The archaeological study of craft production investigates the role of household activities in broader social and political networks. In the Maya area, the production and distribution of ceramics, especially prestige ceramics including polychrome and fine ware pottery, relate to broader transformations in Maya society from the Classic to Terminal Classic periods. However, direct evidence for ceramic production in the form of kilns, workshops, or associated detritus can be elusive. We report the identification, excavation, and preliminary analysis of a large deposit of fine paste ceramics, including sherds representative of the Fine Orange and Fine Gray wares in the type-variety system of Maya ceramics, from a household group at the archaeological site of Benemérito de las Américas Primera Sección, located near the confluence of the Lacantún and Usumacinta Rivers. Discarded ceramics from this context exhibit several signs of overfiring consistent with pottery production. This deposit challenges notions of functional versus symbolic activity, as the members of this household used this deposit to dedicate a group of three burials accompanied by offerings including a figurine ensemble. We discuss the implications for this deposit in the context of economic shifts taking place across the Maya Lowlands during this period.

As airborne lidar surveys reveal a growing sample of urbanised tropical landscapes, questions linger about the sampling bias of such research leading to inflated estimates of urban extent and population magnitude. ‘Found’ datasets from remote sensing conducted for non-archaeological purposes and thus not subject to archaeological site bias, provide an opportunity to address these concerns through pseudorandom sampling. Here, the authors present their analysis of an environmental lidar dataset from Campeche, Mexico, which reveals previously unrecorded urbanism and dense regional-scale settlement. Both characteristics, the authors argue, are therefore demonstrably ubiquitous across the central Maya Lowlands.

A partir de los conceptos de modo y sistema cerámico, analizamos el rango de variación estilística en las cerámicas de El Tintal, Guatemala, como indicadores de conexiones sociales, económicas y políticas a nivel regional. Nuestro estudio muestra que la población de El Tintal participó en sistemas cerámicos con una distribución geográfica extensa durante los períodos preclásico medio y tardío, clásico temprano y clásico tardío. Durante los períodos preclásico terminal y clásico terminal, sin embargo, El Tintal participó en sistemas de afiliación con cobertura espacial limitada, aunque entre estos circulan conjuntos de cerámicas particulares a larga distancia. Con base en los resultados del estudio proponemos aquí algunas explicaciones a estos patrones en términos de dinámicas de interacción sociocultural y económicas.

During the Late Classic period (a.d. 550–900), ancient Maya settlement spread throughout western Belize, including the Vaca Plateau, a rugged karstic region with high densities of ritually utilized cave systems. Within the past decade, archaeologists have increasingly drawn on LiDAR technology to document the extent of such settlement at local and regional scales. Combined with traditional pedestrian survey, we have begun to amass substantial data on variation within household groups, disparities which may indicate inequality within these communities. Here, we use settlement data generated from the Las Cuevas region to quantify residential variation through Gini coefficients and Lorenz curves. Special attention is given to areal and volumetric deviation of identified households within three samples: (1) the complete 95.25 km2 study area; (2) a 12.25 km2 zone of higher population between the primary centers of Las Cuevas and Monkey Tail; and (3) households situated within 500 m of ritually utilized caves within the study area. Results indicate some degree of variation within household area and volume for all samples, suggestive of unequal access to labor within the region. This research adds to the growing database of Gini-based analyses to improve our understanding of wealth differentials within pre-modern populations throughout the Lowlands.

Most population estimates for Maya sites are for the Late Classic period, a time of peak population in the Central Maya Lowlands. At Naachtun, Guatemala, a major city during the Early Classic that continued into the Late Classic period, researchers recently carried out an ambitious program of test pitting in residential areas; its aim was to model the growth of residential units during the entire Classic period and so better contextualize the rise of Classic Maya dynasties and the scale of their economic and political power. This article presents an improvement to the existing method for estimating population for periods preceding the population apex (in this case, the Early Classic period): it not only estimates the occupancy rate of residential units occupied pre-apex but also assesses their size, using a typology I developed based on their morphology and pattern of transformation.

The emergence of monumentality in the Maya lowlands has been linked to political complexity. But how did the emergence of these monuments relate to changing human-environment interactions? Here, the author proposes that Maya monumentality embodies traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK. Taking the example of Tzacauil, the gathering of fieldstone for the preparation of land for cultivation is connected to agricultural intensification and the florescence of monumentality in the Late and Terminal Formative period (300 BC–AD 250). Exploration of the relationships between monumental traditions and localised TEK practices may illuminate the entanglement of complexity, subsistence and human-environment interactions in other parts of the world.

This study reports water capacity estimates for four reservoirs within the Classic Maya city of El Perú-Waka’, Guatemala. Combining field survey, soil analysis, and a variety of GIS interpolation methods, it illustrates ways to more fully quantify a challenging resource—water—and its availability using an interdisciplinary approach. This is accomplished by comparing surface interpolation methods for estimating reservoir capacities to demonstrate that most provide reliable estimates. Reported estimates are further enhanced by analyzing internal reservoir soil morphology to better understand and quantify formation processes and refine estimates from field survey. These analyses document a multiscalar organization to water management within the Waka’ urban core that likely ran the gamut from individuals up to civic and state institutions. Although intricacies remain to be fully elucidated, this example offers an alternate path to theorizing about water management practices from traditional binary approaches.

While Maya public rituals are often assumed to have developed from domestic practices, caches at Ceibal in Guatemala demonstrate the concurrent emergence of distinct domestic and public rituals. During the Middle Preclassic period (c. 1000–350 BC), caches in domestic areas were associated with construction phases—deposited on floors or within construction fills. In the public plaza, however, caches were deposited in intrusive pits. Later, domestic and public ritual practices became more similar. By focusing on deposition processes and deposit context, rather than content, it is possible to recognise distinct ritualised activities that are sometimes obscured by predefined categories such as ‘cache’.

An ∼8400 cal yr record of vegetation change from the northern Peten, Guatemala, provides new insights into the environmental history of the archaeological area known as the Mirador Basin. Pollen, loss on ignition, and magnetic susceptibility analyses indicate warm and humid conditions in the early to mid-Holocene. Evidence for a decrease in forest cover around 4600 cal yr B.P. coincides with the first appearance of Zea mays pollen, suggesting that human activity was responsible. The period between 3450 cal yr B.P. and 1000 cal yr B.P. is characterized by a further decline in forest pollen types, includes an abrupt increase in weedy taxa, and exhibits the highest magnetic susceptibility values since the early Holocene, all of which suggest further agricultural disturbance in the watershed. A brief drop in disturbance indicators around 1800 cal yr B.P. may represent the Preclassic abandonment of the area. Changing pollen frequencies around 1000 cal yr B.P. indicate a cessation of human disturbance, which represents the Late Classic collapse of the southern Maya lowlands.

In the tropical regions of southern Asia, Southeast Asia and the southern Maya lowlands, the management of water was crucial to the maintenance of political power and the distribution of communities in the landscape. Between the ninth and sixteenth centuries AD, however, this diverse range of medieval socio-political systems were destabilised by climatic change. Comparative study reveals that despite their diversity, the outcome for each society was the same: the breakdown of low-density urban centres in favour of compact communities in peripheral regions. The result of this, an ‘urban diaspora’, highlights the relationship between the control of water and power, but also reveals that the collapse of urban centres was a political phenomenon with society-wide repercussions.