Visualizing Mayapán’s Outlying Centers and Regional Distribution

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

We present the identification and analysis of the outlying minor centers surrounding the Postclassic city of Mayapán in the 44 km2 area of the 2013 Mayapán LiDAR Survey. The centers were identified in the airborne laser scanning (ALS) data, and all were ground-checked. In this presentation, we display the major architectural and environmental features and their spatial arrangement for each minor center. Most previous research in the area focused on the two centers within the urban core, but we seek to build a better understanding of the diverse manifestation of minor centers distributed in the rural area surrounding the city. We evaluate the form and organization of each center to characterize their variation using systematic procedures to identify the fundamental structures and environmental features in each and identify key similarities and differences among them. We explore the minor centers' potential relationships within the broader polity to gain a greater understanding of political and economic activities in the Mayapán region. We use this analysis to enhance our understanding of regional interconnections and shift the focus of analysis from the isolated city to the broader relationships connecting people at multiple settlement levels and to support further research in and around Mayapán.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39461.0