Maya Inequality at Caracol, Belize: District-Level Urban Analysis within a Garden City

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 2009 and 2013, LiDAR data collected for Caracol, Belize revealed the anthropogenic landscape of this Maya city. These data have advanced our understanding of water management, agriculture, markets, urbanism, and inequality at Caracol. Now with the analytical unit of the district – an urban administrative boundary of urban service provisioning within a city – the variation between these administrative units can be investigated. Beyond Gini indices and Lorenz Curves of household areas and volumes, this research analyzes the population densities within districts with respect to the urban service facilities located within these district nodes. These formal plazas, ballcourts, monumental reservoirs, and E-groups provide a built environmental indicator of specialized urban function with widespread distribution. Urban districts reconstructed through least cost area allocation and nearest neighbor analysis in contrast with the sampled plazuela density at Caracol demonstrate the variation in urban density present within one Maya city. While density drop-offs are often used to identify the boundaries of Maya cities, density variation within the city is rarely discussed. The LiDAR dataset in conjunction with 35 years of excavation data uniquely allow the Caracol Archaeological Project to analyze inequality at the intra-site level within this garden city.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23433