Late-Terminal Classic Community Mobility and Migration at El Perú-Waka’

Summary

Recent archaeology at the Classic Maya city of El Perú-Waka’ has revealed a number of distinct communities making up the urban occupation. These communities possess their own cycles of settlement, florescence, and abandonment. Taken together, these cycles seem to show two distinct aspects that directly pertain to Classic Maya urbanism. One, it shows the urban landscape to be in a continuously changing state. The urban ruins encountered by researchers are the end product of centuries of such shifting settlement and rarely reflect contemporaneous occupation. Two, urban and hinterland communities across the city likely display a variable degree of mobility through time. The El Peru communities described in this paper appear to originate elsewhere and, after abandonment, migrate again. The shifting settlement reflects not just change over time, but mobility, a fundamental dynamic in urban settlement patterns. This paper investigates these phenomenon as evident from the archaeological record of El Perú-Waka’, Guatemala. Communities occupy a position on the landscape, sometimes marginal positions, sometimes privileged ones, and seem to insert themselves into a preexisting urban system.

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): 20940