Verification of a Maya Settlement Model through Remote Sensing

Folan, William J.; Marcus, Joyce; Miller, Wendy

doi:10.1017/s0959774300015067

Cited by 33 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…However, as more settlement work around major sites is completed, major roads extending kilometers out from site centers have been found, sometimes-but not always-linking sites together. Calakmul (Folan et al 1995(Folan et al , 2001a and Caracol (Chase and Chase 2001) both have major roadway systems that have been interpreted as relating to economic activities. New methods for identifying roadways on a large scale, including radar imaging, remote sensing, and GIS (Carballo and Pluckhahn 2007;Folan et al 1995;Sever and Irwin 2003), may help future efforts to understand the connections between sites, regions, and economies.…”

Section: Large-scale Spatial Patterningmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Elusive Maya Marketplace: An Archaeological Consideration of the Evidence

Shaw

2012

J Archaeol Res

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The modeling of ancient Maya economies has been a dynamic area of archaeological research in the past few decades, but in most cases there has been little attention on how goods actually changed hands. Through an overview of the literature, this paper considers marketplace exchange as one mechanism of distribution. Researchers have proposed a number of physical features and artifact characteristics that may be expected in association with marketplace activity, and new methods of data collection have been offered that can be used to build a case for marketplace exchange. What remains is the challenge of developing strategies to identify ancient Maya marketplaces convincingly through archaeological excavation.

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Section: Large-scale Spatial Patterningmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Elusive Maya Marketplace: An Archaeological Consideration of the Evidence

Shaw

2012

J Archaeol Res

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“…This economic development was accompanied by new human settlements that exploited wildlife resources surrounding the CBR and cleared land for small-scale agriculture and farming from 1890 to 1940 (Konrad, 1992). The result has been the irreversible landscape modification of the CBR region by the late twentieth century, with subsequent natural rehabilitation following lumber, sisal, and gum industry failures (Culbert, 1973;Rice, 1986;Braswell et al, 2004) and significant reduction of deterioration of the remaining conserved regions (Folan et al, 1995;. These historical changes in use and transformation of the Calakmul region and current land use and socio-cultural practices have had an important impact on biodiversity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Landscape ecology of Trypanosoma cruzi in the southern Yucatan Peninsula

et al. 2015

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“…As indicated earlier, there is also no explicit acknowledgment of the second cycle in the traditional periodization. 31 29 Very few intercity road systems have thus far been discovered in the Maya lowlands, but we do have them radiating from Calakmul, Cobá, and El Mirador (Folan, Marcus, and Miller, 1995). 30 Our argument is not against the traditional periodization as a framework for archaeology, art history, or culture, but rather against its limited value for understanding the politics.…”

Section: Broader Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…The sources used to reconstruct a polity's (pre)history and estimate its dates of rise and fall differ by levels of chronological precision and proximity to the field evidence. Primary sources consist of (a) structural, architectural, or other archaeological evidence (e.g., Webster, 1976;Inomata, 1994;Folan, Marcus, and Miller, 1995); as well as (b) textual information in the Mayan language, including hieroglyphic, paleographic, or other epigraphic records pertaining to social and political events (e.g., Berlin 1958;Schele and Freidel, 1990;Schele and Mathews, 1991;Marcus, 1992a). Thus, both archaeological and hieroglyphic bodies of evidence were used in this study, unlike previous studies that rely almost exclusively on epigraphic dates (Hamblin and Pitcher, 1980;Lowe, 1985;Mathews, 1985).…”

Section: Appendix: Sources and Datesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution of Maya Polities in the Ancient Mesoamerican System

Cioffi‐Revilla

Landman

1999

Int Studies Q

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The analysis of politics in antiquity presents new opportunities for political science and international relations, particularly the ancient New World (c. 2000 B.C. to A.D. 1521). Governance through leadership and institutions, collective action, war and peace, alliance dynamics, regional hegemonies, interstate rivalries, and other universal patterns of world politics existed in Mesoamerica, antedating the modern state system. We report findings from a study to record systematically the rise and fall of Maya polities in the Mesoamerican political system, using sources from archaeology and epigraphy. Based on tests of competing hypotheses and new distribution statistics and hazard rates (survival analysis) for 72 Maya polities, our findings support a model of Maya political dynamics based on Preclassic origins, punctuated phases of development, multiple cycles of system expansion and collapse, and weaker political stability for increasingly complex polities. We draw two main implications: (a) a new theory of the Maya political collapse(s), based on their failure to politically integrate; and (b) confirmation for a new periodization of Maya political evolution, different from the traditional cultural periodization, based on several cycles of rise-and-fall, not just one. Our findings may also make possible future investigations in areas such as the war-polarity and war-alliances hypotheses. China also spawned pristine polity systems. As one prominent Mayanist notes, "since 1960 we have moved Maya archaeology and texts from myth to history" (Marcus, 1996). Although much speculation has characterized our thinking on the evolution of Maya polities, few if any studies have measured and compared their evolutionary rise and fall as a cohesive political system, using the most valid and reliable data available today. The systematic measurement and comparison of Maya polities are important because they will advance our understanding of early political dynamics and their comparison with the modern system of world politics. In the last thirty years, archaeology, epigraphy, and ethnohistory, together with other allied sciences and humanities, have begun to show a more precise (albeit disciplinarily fragmented) understanding of the long-range evolution of the Maya and other early polity systems. 1 Our new data set and analysis builds on these earlier efforts from anthropology and proposes some new ideas for testing competing explanations using political science theory and research methods.In this six-year study we developed a new data set to measure and compare the rise and fall of individual Maya polities, including all those that eventually evolved into major states, obtaining the first distribution statistics and associated survival analysis results. Our measurement used primary, secondary, and tertiary sources, provided by contemporary archaeological, ethnohistorical, and epigraphic evidence. Our main findings and tests of competing hypotheses, based on the identification of 72 Maya polities with sufficiently accurate dates ...

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Verification of a Maya Settlement Model through Remote Sensing

Cited by 33 publications

References 6 publications

The Elusive Maya Marketplace: An Archaeological Consideration of the Evidence

The Elusive Maya Marketplace: An Archaeological Consideration of the Evidence

Landscape ecology of Trypanosoma cruzi in the southern Yucatan Peninsula

Evolution of Maya Polities in the Ancient Mesoamerican System

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