Ancient Mesoamerican and Andean Cities: Old Debates, New Perspectives

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Ancient Mesoamerican and Andean Cities: Old Debates, New Perspectives" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the past 20 years, archaeologists working in the Andes and Mesoamerica have broadened the definitions on urbanism and emphasized the social, political, and economic relations within and between urban settlements. Urban centers in these regions developed much differently from other parts of the world and as such do not conform to Western notions of urbanism. This has prompted the use of new theories, technologies, and methods. Participants in this session revisit perennial questions and debates in Americanist urban archaeology and consider how our understanding of urbanism has changed over the last 20 years. In the process, contributors might also highlight both methodological and technological innovations, the diversity of urban forms and life in ancient Mesoamerica and the Andes, and how such spaces were constituted, experienced, or perceived in the past. Themes to be explored include, among other things, the economic foundations of cities; the spatial organization of urban centers, including dispersed and low-density urbanism; the materiality of urban places and things; urban planning and infrastructures; social arrangements; identities and inequalities; the relational aspects of urban-rural assemblages; and the dynamics and tensions between top-down and bottom-up political processes.