The Nested Nature of Inequality in Classic Maya Cities: Continuums of Cooperative Neighborhoods to Despotic Rulership

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Cooperative and Noncooperative Transitions in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent research suggests that locations on the continuum of collective to despotic forms of governance correlate with degrees of inequality. Among more despotic forms of governance, certain individuals disproportionately accrue resources, increasing wealth inequality. However, how governance affects different sectors of society may vary. These transitions and differences in wealth are visible in the archaeological record and can be tested geospatially and statistically. Here, we assess the nested nature of varying forms of power, authority, and governance within a community through time. We focus on transitions in nested scales of governance and inequality at Classic Maya (250-900 CE) polities in southern Belize. At the polity-leadership scale, movement from more collective cooperation to more coercive cooperation, or despotic governance wherein rulers must provide concessions, occurred with increasing population density and stress on resources. Districts located within these ancient cities, acted as microcosms of the polity, wherein founding families generated wealth through time, ultimately becoming local despots. However, within neighborhoods, more cooperative forms of kin-based governance likely persisted despite the overarching shifts in governance at the polity-scale. To assess these hypotheses, we use differential access to resources and house size metrics to evaluate shifts in governance through time at nested spatial scales.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Cooperative and Noncooperative Transitions in the Archaeological Record   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51102