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At Chalcatzingo, Mexico, an early regional center, the common location for burials was under house floors, but some high-status burials occurred in more open spaces. These latter were also residential burials, interred within the landed domain of social units. Although both “inside” and “outside” burials drew on claims of ancestral continuity, it is important to explore the differences they entailed. Investigating how repeated mortuary practices at Chalcatzingo evoked referential networks—endowing those practices with intelligibility and enabling identity formation over time—can broaden understandings of residential burial practices and bridge various classificatory separations imposed by archaeologists, including those between public and private mortuary spaces. [mortuary practices, citation, social houses, complex society, Mesoamerica]

The prehispanic Maya are known to have commonly interred their dead beneath the floors or within the platforms of domestic structures. This custom has been interpreted as part of a larger complex of rituals and beliefs associated with ancestor veneration. By continually curating the bones of deceased family members within their own domestic space, the surviving members of the household may have strengthened their rights to material property believed to have been acquired by these ancestors. Maya residences have thus been considered domestic mausolea: “places of death.” However, archaeological interpretations of burial practices should take into account the likelihood of customs and beliefs regarding the proper disposition of the nontangible components of deceased persons along with their physical remains. These components include names and souls, which may have been the property of specific corporate groups who transferred them from the dead to the newly born as an expression of group continuity. Archaeological, historical, and ethnographic evidence from Maya peoples is examined here to suggest that residential interments may have served to ensure control over the souls of the dead. Ancestral spirits were important nontangible property belonging to prehispanic Maya corporate kin groups, known as “houses.” They were carefully safeguarded for reincarnation in subsequent generations, thereby perpetuating the kin group. Rather than a place of death, Maya domestic space is therefore better considered a place of curation, transformation, and regeneration of enduring social personae.

Long-standing disagreements concerning prehispanic Maya kinship and social organization have focused on the nature of their corporate groups, generally presumed to have been lineages. Specific debates center on whether the lineages were patrilineal or incorporated some kind of double-descent reckoning, how descent was combined with locality to define a group, and the status of lineage-outsiders within a group. It is argued here that Maya social organization is better approached within the contemporary critique of kinship, replacing "lineage" with Levi-Strauss's model of the "house"—a corporate group maintaining an estate perpetuated by the recruitment of members whose relationships are expressed "in the language" of kinship and affinity and affirmed by purposeful actions. In this perspective, the operation of corporate groups is the primary concern, and relationships construed in terms of consanguinity and affinity are seen as strategies pursued to enhance and perpetuate the group, [ancestor veneration, house society, kinship, Maya, social organization]