In the Realm of Three Hills: Civic-Religious Architecture at Llano Grande, Copan, during the Late Classic Period (ca. AD 650–850)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Mountains, Rain, and Techniques of Governance in Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Copan Valley, located in western Honduras, has been inhabited by permanent communities since the Early Formative period (ca. 1400 BC). These early communities developed a lifestyle based on milpa agriculture, which continues today with the Ch'ortí Maya, the linguistic group that is the descendants of the ancient Copanecos. The origin of agriculture elsewhere in the Maya lowlands required a mechanism of time measurement to define the seasonality of the agricultural cycle. As an alternative to the monumental architectural complexes built in the Maya lowlands to measure the movement of the sun, the ancient Copanecos used the natural landscape as spaces that can be defined as E-Groups. In this work, it is argued that the site of Llano Grande functioned as an observatory with the hills of Cerro Piedra Colorada, Cerro Pacho, and Cerro de LLanetillos as natural markers that were used to observe and measure solstices and equinoxes to define the agricultural season.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Mountains, Rain, and Techniques of Governance in Mesoamerica   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39958.0