INTRODUCTION

Recent anthropological studies of feasting have made significant contributions to our theoretical understanding of the roles of community ritual in the operation of past societies. However, far more limited progress has been made in discerning the relevant diagnostic criteria of these events and their manifestations in the cultural material record. Since communal feasting often occurs in public settings, such as plazas, the archaeological residues of feasts frequently are obscured by the remains of other activities that are carried out in the same spaces. Compounding the situation, activity patterning in plazas is often difficult to document in the archaeological record because these areas were probably kept clean for ritual use, since considerations of purity and pollution were symbolically important. The long-term result is a “palimpsest” of overlapping activity patterning in which the material debris produced by multiple activities are mixed over time. In an attempt to separate out these various activities and, in doing so, to better understand the organization of feasting in prehispanic societies were I work in southeastern Mesoamerica, I used my ARI Fellowship to study the distribution of artifacts and associated chemical patterning of activity residues in anthropogenic sediments from the main civic-ceremonial plaza at the Classic period (ca. AD 400-900) site of El Coyote in northwestern Honduras. Based on ethnoarchaeological comparisons drawn from a multi-elemental chemical study of plaza soils in the nearby modern-day town of Petoa, I inferred aspects of the organizational principles of communal feasting at El Coyote. The results of these studies demonstrate that comparative, chemical analyses of modern and prehistoric anthrosols, along with considerations of associated patterns of artifact distribution, can greatly enhance our understanding of some of the spatial and social characteristics of ancient feasts.