San Pedro Maya Youth in British Colonial Yucatan

Given village demographics, many if not most artifacts at the nineteenth-century Maya site of San Pedro Siris were used or produced by people under 18 years of age. Yet the saucer from a toy tea set and the porcelain dolls found there are more conventionally associated with children of the colonizers, not the colonized and indigenous. Protestant authors of nineteenth-century parenting advice books recommended interventionist parenting including introduction of objects like these in such a way as to train children to be passive and pliant, seen and not heard. Not coincidentally, submission and self-denial were qualities that colonizers and elites most desired in colonized and working class populations. In nineteenth-century Yucatan, the degree to which colonizers could enforce such ideals in different Maya contexts in different parts of the peninsula depended largely on geopolitics and economic conditions (Watanabe, Pluralizing ethnography, comparison and representation in Maya cultures, histories, and identities. SAR Press, Santa Fe, 35–65, 2004). Using data from the site of San Pedro Siris in British occupied Yucatan, I ask how colonized parents and children might have received the messaging embedded in Victorian or Edwardian toys. Despite the violence and upheaval of the Caste War era, archaeological assemblages suggest a surprising level of continuity in Maya childrearing practices and the nature of children’s activities through time in our team’s region of study.