Traditionally, archaeologists have divided time and materials into precolonial and colonial periods, categories that carry de facto connotations about those who shape history, and those who are shaped by it (see Hart et al., this volume; Lightfoot 1995; Rubertone 1996, 2000). Interpretations created by such a schema often situate Indigenous people as the creators of their history before the arrival of Europeans, but the victims of history after contact. This disconnect in modern scholarship continues the work of colonization, depicting the arrival of Europeans as the defining moment in Indigenous lives. Archaeology is the discipline perhaps best equipped to decolonize historical narratives of Indigenous peoples. Elizabeth Brumfiel (2003, 2006) urged archaeologists to take long-term history seriously in order to understand the subjective variables of identity and agency within the contextual and structural variables of history, politics, and economy. As the contributors to this volume show (see also Scheiber and Mitchell 2010), scholars of colonial period interactions are also taking up the call of long-term historical understanding. These scholars recognize that Indigenous histories and actions help to structure the interactions between Indigenous populations and colonizers, and are part of the context in which these interactions occur. In this chapter I use a long-term history perspective as I reimagine colonial period interactions at the Maya community of Progresso Lagoon, in northern Belize. This work builds on efforts that use Spanish documents to reconstruct colonial interactions, such as Grant D. Jones's (1989, 1998) efforts to piece together the sociopolitical landscape of sixteenth-to-seventeenthcentury conflicts between Maya and Spanish polities of the Belize frontier. Archaeological investigations, however, allow us to connect these conflicts to a long and continuous Indigenous Maya history. My work on the west shore of Progresso Lagoon suggests that the fifteenth to seventeenth century represented a significant period of transition for Maya residents. Roughly a century before the arrival of Spaniards in the region, the Progresso Lagoon community experienced economic and political instability, and a reorganization of the social order. When the Spanish attempted colonization of the region in 1544, the Maya of Progresso Lagoon were forced into new interactions with Spanish colonists, cooperative Maya missions, and unconquered Maya groups. In this chapter I will show that these colonial interactions cannot be understood outside of the context of Progresso Lagoon's long-term history. Changes to everyday life in the fifteenth century influenced how Maya residents of Progresso Lagoon shaped their interactions with Spanish and Maya neighbors. The first part of the chapter situates the Progresso Lagoon community within the colonial period history of the Belize region, as detailed in the ethnohistoric work of Grant D. Jones (1989, 1998, 2005). Progresso Lagoon's Maya residents interacted with both Spanish and Maya neighbors during this time and alternated between resistance and accommodation to Spanish authorities. What motivated these interactions? How do they fit within the long-term history of this community? In the second part of the chapter, I address these questions with archaeological data, tracing the community's decisions back to Indigenous political and economic changes in the mid-fifteenth century. The Progresso Lagoon community was significantly affected by the collapse of the Postclassic Maya capital of Mayapán, between CE 1441 and 1461. During the mid-fifteenth century, concurrent with the collapse of Mayapán, the main settlement at Progresso Lagoon moved from the island of Caye Coco to the west shore of the lagoon. There, households experienced higher levels of political instability and economic uncertainty, and community leaders struggled to maintain prestige in the post-Mayapán era (Oland 2009). I conclude with examples of how fifteenth-century changes at Progresso Lagoon affected colonial period events. Spanish colonization occurred within the restructuring of the community's political, economic, and social institutions, and interactions of the Progresso Lagoon community with both Spanish and Maya groups were deeply tied to this reorganization. Archaeological data show how Progresso Lagoon's leaders manipulated their relationships with the Spaniards to regain prestige lost when Mayapán collapsed. The approach taken in this chapter helps to decolonize the narrative of the conquest of the Maya, because it situates colonial events within a long-term Indigenous and local history.1 Colonial events were shaped as much by local Maya history as by Spanish actions. Instead of imagining the Maya as thrust into the world of the colonial Spaniards (and forced to react), we might instead imagine the Spaniards as lost among the colonial Maya, interjected into a deep Maya timeline that they did not understand and could not control. This subtle theoretical shift, in which we reject precolonial and colonial period categories, changes the way we interpret archaeological data and historically known colonial events.