Stop and Go Traffic: Power, Movement, and Emplacement in the Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan Kingdoms

Summary

This paper explores the many sides of the natural and supernatural landscape surrounding the Classic period Maya kingdoms of Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan with a particular focus on how the rulers of these polities struggled with one another for control of movement across the broken terrain of hills, cliffs, valleys, swamps, and rivers that define the Middle Usumacinta River basin. The standard image of a rather homogenous landscape in the Maya lowlands is quickly dispensed with in the Middle Usumacinta, and the challenges of transporting goods and conducting warfare across such a terrain was made all the more difficult by a complex network of defenses that regulated movement. Exploring the archaeological and epigraphic sources from Piedras Negras, Yaxchilan and their surrounding noble courts and hinterland settlements we can begin to envision and experience the dynamic sense of place that was central to the political lives in the Maya west.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Circulation of People, Things & Ideas: Practices of Mobility in the Upper Usumacinta Basin

Keywords

Spatial Coverage