TY - JOUR
T1 - Maya Monumental “Boom”
T2 - Rapid Development, Hybrid Architecture, and “Pretentiousness” in the Fabrication of Place at Alabama, East-Central Belize
AU - Peuramaki-Brown, Meaghan M.
AU - Morton, Shawn G.
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Research Centre and Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences at Athabasca University, and our generous supporters through Experiment.com. We thank the Belize Institute of Archaeology for granting us a permit to conduct archaeological investigations at Alabama, and the property owners for allowing us access to the private land on which Alabama is situated. None of this research could have been accomplished without our SCRAP team, including local and foreign assistants, students, and research collaborators. A special thank you to Dr. Elizabeth Graham, Dr. Brett Houk, Dr. Laurie Milne, Dr. Elizabeth Paris, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Any mistakes are our own.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, © Trustees of Boston University 2019.
PY - 2019/5/19
Y1 - 2019/5/19
N2 - Boomtowns are the product of unique flows of development characterized by relatively rapid population growth and land conversion, and the sudden appearance of functional and place-making features, much of which may not be readily apparent in the archaeological record. While settlements may expand rapidly in the absence of these forms, and thus lie outside the boomtown definition, we propose that the process does, in fact, describe development at the ancient Maya site of Alabama, Belize. We invoke archaeological evidence in the description of the tempo and tone of development at Alabama during the Late to Terminal Classic period (ca. 700–900 a.d.): a dynamic interval of Maya civilization. If, as archaeologists, we are truly interested in understanding the social and demographic processes that drove change in prehistoric and historic human landscapes, we must take care to incorporate descriptions of the human-scale experiences of development itself.
AB - Boomtowns are the product of unique flows of development characterized by relatively rapid population growth and land conversion, and the sudden appearance of functional and place-making features, much of which may not be readily apparent in the archaeological record. While settlements may expand rapidly in the absence of these forms, and thus lie outside the boomtown definition, we propose that the process does, in fact, describe development at the ancient Maya site of Alabama, Belize. We invoke archaeological evidence in the description of the tempo and tone of development at Alabama during the Late to Terminal Classic period (ca. 700–900 a.d.): a dynamic interval of Maya civilization. If, as archaeologists, we are truly interested in understanding the social and demographic processes that drove change in prehistoric and historic human landscapes, we must take care to incorporate descriptions of the human-scale experiences of development itself.
KW - ancient Maya
KW - archaeology
KW - architectural planning
KW - Belize
KW - boomtown
KW - monumental architecture
KW - spatial analyses
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85063727210&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/00934690.2019.1591093
DO - 10.1080/00934690.2019.1591093
M3 - Journal Article
AN - SCOPUS:85063727210
SN - 0093-4690
VL - 44
SP - 250
EP - 266
JO - Journal of Field Archaeology
JF - Journal of Field Archaeology
IS - 4
ER -