Lidar as a Tool to Estimate Late Classic Population in the Central Maya Lowlands

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.

In 2016, the Pacunam Lidar Initiative surveyed 2,100 km2 of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the Department of Petén, Guatemala. This lidar survey provided an unprecedented scale of settlement data that attest to elevated population levels throughout the southern Maya lowlands, especially for the Late Classic period. Current estimates suggest a population of between 7 and 11 million people for the region during this period. In this paper, we discuss how demographic estimates derived from archaeological data come with a relatively high degree of uncertainty and argue that when dealing with large areas, population estimates should always be expressed using ranges to avoid false precision. We review various methodologies used to develop population estimates along with the potential problems inherent with each, and propose means of constraining these problems to produce reliable estimates. We conclude by discussing how ongoing fieldwork in these lidar survey regions is providing data that further refine our estimates, rendering them more robust.

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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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32342