African Archaeology and the Ancestral Maya World

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Lidar mapping has revealed extensive ancestral settlement patterns signifying a low-density urban system. Maya archaeologists are tasked with interpreting how the ancestral Maya interacted and kept this system working for over 1,000 years (ca. 100 BCE–900 CE) in the southern Maya lowlands of Central America. It was a complex system, one where scholars cannot rely on the written record to explain its inner workings since it only focused on royal life—and not on economic issues, political structures, tribute systems, agricultural practices, seasonal schedules, means of transportation, and so on. Maya archaeologists often look to other case studies globally, including several in Africa, particularly those in tropical areas above and below the equator, such as Djenné-Djenno in Mali (400 BCE–1000 CE) and its surrounding self-organizing and heterarchical communities, and the Aksumite Kingdom (ca. 150 BCE–850 CE) in the Ethiopian Highlands with its diverse capital city, Aksum, as well as its extensive trade network. I am particularly interested in how Africanist scholarship addresses the seasonal pulses of interaction between urban cores and hinterland peoples and resources, as well as the different trajectories of political histories versus durable agricultural and social practices.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35856.0