Taking the high ground: A model for lowland Maya settlement patterns
Taking the high ground: A model for lowland Maya settlement patterns
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DOI：
10.1016/j.jaa.2021.101349
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发表时间：
2021-08-26
影响因子：
1.8
通讯作者：
Auld-Thomas, Luke
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Canuto, Marcello A.;Auld-Thomas, Luke
玛雅低地的定居点研究一直在努力调和其从生态角度模拟热带森林文明的目标与森林本身施加的后勤限制。在本文中，我们认为，热带低地环境中的聚落研究面临的方法论挑战限制了研究人员对其数据代表性的信心，推动该学科转向社区规模分析，远离定量宏观聚落模式研究。结果，人文地理学的许多基本事实仍然悬而未决。由于遥感技术的进步，这些挑战现在可以得到克服。在这里，我们使用来自危地马拉西北部科罗纳-阿奇奥塔尔地区的激光雷达得出的聚落和地形数据来开发聚落适宜性模型，该模型揭示了考古遗迹相对地貌的分布模式。将该模型应用于更大的已发布聚落数据集，我们展示了它不仅广泛适用于玛雅内陆低地，而且能够识别聚落分布中的历史意外事件，即与城市致密化相关的不太合适的景观区域的拥挤。
Settlement research in the Maya lowlands has struggled to reconcile its goals to model a tropical forest civilization in ecological terms with the logistical constraints imposed by the forest itself. In this paper, we argue that the methodological challenges facing settlement research in this tropical lowland setting limited researchers' confidence in the representativeness of their data, nudging the discipline toward community-scale analysis and away from quantitative macro-scale settlement pattern research. As a result, many basic facts of human geography have remained unsettled. These challenges can now be overcome thanks to advances in remote sensing. Here, we use lidar-derived settlement and topographic data from the Corona-Achiotal region of northwestern Guatemala to develop a settlement suitability model that reveals patterns in the distribution of archaeological remains vis-`a-vis landforms. Applying this model to a much larger published settlement dataset, we demonstrate how it is not only widely applicable in the interior Maya Lowlands, but also capable of identifying historical contingencies in the distribution of settlement, namely the crowding of less-suitable areas of the landscape, linked to urban densification.