You Can Bet on the (Rural) Farmer: Agriculture and Urbanism at Postclassic Mayapán

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In Mesoamerica, recent scholarship emphasizes the importance of urban smallholders, or intensive production by urban residents. The acquisition of regional lidar imagery of urban centers and surrounding landscapes reveals that the spatial limitations of production were often far more extensive than once thought. We use the spatial analysis of remotely sensed data to evaluate maize production potentials across the area of Postclassic settlement in and surrounding Mayapán in the northern Yucatán Peninsula. Mayapán is the largest Postclassic urban center in the Maya Lowlands and was profoundly interconnected politically, economically, and culturally with populations across the peninsula. Traditional and lidar surveys in the Mayapán region during the last 20 years reveal a densely occupied cityscape and rural settlement characterized by widely distributed ceremonial groups linking a network of diverse settlements across the region. We contextualize the results with estimated site population and the resulting caloric requirements of its residents. We argue that the states in the region were substantially dependent on production by rural farmers. Rural maize production would have been a major contributor to the urban polity’s overall sustainability and longevity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37016.0