Country Roads: Travel, Visibility, and Late Classic Settlement in the Southern Maya Mountains

ABSTRACT

Mayanist archaeology has long been concerned with creating and evaluating explanatory models for the locations of ancient sites relative to one another and to the physical geography of the Maya world. This study combines epigraphic data and spatial analyses to explore motivations for settlement location and to interrogate territorial strategies in Late Classic (a.d. 600–830) kingdoms in the southern Maya Mountains, around the modern towns of Dolores and Poptún, Guatemala. Least-cost path analyses were used to model natural travel corridors and their relationship with site location was assessed. In conjunction, viewshed analyses were applied to evaluate the importance of visual connections to likely travel routes. The results are considered in the context of the socio-politics and economics of the region, and raise questions about the character of and interconnections between travel, exchange, settlement location, and mechanisms for reinforcing territorial claims in the Late Classic Southern Maya Mountains.

KEYWORDS:

• Maya archaeology
• spatial analysis
• visibility analysis
• least-cost paths
• Maya epigraphy

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a SPARC Award. The SPARC program is based at CAST at the University of Arkansas and is funded by a generous grant from the National Science Foundation (Awards #1321443, #1519660, and #1720339). We gratefully acknowledge the invaluable support of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Dorothy Carter, Robert Kimberk, Barbara MacLeod, Katharine Lukach, Dorie Reents-Budet, Mara Antonieta Reyes, and two anonymous reviewers contributed valuable comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on Contributors

Nicholas P. Carter (Ph.D. 2014, Brown University) is a Research Associate with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. His research interests include Mesoamerican epigraphy and the archaeology of areas on the peripheries of premodern states.

Lauren M. Santini (Ph.D. 2016, Harvard University) is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. Her research interests include remote sensing and archaeoanthracology.

Adam Barnes (M.A. 2006, University of Arkansas) is a Research Associate with the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies at the University of Arkansas. His research interests include remote sensing and spatial analysis of cultural surfaces, sites, and objects.

Rachel Opitz (Ph.D. 2009, University of Cambridge) is a Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests include archaeological remote sensing, landscape archaeology, and digital methods including 3D modeling, analysis, and interfaces.

Devin White (Ph.D. 2007, University of Colorado) leads the Autonomous Sensing and Perception Department at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and is a Research Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research interests include machine intelligence, photogrammetry, remote sensing, computer vision, imaging science, geographic information science, computational social science, high performance computing, modeling human movement and visibility across landscapes, complex adaptive systems, and Southwestern archaeology.

Kristin N. Safi (Ph.D. 2015, Washington State University) is an Archaeologist at Wood Environment & Infrastructure Solutions, Canada. Her research interests include the formation of multi-ethnic communities, peer-to-peer community interactions, and regional transportation networks.

Bryce A. Davenport (M.A. 2013, Brandeis University) is an independent researcher with a background in geospatial analysis consulting and world heritage management. His research interests include Mesoamerican political economies, novel remote sensing applications, and cultivating public engagement with archaeological resources.

Clifford T. Brown (Ph.D. 1999, Tulane University) is a Professor of Anthropology at Florida Atlantic University. His research interests include Mesoamerican archaeology and quantitative methods.

Walter R. T. Witschey (Ph.D. 1993, Tulane University) is Research Professor of Anthropology and Geography at Longwood University. He is co-principal investigator of the Electronic Atlas of Maya Sites, and a Research Fellow of the Middle American Research Institute (Tulane) and the Longwood Institute of Archaeology.

ORCID

Nicholas Carter http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2693-8916

Lauren Santini http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7867-1195

Adam Barnes http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4415-9526

Rachel Opitz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5232-1434

Devin White http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5894-9559

Kristin Safi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3587-5638