A Functional Approach to Classic Maya Regal Palaces: Case Studies from La Corona and Cancuen

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Regimes of the Ancient Maya" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Regal palaces, found in the epicenter of great many polities, were a defining element for most Classic Maya political regimes. While they varied in size and shape, all regal palaces seem to have anchored two essential dimensions of Classic Maya politics: the household of royal families and the administrative-ceremonial cores of regimes. In this paper, we take a functional approach to palatial architecture and propose a terminology for the different, yet complementary activities that occurred within regal palaces and facilitated the operation of political regimes. We focus on the regal palaces of La Corona and Cancuen, Guatemala, where residential, communicational, economic, administrative, and ceremonial activities operated in a pragmatic and complementary fashion. These five types of activities are identified through architectural, artifactual, and geoarchaeological evidence. The results of our comparative study suggest that, even if the same set of activities occurred in these architectural institutions, their spatial organization differed significantly. These differences help us identify how the architectural institutions that anchored these polities in place reflect their distinct, yet comparable regimes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Regimes of the Ancient Maya   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36123.0