Inequality, Urban Longevity, and Commoner Households at the Ancient Maya City of Aventura, Belize

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological studies of urbanism frequently seek to assess the factors which enable some cities to persist over the long-term while others fail after a few generations. This paper continues this line of inquiry by drawing on anthropological scholarship on inequality to examine the relationship between socioeconomic inequality and urban longevity. The paper utilizes settlement survey and excavation data from commoner households at the ancient Maya city of Aventura, Belize as a case study to further examine this relationship. Aventura provides an ideal case to assess the relationship between inequality and urban longevity because of its long-term urban occupation and the persistence of its heterogeneous population during the Terminal Classic to Early Postclassic transition (750-1100 CE), a period of regional stress. By focusing on commoner households, this paper will consider the overall impact this period of stress had on lower-end households and reflect on the broader social and economic processes that enabled Aventura’s urban community to persist while others did not.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32749