Exploring Settlement Patterns at the Ancient Maya Port Site of Conil, Quintana Roo, Mexico (original) (raw)
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Population Estimates at the Ancient Maya City of Chunchucmil, Yucatán, Mexico
Digital Discovery: Exploring New Frontiers in Human Heritage. Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, CAA 2006, Proceedings of the 34th Conference, Fargo, United States, April 2006, 2007
This paper seeks to show how GIS has become an essential tool for the recording, storing, processing, and visualization of the archaeo-recording, storing, processing, and visualization of the archaeological data collected by Pakbeh Regional Economy Project at the ancient Maya city of Chunchucmil (Yucatán, Mexico). Chunchucmil, located in an agriculturally poor region but at the edge of several ecological zones, grew to become one of the most densely settled cities of the Maya area during the Classic Period (AD 400-650) thriving on commerce and trade. At the apogee of Chunchucmil, people chose to settle close to each other in residential groups delimited by boundary walls over an area of at least 25 km 2 . In a site where we have recorded more than 6,000 structures, GIS has enormously facilitated calculations for structure and population estimates making GIS an indispensable tool for analysis of such an extensive database.
PLOS ONE, 2022
Until recently, an extensive area in the central lowlands of the Yucatán peninsula was completely unexplored archaeologically. In 2013 and 2014, during initial surveys in the northern part of the uninhabited Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in eastern Campeche, Mexico, we located Chactún, Tamchén and Lagunita, three major Maya centers with some unexpected characteristics. Lidar data, acquired in 2016 for a larger area of 240 km2, revealed a thoroughly modified and undisturbed archaeological landscape with a remarkably large number of residential clusters and widespread modifications related to water management and agriculture. Substantial additional information was obtained through field surveys and test excavations in 2017 and 2018. While hydraulic and agricultural features and their potential for solving various archaeologically relevant questions were discussed in a previous publication, here we examine the characteristics of settlement patterns, architectural remains, sculpted monumen...
1984
The ancient Maya site of Sayi1 is located in the Puuc region of northern Yucatan approximately halfway between the sites of Kabah and Labna (Figure 1). It is a very large site both in terms of extensive public architecture and areal extent, although it is not nearly as well known as Uxma1 nor are many of its structures visited by tourists. Our current knowledge of the site's overall layout is based on the 1934 map prepared by Edwin Shook under the direction of Harry Pollock during the latter's survey of Puuc architecture for the ...
PLOS ONE, 2022
Until recently, an extensive area in the central lowlands of the Yucatán peninsula was completely unexplored archaeologically. In 2013 and 2014, during initial surveys in the northern part of the uninhabited Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in eastern Campeche, Mexico, we located Chactún, Tamchén and Lagunita, three major Maya centers with some unexpected characteristics. Lidar data, acquired in 2016 for a larger area of 240 km2, revealed a thoroughly modified and undisturbed archaeological landscape with a remarkably large number of residential clusters and widespread modifications related to water management and agriculture. Substantial additional information was obtained through field surveys and test excavations in 2017 and 2018. While hydraulic and agricultural features and their potential for solving various archaeologically relevant questions were discussed in a previous publication, here we examine the characteristics of settlement patterns, architectural remains, sculpted monuments, and ceramic evidence. The early Middle Preclassic (early first millennium BCE) material collected in stratigraphic pits at Tamchén and another locale constitutes the earliest evidence of colonization known so far in a broader central lowland area. From then until the Late Classic period, which was followed by a dramatic demographic decline, the area under study witnessed relatively constant population growth and interacted with different parts of the Maya Lowlands. However, a number of specific and previously unknown cultural traits attest to a rather distinctive regional development, providing novel information about the extent of regional variation within the Maya culture. By analyzing settlement pattern characteristics, inscriptional data, the distribution of architectural volumes and some other features of the currently visible archaeological landscape, which largely reflects the Late Classic situation, we reconstruct several aspects of sociopolitical and territorial organization in that period, highlighting similarities with and differences from what has been evidenced in the neighboring Río Bec region and elsewhere in the Maya area.
Calakmul: New Data from an Ancient Maya Capital in Campeche, Mexico
Latin American Antiquity, 1995
In this paper we summarize more than a decade of interdisciplinary work at Calakmul, including (1) the mapping project, which has covered more than 30 km2; (2) the excavation project, which has uncovered major structures and tombs in the center of the city; (3) the epigraphic project, whose goal is to study the hieroglyphic texts and relate them to the archaeological evidence; (4) the analysis of the architecture, ceramics, and chipped stone to define sacred and secular activity areas and chronological stages; and (5) a focus on the ecology, hydrology, and paleoclimatology of Calakmul and its environs with the aim of understanding more fully its periods of development and decline.
2012
Most settlement pattern research and GIS analysis of the ancient Maya of the Northern Yucatan have focused on water availability in a dry landscape where cenotes are often the only water source. While water is of paramount importance, permanent settlement secondarily requires farmable soil, a resource often as precious as water in many parts of the Yucatan. The dynamics between these resources reveal areas of ideal settlement and more challenging landscapes for which the Maya developed strategies to overcome environmental conditions. A region of the southwest "Cenote Zone", however, appears to have presented the ancient Maya with insurmountably poor environmental conditions despite abundant water resources. The lack of dense population and stone architecture in this area emphasizes the lack of a simple correlation between cenotes and settlement. This thesis uses GIS analysis to identify and explore such problematic settlement areas to better understand the factors and complexities involved in the more successful settlements of neighboring regions.
Site and Community at Chunchucmil and Ancient Maya Urban Centers
Journal of Field Archaeology, 2008
For thirty years, the Classic period urban center of Chunchucmil (fig. 1) has been recognized as one of the largest and most densely populated sites on the Yucatan Peninsula (Vlcek, Garza, and Kurjack 1978; Kurjack and Garza 1981). As we present below, the Pakbeh Regional Economy Program (PREP), initiated in 1993 by Bruce Dahlin, has determined that the site was even larger-demographically and spatially-and more densely occupied than originally suggested. In this paper, we present the findings of 10 seasons of settlement pattern research at the site and use these findings to explore the concept of "urban community" as it applies to the ancient Maya. The notion of urbanism has been contentious for the Classic period Maya Lowlands, partly because of a well-documented tendency toward residential dispersion (Drennan 1988; Freidel 1981; Sanders 1981; Sanders and Price 1968). Such dispersion often results in a lack of clear site edges, thus underlining the fact that "site" and "community" are not always the same thing (Kolb and Snead 1997; Yaeger and Canuto 2000). We begin by discussing residential dispersion and critiques of the concept of site, then discuss our field meth-1