Materiality has a crucial role in transforming fleeting identities into historical facts. Social reality is given the force of unconscious facticity by the things that form the settings of everyday life. We propose that as a consequence," communities" become manifest through material media." Communities" are realized in daily routinization of passage through material settings, including buildings (Bourdieu 1973, 1977). Community is incorporated in the body through the repetition, or citation, of the practices of others who move through the same spatial locations carrying out the same range of practices (Joyce 1998; after Butler 1990, 1993: 12–16, 101–19; Connerton 1991).

We consider in this paper how this assumption transforms our analyses of two Late Classic Honduran settlement distributions. At Cerro Palenque (Joyce 1991)" communities" seem well-bounded and easily defined. But in the Cuyumapa drainage (Joyce et al. 1989; Hendon and Joyce 1993) the distribution of settlement across the landscape challenges the delineation of communities as spatial entities. We interpret these differences as evidence of different materializations of historicized identities within heterarchical communities. We treat the architectural complexes in these two areas as assertions by their builders of the concrete reality of different kinds of communities. Settlements in the Cuyumapa drainage suggest a lack of closure in the materialization of unified, distinct, bounded identities, while Cerro Palenque physically embodies, and therefore creates, a closed community.