Microarchaeology and the Production of Urban Life at the Classic Maya City of Palenque

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological studies of urbanism typically include a consideration of scale, from the household, the neighborhood, ward, and city. These spatial scales are also spheres of interaction and have implications for the kinds of shared material practices we can expect to find archaeologically. And while urban studies in the Maya region tend to privilege the large-scale unit of analysis that is the city, this paper begins with the smallest scale, the household. Using micro-methods including paleoethnobotany, micromorphology and soil chemistry, we consider single events within the household and how they were structured by a larger, “urban social field.” We discuss the continuity of practice across multiple generations of a single elite household in the Classic period Maya city of Palenque and consider the ways households (and potentially neighborhoods) within the same city may distinguish themselves through a set of shared ritualized practices. And finally, we argue for continued microscale analyses in the consideration of the production of urban life.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32402