Settlement and Mobility in Early Colonial Tabasco, Mexico

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.

One of the most pervasive changes in Mesoamerican early colonial period was the new form of urban and town configuration and their relations with the surrounding landscape. Native settlement abandonment, forced congregations, and changes in communication and trade routes profoundly transformed the mobility system of this territory. The coastal region of Tabasco-Campeche, for example, passed from being an area of important commercial routes and bustling trade centers, to be a rapidly depopulated and marginal frontier of the New Spain. Yet, this was the location of one of the first Spanish settlement in the Americas, Santa Maria de la Victoria, at the mouth of the Grijalva River, capital of the province of Tabasco for more than a century. Although no systematic archaeological work has been done to identify its exact location, the settlement was an important node in the system of riverine and coastal mobility of the region. Combining historical maps, colonial documents, and regional scale lidar, this paper presents some methodological approaches to reconstruct the role of this area in early colonial times, through the implementation of a Historical GIS project.

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)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32570