Revisiting the Xunantunich Palace: The 2003 Excavations

V.  Dismantling and Filling the Central Room of the Lower Building

The final modification to Str. A-11, marking its transition from the ruler’s residence to unused space entailed dismantling and filling in the central room of Str. A-11.  As with the flanking rooms, the walls and vault of the central room were pulled down, large storage vessels were broken in the eastern part of the room, and the room was filled in. Two differences set the dismantling of the central room apart, however: the fill included a notable number of plastered cut-stone blocks, some bearing incised graffiti designs (Figure 14), and the doorway leading into the room from the frontal terrace was never blocked with a masonry wall. Although the filling in of this room marked the end of Str. A-11’s uselife, it is important to note that this did not represent a radical departure from previous use of the complex, but followed the systematic dismantling and in-filling of the lower building’s four flanking rooms that occurred in at least three stages.

At some point during the history of Str. A-11, the upper building collapsed as well. MacKie (1961, 1985) argued that this collapse was a sudden event that occurred during the use of the structure, perhaps as a result of an earthquake. He supports this argument by observing that fallen vault stones–in at least one case, a group of vault stones that obviously fell as a body–sat directly on the plastered floor surfaces, with no intervening soil or sediment, and that this architectural collapse crushed a number of ceramic vessels that apparently sat on the floor of the room. Clearly, the presence of in situ vault collapse in Rooms 1 and 2 is very distinct from the situation in any of the rooms of the lower building.

MacKie suggested that the entire upper building collapsed at once, but our excavations of Room 4 indicate a more complex scenario. The collapse within Room 4 did contain the density of vault stones that MacKie found in Rooms 1 and 2.  Furthermore, the surface of Room 4’s west wall bore clear evidence of picking through the plaster to expose the joins of the underlying blocks, identical to the evidence for intentionally dismantling the rooms of the lower building. This raises three possibilities: (1) all of the rooms of the upper building were dismantled at once, but using different techniques; (2) the central rooms of the upper building collapsed first, destabilizing the entire building and stimulating the intentional dismantling of the adjacent rooms; or (3) the flanking rooms of the upper building were dismantled first, destabilizing the entire building and leading to the collapse of the central rooms. The second scenario seems most likely, but it is unfortunately impossible to directly sequence the collapse of the central rooms and the dismantling of Room 4, nor correlate those events with the dismantling of the rooms of the lower building.

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