Three Walks Through Tzacauil: Engaging the Rural Landscape of Central Yucatán 2000 Years Ago, 1000 Years Ago, and Today

Summary

Tzacauil is a small archaeological site in the hinterlands of Yaxuná, a major center in the central Yucatán region of the northern Maya lowlands. Excavations of Tzacauil’s nine house groups suggest that a community formed here twice: first during the Late Formative period (250 BCE – 250 CE) and again in the Terminal Classic period (700 – 1100 CE). Both of these occupations coincide with population peaks at nearby Yaxuná. Judging by the ample open spaces surrounding the site’s house groups, people living "out there" at Tzacauil may have been drawn to the opportunities presented by the relatively uninhabited intra-settlement landscape. With these open spaces as a starting point, this paper explores how people at Tzacauil physically moved within the intra-settlement landscape of their rural community. The transformation of intra-settlement spaces through the construction of formal and informal walkways suggests that the two chronologically distinct communities engaged with the rural landscape in remarkably different ways. Finally this paper extends the study of continuous human-landscape interactions at Tzacauil by sharing the results of a new community-based approach to landscape archaeology in the northern Maya lowlands, made possible by ongoing collaboration with the people of the modern town of Yaxunah.

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): 20905