The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Urbanism and architecture in Mesoamerica have been the subject of intense investigations; however, there is still much to learn surrounding the various trajectories leading to city development, functioning, and sustainability. The extreme variability of precolumbian Mesoamerican settlements in terms of configuration and nucleation makes it often impossible to identify the city edges and reconstruct its gradual development. Because cities are dynamic, they require dynamic programs of investigation that address the urban experience as multiscalar, nonlinear, and materially rich. This session proposes a multidisciplinary and multiscalar approach to the consideration of the history of urban development in Mesoamerica, from the individual event, to the household and finally the urban scale. That approach, including both micro and macro methods, spatial analyses, and digital archaeological techniques presents an opportunity to investigate the relationship between the Mesoamerican city and its gradual expansion to its inhabitants, in terms of population scale with respect to infrastructure for people’s daily movement, living, and interaction. With the papers presented here, we aim to contribute to a comprehensive theoretical and methodological approach to Mesoamerican urban studies that attends to the city as the result of intertwined social, economic, political, practical, and worldview related processes.