Comparing Demographic Shifts versus Permanence across the Maya Lowlands: A Multiproxy Approach to the Centuries Surrounding the “Maya Collapse”

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

he so-called Maya collapse has been seen as an entelechy of the depopulation and emigration of the great Maya cities of the lowlands during the ninth and tenth centuries AD. However, proper paleodemographic and archaeodemographic works that support this entelechy are scarce. In this paper, we redimension different paleodemographic scenarios with systematically collected population data of large skeletal populations from four different Maya Lowland areas; namely, the northern, southern, and central Petén, along with that of the Copán Valley, Honduras, through the Late Terminal Classic and Terminal Classic–Early Postclassic periods. The sample is composed of 690 individuals from 39 archaeological sites from Guatemala, three from Mexico, and one from Honduras with determined sex and age and chronologies, obtained from the literature and one of the coauthors’ own databases (VT). The modeling of residential and structural mobility (fecundity, mortality, and migration) demonstrates drops in life expectancy in all areas except for the Copán Valley. As for the migration indicators, we observe intraregional entries and exits of individuals, thus reconfiguring the cultural and population space.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part II   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36597.0