Pondering Prehistory, Texts, and Roads in Yucatan

Summary

Roads in Yucatan, Mexico, were aesthetic, territorial, and communicative systems that both united and divided the landscape. I employ network theory, placemaking, and urban planning and landscape models to analyze Maya road systems at Yaxuna, Coba, Ek Balam, and Chichen Itza as site extensions, markers of identity, and ritual and commercial corridors. It may seem heretical for an art historian to abandon historical documents available for one’s arsenal for analysis. However, Gil Stein and others characterize the complicated times when conquerors and explorers met the colonized as the “colonial entanglement.” In Yucatan this entanglement occurred in the sixteenth century; the resultant historical literature is several centuries later than the roads in question, a timespan long enough to question accuracy, memory, and problematic cultural stances.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Understanding Visual Culture Without Textual Sources: What Are the Possibilities for Analysis?

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