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3 The Spatial Arrangement of a Maya City In the previous chapter,I summarized what we know of Blue Creek’s site core.However ,like the downtown district of a modern city,Blue Creek’s site core housed only a small percentage of the population.Years ago,Mayanists viewed the ancient social system as a naively simplistic dichotomy between elites and commoners. Further, they saw commoners as a homogeneous mass with little input into the society’s organization and little to offer us in terms of understanding the past. Nothing could be further from the truth.Today,we have only begun to understand the complexity of the 95 percent or so of the population that lived outside of the site core.1 Some aspects of this complexity can be understood by viewing the spatial arrangement of people, their residences, and other activity areas across the landscape .2 This is a basic tenet of human geography. Unfortunately, it is usually extremely difficult to assess the spatial arrangement of Maya cities as they sprawl through today’s forested environment. Consequently, only a few have been well mapped.3 It is our great fortune to work at a site that had been previously cleared for agriculture and ranching.While the clearing damaged and sometimes destroyed the archaeological materials,it also made the materials more visible.So,while other fieldworkers must cut lines through dense forest, we were able to rapidly map, then (not so rapidly) conduct test excavations across large areas around the site core. Ancient Maya cities consisted of complex spatial arrangements of functional and structural components.Despite many decades of research,the complexity and variability of these cities are only now becoming clear.In this chapter,I will summarize Blue Creek’s spatial arrangement to provide a better understanding of aspects of this complexity. Additionally, the spatial patterning of Blue Creek is contrasted with models of Maya cities to show that such models remain overly simplistic and do not adequately describe the realities of Maya spatial planning. Blue Creek’s location at the headwaters of the Río Hondo offers important strategic resources. Soils at the base of the escarpment are very deep and rich and provide some of the highest agricultural potential in Central America. However, they 50 Chapter 3 are associated with high risk factors such as occasional seasonal inundation that can cause complete crop loss.Elevations at the top of the escarpment are in the range of 180–200 meters above sea level. Further, the eastern Petén zone consists of eroded karstic uplands marked by pronounced limestone hills with little or no soil. Separating these hills are expanses of deep, rich soils with high agricultural productivity . While these are not as productive as the soils below the escarpment, they do not have the same high risk of inundation and are used today for mechanized agribusiness .Where these expanses are large,they are termed bajos. One,the Dumbbell Bajo that defines the west boundary of the Blue Creek polity, covers approximately 40 square kilometers. I apply the term bajito to refer to the much smaller low-lying areas near the escarpment. An example of a bajito is the area between Plaza A and the southern end of Kín Tan (Figure 2.2). Thus, Blue Creek was strategically located with respect to three important economic resources: the variety of resources availed by the ecotonal zone of the Bravo Escarpment with access to both physiographic zones, the rich agricultural lands above and below the escarpment, and river access to the well-established circumYucatecan coastal trade system. This maritime trade system moved exotic, elite, status-reinforcing objects as well as commodities and formed an economic link that bound otherwise independent Maya polities.4 It also provided an outlet for agricultural goods produced at Blue Creek to enter distant markets. The Río Hondo headwaters area was fully under Blue Creek’s control, as the nearest neighboring sites are more than 10 kilometers from the headwaters. As a consequence, Blue Creek, despite its modest size, had inordinately high access to exotic objects such as jade, the most valuable material in the ancient Maya world. Models of Maya Cities Scholars are largely in agreement regarding the nature of the core areas of Maya cities. However, the nature of the surrounding settlement zone is anything but clear. This, for the most part, is a function of the focus given to excavations of the monumental architecture. Further, while many studies have focused...

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