Uci and Izamal: Influence and Interaction in the Northern Maya Lowlands

Summary

In the Late Preclassic and Classic periods, several sites in the center of the northern Maya lowlands constructed buildings with distinctive megaliths. Izamal was the largest of these sites by far, and connected itself to other important sites with stone causeways that stretched up to 30 km long. Ucí, located approximately 35km to the northwest of Izamal, had its own long distance causeway which linked it to three smaller sites with monumental architecture. This paper combines data from two separate, long-running archaeology projects, one focused on Izamal, the other focused on Ucí, in order to investigate political, economic, and chronological relations between the two sites. The paper compares Late Preclassic, Protoclassic, and Classic period ceramic assemblages from the two projects in order to document the degree of variation in pottery consumption. Such variation may help determine the extent of economic and political integration between Ucí and Izamal, but could also be accounted for by differential access to resources, participation in divergent trade connections, or differences in chronologies of occupation. This paper uses additional lines of evidence to assess the strength of these explanations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21052