ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This website, which is a product of the technical expertise and advice of Destiny Crider, presents a subset of my dissertation research that is concerned with the relationship between labor mobilization practices and the development of social hierarchy in prehispanic complex societies in southeastern Mesoamerica. Many thanks go to the members of my doctoral advisory committee for their guidance: Ben Nelson (Chair), George Cowgill, Edward Schortman, Arleyn Simon, Barbara Stark, and Patricia Urban. The work was conducted under the aegis of the Cacaulapa Valley Archaeological Project, directed by Patricia Urban and Edward Schortman of Kenyon College and by Marne Ausec of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and was carried out with the permission of the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia (IHAH), directed by Dr. Olga Hoya. I gratefully acknowledge the aid of Lic. Carmen Julia Fajardo, Head of the IHAH Archaeology Section; Lic. Juan Alberto Durón, Regional Director of Archaeology for IHAH in Cortés and Santa Barbara; and Lic. Carlos Alberto Acosta of the Regional IHAH Office in La Lima, Cortés. Funding for this research was provided by a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation (BCS-0108742) and a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Additional funding, which permitted chemical analyses of soils, was provided by a Claude C. Albritton Award for Ph.D. Research in Archaeological Geology from the Archaeological Geology Division of the Geological Society of America, and by a Dissertation Research Grant from the Department of Anthropology at Arizona State University (ASU). Soil analyses were conducted with the help and expertise of James Burton and T. Douglas Price as part of a Graduate Research Fellowship in Archaeometry from the Laboratory for Archaeological Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A Graduate Research Fellowship in Archaeology from the Archaeological Research Institute at ASU, along with the support and advice of Arleyn Simon, allowed me to analyze the data and to present my findings in this website.