This thesis addresses the excavation and analysis of the Hingston Group, a small courtyard group just south of the ceremonial core of the Ancient Maya city of Ka'kabish in North-Central Belize. I use settlement and household archaeological theory to understand the functions, occupation history, and status of this residential group. I also rely on entanglement theory, along with the hypothesizes presented by Palka (2003) and McAnany (1995), to create a possible interpretation for the reasons why we see what we do in the Hingston Group during its main period of occupation.
The Hingston Group is composed of three structures and two chultuns (underground storage areas). Research teams excavated both chultuns during prior field seasons and found burials from the Postclassic and Late Formative Periods. This information led to the assumption that the occupation of these structures would correspond to one, or both, of these periods. However, we found that this courtyard group was occupied during a period when the rest of the core of Ka'kabish was abandoned. Along with this, excavators found an ephemeral occupation into the Colonial Period; these two new periods of occupation have expanded our understanding of the chronological history of Ka'kabish.
Author Keywords: formative to postclassic, household archaeology, Maya, settlement archaeology