Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-04T03:50:27.808Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter Four - Patterns of Early Urbanism in the Southern Maya Lowlands

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2021

Michael Love
Affiliation:
California State University, Northridge
Julia Guernsey
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
Get access

Summary

In the past, the study of ancient urbanism called out the singularity of the Maya case in a manner that left Mayanists with an outstanding theoretical debt to the rest of the scholarly field. With seeming dismay, V. Gordon Childe (1950: 9) unabashedly claimed: “[T]he minimum definition of a city, the greatest factor common to the Old World and the New will be substantially reduced and impoverished by the inclusion of the Maya.” His techno-economic argument for early urbanism (and, by extension, ancient sociopolitical complexity) was not supported by the Maya data as he understood them. His subsequent ten characteristics of ancient urbanism and sociopolitical complexity, then, were inescapably impoverished – that is, made less precise and more abstract – by the inclusion of the ancient Maya into the fraternity of ancient urban civilizations.

Type
Chapter
Information
Early Mesoamerican Cities
Urbanism and Urbanization in the Formative Period
, pp. 73 - 98
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×