Surveillance, Fortification, and Movement around the Petén Lakes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Recent Research in the Petén Lakes Region, Petén, Guatemala" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The physical movement of people across the terrain is implicit to notions of migration, trade, and warfare. Numerous factors determine the specific paths taken by individuals and groups in motion, some physical and others conceptual. Tracing the physical conduits and limitations to travel across a particular landscape will therefore not provide a complete picture of patterns of movement but can illustrate likely and unlikely paths. The Petén Lakes region offers the potential of water-based transport, known to have been accomplished by canoe, in addition to overland routes across the undulating terrain through naturally dense forest. Least-cost corridors of movement as preferred paths are complicated by the surveillance potential from sites in the area, often located at local high points and further augmented vertically by construction, as well as other occupied perches. The study presented here assesses likely paths of movement across the Petén Lakes region as modulated by the terrain, with consideration of the surveillance potential from the fortified site of Muralla de León on the northeast shoreline of Lake Macanché.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Recent Research in the Petén Lakes Region, Petén, Guatemala   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36720.0