Ancient Recycling: Considerations of the Wasteful, Meaningful, and Practical from the Maya Site of Ucanal, Peten, Guatemala

Recycling practices among ancient societies are rarely systematically explored. When such practices are considered, they are often examined in dichotomous terms as either an elite artisanal capacity for producing meaning or as part of practical logics of rationality and efficiency in confronting scarcity. The study of groundstone tool, ceramic, and architectural recycling at the Maya site of Ucanal, Peten, Guatemala, challenges this false dichotomy in highlighting the varied ways meaning and value are produced. Diachronic and contextual analyses reveal that recycling practices of quotidian materials, such as groundstone and ceramics, did not increase during periods of crisis nor were they more common among modest households as compared to higher-status households. Likewise, evidence of substantial efforts to recycle elite and monumental building materials during the Terminal Classic period (ca. 830-950/1000 CE) did not coincide with a scarcity of labor or building materials. Such findings underscore the need to consider the role of abundance as it relates to recycling, a factor that also drives much contemporary recycling.