory, identity and mortuary practice.