Journal
JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHAEOLOGY
Volume 64, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1016/j.jaa.2021.101349
Keywords
Settlement patterns; Maya lowlands; Lidar; Landform classification; Urbanization
Categories
Funding
- Fundacion Patrimonio Cultural y Natural Maya-PACUNAM
- Hitz Foundation
- Cerveceria Centro Americana
- Grupo Campollo
- Cementos Progreso
- Blue Oil
- Asociacion de Azucareros de Guatemala-ASAZGUA
- Grupo Occidente
- Banco Industrial
- Walmart Guatemala
- Citi
- Samsung
- Disagro
- Cofino Stahl
- Claro
- CEG
- Agroamerica
- Fundacion Tigo
- Fundacion Pantaleon
- Alphawood Foundation
- National of Anthropological Archaeology Geographic Society [(2021) 101349, 9710-15]
- Middle American Research Institute at Tulane University
Ask authors/readers for more resources
This paper discusses the challenges faced by settlement research in the Maya lowlands, arguing that advances in remote sensing can overcome these challenges. By utilizing lidar-derived data to develop a settlement suitability model, patterns in the distribution of archaeological remains vis-`a-vis landforms are revealed.
Settlement research in the Maya lowlands has struggled to reconcile its goals to model a tropical forest civilization in ecological terms with the logistical constraints imposed by the forest itself. In this paper, we argue that the methodological challenges facing settlement research in this tropical lowland setting limited researchers' confidence in the representativeness of their data, nudging the discipline toward community-scale analysis and away from quantitative macro-scale settlement pattern research. As a result, many basic facts of human geography have remained unsettled. These challenges can now be overcome thanks to advances in remote sensing. Here, we use lidar-derived settlement and topographic data from the Corona-Achiotal region of northwestern Guatemala to develop a settlement suitability model that reveals patterns in the distribution of archaeological remains vis-`a-vis landforms. Applying this model to a much larger published settlement dataset, we demonstrate how it is not only widely applicable in the interior Maya Lowlands, but also capable of identifying historical contingencies in the distribution of settlement, namely the crowding of less-suitable areas of the landscape, linked to urban densification.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available