Population History for Caracol, Belize: Numbers, Complexity, and Urbanism

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.

Caracol, Belize, is among the largest known ancient Maya cities. Its urban area spans some 200 km2 and is integrated by a series of radial causeways that connect outlying public architecture and plazas to the central hub. The entire landscape is covered by residential settlement and agricultural terracing, making Caracol a truly green city. Excavation and an extensive sampling program at Caracol have demonstrated that almost all residential groups were occupied during the Late Classic period. Since the early 1990s, the population at CE 650 for Caracol has been estimated as being some 100,000 people. Lidar imagery has confirmed the scale of settlement and various calculations corroborate these numbers. Excavation and sampling further permit a reconstruction of the site’s population history. While lidar is an incredible asset for settlement study, comparing intensively mapped settlement areas with lidar imagery reveals that approximately one-third of the lowest-lying structures in Caracol’s residential groups are not immediately visible in lidar hillshades. This has implications for the interpretation of lidar hillshades elsewhere and suggests that structure density from on-the-ground mapping will actually be higher than estimates based solely on lidar. However calculated, Caracol’s ancient population operated within a complex urban system.

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): 32104