Livelihoods and Opportunities: Household, Land Use and Landscape Change at Tikal

Summary

Sometimes described as a mosaic, regional land use and landscape in the Maya lowlands offer a unique opportunity to investigate the spatial and temporal dimensions and the socio-ecological dynamics of a variety of cultural systems, settlement patterns, and the environment. Unfortunately, the majority of urban theory applied to the lowlands focuses exclusively on urban authority and power for the provisioning of resources. Such approaches offer useful discussion and debate about the scale and intensity of these systems, but provide little comparative anthropological information about the complex interactions among households, landscape, and ecology. Building on early regional archaeological science at Tikal, this paper describes and analyzes regional spatial and temporal variation of the distribution of households, land use, and resources in the region. Particular attention is paid to recent regional soil surveys as compared to what is known about settlement patterns. Emphasizing livelihoods and opportunities, the key purpose of the paper is to shift discussions in the Maya lowlands from generalized theory of urbanization, including obsolete urban and rural dichotomies, to household provisioning of food, resources, and ecosystem services. In this context, landscape and planning are spatially heterogeneous household centered responses best described as a lowland Maya mosaic.

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): 21808