Classic Maya Population Densities as Seen from Río Bec, Campeche, Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican Population History: Demography, Social Complexity, and Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ideally every ancient Maya city should be characterized by its population density and its urban agricultural productivity, closely linked parameters that must be explored before tackling the issue of production/exchange relations with hinterlands. Río Bec can be characterized as a low-density urban landscape with high agricultural productivity in intensified infields. Through time the housing system changed as the local farmers built many vaulted multiroom structures increasing lodging capacities. Intensive and extensive excavations of several household clusters have allowed us to reconstruct specific neighborhood dynamics—the basis for a model that is applied to the Río Bec 1.6 km2 settlement core, strengthened by datations obtained from a wide sample of tested units. Those modeled dynamics in turn help reconstruct the evolution of the demographic charge through the Classic period. This specific method is evaluated, and comparative insights are derived from datasets obtained from La Joyanca (northwestern Petén) and Naachtun (central Petén).

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Ancient Mesoamerican Population History: Demography, Social Complexity, and Change

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 30937