Understanding Infrastructural Power, Collective Action, and Urban Form: Situating Neighborhoods and Districts at Caracol, Belize

Summary

Ancient Maya cities possessed a unique urban form characterized by two factors: mixed agricultural land use within residential areas and dispersed households consisting of extended family groups. These two factors contributed to the low-density nature of Maya cities, and conditioned urban form and the structure of neighborhoods and districts. The requirements of top-down administration resulted in the creation of districts to delineate areas of provisioning for the city’s urban services. However, a variety of interactions between top-down and bottom-up processes create neighborhoods, especially when they occur in areas of frequent, repeated face-to-face interaction between residents. The use of neighborhoods and districts as scales of analysis permits analysis of various concepts, including: urban infrastructural power, collective action among urban residents, household autonomy within the city, and other concepts that span the spectrum from top-down to bottom-up administrative processes. While districts at Caracol can be reconstructed through the spatial distribution of architectural features that would have provisioned urban services, no such architectural features occur uniquely at the neighborhood scale. As such, Caracol’s neighborhoods have been reconstructed through spatial methods utilizing the concept of frequent, repeated face-to-face interaction. These reconstructed spatial units help define the unique characteristics of ancient Maya urbanism.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 18705