This article reports the material evidence of roads in the northwestern Maya Lowlands that were in use from the Middle Preclassic (800–300 BC) through the Late Classic (AD 700–900) period in Chiapas and Tabasco, Mexico. The study includes archaeological evidence recovered from field research in an area covering approximately 670 km2 and 618 recorded archaeological sites. It presents the physical characteristics of a series of piedmont paths that connected the region from the Usumacinta River to the Tulijá River, including large population centers such as Palenque and Chinikihá. The study uses a geographic information system (GIS) least cost path (LCP) analysis to identify the location of roads and how they relate to regional settlement patterns. It also tests the use of modern computational models to advance regional studies in the Maya area. Study results show how the Classic Maya adapted and appropriated the region's topography to facilitate movement, long-term settlement, and the building of landesque capital.

A multiyear field project focused on long-distance causeways between Uci and Cansahcab in Yucatan, Mexico, supports their use for processions and pilgrimages, their role in the creation of multisite polities, and their involvement in the constitution of local authority. Yet details of the causeways’ construction suggest that people contested this authority. Work was central to these dynamics and comes in the form of labor as practice, investments in the maintenance of relations with other-than-human beings, and the ways that causeways produced embodied experiences that were ideal for their use in pilgrimages.

Despite the high degree of technological sophistication visible in other aspects of urban engineering, the archaeology of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica has revealed curiously few examples of bridges or formal, permanent water-crossing structures. The ancient city of Cotzumalhuapa, where at least five such structures have been identified, is a notable exception. The author reviews the archaeological and historical evidence for these bridges, and reflects upon the diversity of engineering technologies that they reveal. Although it remains unclear why bridges are absent at many other contemporaneous sites, these examples offer a fascinating glimpse into the urban planning of structured mobility in Mesoamerica.

Cosmological models are common in Mayanist settlement studies. In such models, causeways are often said to follow various cosmological principles that are more or less the same from the Middle Formative to the present time. The models have been created by merging disparate data from ethnography, ethnohistory, iconography, epigraphy and archaeology into a single form where all the parts are determined by a common principle. The Terminal Classic triadic causeways at Ichmul, Yucatan, Mexico, could potentially be interpreted with such cosmological models. The evidence, however, does not fit these models. It is proposed, instead, with reference to the philosophers Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda, that settlement studies should focus only on what is present at the site without reliance on transcendent concepts such as culture or cosmology. The triadic causeways at Ichmul are seen as virtual processes that have the potential to become actual forms at every present moment.