Reconstructing and Testing Ancient Neighborhoods at Caracol, Belize

Summary

This is an abstract from the "People and Space: Defining Communities and Neighborhoods with Social Network Analysis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Neighborhoods in the past formed in urban contexts from the bottom-up through repeated face-to-face interactions. Through these shared social experiences and relational identity, neighborhood groups would possess a high potential for collective action, facilitating local solutions to issues facing these communities. In addition, these neighborhoods would have possessed higher intragroup cohesion for the above reasons. While we cannot ask the deceased who they interacted with and for how long, we can reconstruct likely zones of repeated face-to-face interaction. Previous methods of neighborhood reconstruction have often utilized clustering algorithms focusing on straight line distance. As such, these methods are not well suited to rugged, hilly landscapes. Instead, this research uses a combination of least cost paths, clustering, and social network analysis principles to reconstruct neighborhoods for the last phase of occupation at the Classic period Maya city of Caracol in modern Belize. In addition, comparison of ritual deposits from caches and burials within plazuela housemound groups sheds additional light on these communities. This excavated material permits testing of these reconstructed neighborhood boundaries. Four neighborhoods provide a minimal dataset to distinguish the effects of district marketplaces and neighborhood identity and ascertain the validity of this neighborhood reconstruction method for Caracol, Belize.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• People and Space: Defining Communities and Neighborhoods with Social Network Analysis

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 29874