Whose Land? Governance of Land Tenure, Property, and Inequality in the Maya Lowlands

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The role that governance and property regimes play in the everyday life of citizens is something we grapple with, actively or passively, every day. In the archaeological record, these topics often prove challenging to evaluate without written records. However, using robust survey data from settlements and civic-ceremonial/administrative architecture in conjunction with high-resolution and multiproxy dating and spatial analysis, we address these questions in the Maya region while considering bottom-up and top-down approaches at multiple scales. We evaluate the role of governance on economic, political, and environmental inequality among more than 40 Classic Maya cities. We bolster this broader survey with two case studies, one from the large Maya city of Caracol in central Belize and the second from the medium-sized cities of southern Belize, discussing the dynamic interplay among settlement selection, governance, and differential access to resources as these communities developed, persisted, and declined over hundreds of years. Our work highlights the heterogeneity of ancient Maya sociopolitical landscapes and the implications of changing governance and communities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeology of Property Regimes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38708.0