The Preclassic Maya Site of Noh K'uh: A Network of Communities

Summary

In many societies around the world, the concept of community plays a central role in the formation of individual identities. Communities are subject to change and the focus on community identity provides a theoretical approach in which the individual can be situated in a broader sphere of social interaction. I research community through spatial analyses of human constructions at the Preclassic site of Noh K'uh in Chiapas, Mexico. My findings revealed that house-mounds clustered on hill-tops that were heavily modified to accommodate multiple structures. Through spatial observations and other archaeological data, I propose that the site of Noh K'uh could be best understood as a collection of corporate households, in which individual buildings and platforms were designed to meet specialized needs. In practice, these aggregates were micro-communities where the processes of production, distribution, transmission and reproduction took place over very wide spread spaces that encompassed multiple buildings. Spatially similar to neighborhoods, these micro-communities were tightly knit with well defined and unique identities that were constructed and maintained through ritual activities. As an early urban society, Noh K'uh offers the opportunity to study how populations organized themselves during an era of incipient urbanization.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Theorizing and Excavating Neighborhoods

Keywords

Spatial Coverage