Invisible Ties: Socioeconomic Integration at the Lowland Maya Center of La Corona

Bio:
Jocelyne M. Ponce is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Environmental and Urban Studies at Tulane University. She obtained a PhD from Tulane University and earned her B.A. from Universidad del Valle de Guatemala. Her research has been funded by several organizations, including the National Science Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, the American Association of University Women, and Lambda Alpha National Anthropology Honor Society. Her research interests include urbanism, social inequality, gender, and public archaeology. Through her dissertation research, she explored settlement organization through daily interactions in the Lowland Maya center of La Corona. In addition to her Lowland Maya research, she actively collaborates on an outreach project with Kaqchikel Maya indigenous communities and is part of a project focused on addressing inequalities in archaeological practice.

Abstract:
The comprehensiveness of recent remote sensing lidar data across the Maya Lowlands offers a unique opportunity to define diverse forms of interaction and organization that existed within entire settlement systems. Although infrastructure suggests that inhabitants of supra-household groups interacted in various ways, focusing solely on spatial components offers a limited perspective. The incorporation of material analyses and sourcing studies, including neutron activation analysis (NAA) and XRF, has enabled a broader and more detailed understanding of communal cohesion at different scales. La Corona is a medium-sized center located in the sparsely populated subtropical region of northwest Petén, Guatemala. It was inhabited mostly during the Classic period (ca. AD 250-900) and consists of a ceremonial-administrative core surrounded by a patchwork of residential groups that form concentric rings with progressively lower settlement density. The examination of architecture, specialized production, and resource access of three supra-household groups located in the urban, peri-urban, and rural density rings is used to discuss the nature of daily interactions and the means of socioeconomic integration in this low-density settlement.

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Location

Bradford BD7 1DS, UK