Beyond the Kaanul: Setting Some Questions and Initial Thoughts on the Urban Layouts of Calakmul and Its Region

Summary

This is an abstract from the "New and Emerging Perspectives on the Bajo el Laberinto Region of the Maya Lowlands, Part 2" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The ancient city of Calakmul was the locus of important human developments throughout a period of no less than fifteen centuries, during which various social groups, ruling houses and urban palimpsests followed one another, and sometimes coexisted, until its definitive abandonment. Nowadays, lidar technology provides the most detailed and accurate type of documentation that can be generated about the remains of an ancient landscape. This allows an understanding of the details of a built environment on an unprecedented scale; something to which settlement archeology aspired from its very beginnings. Parallel to the initial classification of a large amount of data that the new relief models provide, identifying the imprint of the different construction projects, as well as establishing their approximate chronology and development, becomes a fundamental task. Some architectural and spatial patterns seem to emerge not only from the analysis per se that we have made of these models but also from their comparison with other contemporary centers of the Maya Lowlands. In this paper we propose that these potential urban projects could be representative of certain sociopolitical systems during specific times, and a testimony of their materialization, as well as the canvas for their gradual change to new ones.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• New and Emerging Perspectives on the Bajo el Laberinto Region of the Maya Lowlands, Part 2   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39639.0