Mesoamerican City Urbanization

北岭加州州立大学的迈克尔·洛夫博士将与来自美国和危地马拉大学的同事和学生一起，在危地马拉的拉布兰卡遗址对早期的城市化进行考古调查。先前关于中美洲城市主义的学术研究将其首次出现在古典时期（公元300年至公元900年），但最近的证据表明，城市主义开始的时间要早得多，在前古典时期中期（公元前1000年至600年）。城市化是一种引起社会科学和人文科学广泛关注的许多话题的现象。作为一个过程，城市化改变了许多社会和文化变量之间的关系，包括人口、经济、政治结构和宗教习俗。因此，对第一代城市化的分析提供了一个重要的机会，可以全面地看待人类状况的重要变化以及无数的社会问题。作为世界上为数不多的城市中心独立发展的案例之一，中美洲在世界范围内对第一代城市和城市主义的比较分析中发挥了重要作用。作为中美洲最早的城市规模的聚落之一，La Blanca是了解第一代城市的关键地点。勒夫的研究将考察城市化如何改变人们的日常生活，以及早期城市里的人们如何相互协商生活。当来自广阔腹地的人群聚集在一个新的地方时，La Blanca就建立了。这种形式的聚集似乎是世界各地早期城市的典型特征。一个主要的问题是，这些不同背景的人是否合并成一个新的群体，或者他们是否基本上彼此独立，保持各自的身份。洛夫的研究将考察城市的三个不同区域，并询问它们是否通过单一的等级制度相互结合，或者这些地区是否自治，只是松散地相互结合。Love和他的同事们将检查La Blanca每个地区许多家庭的物质遗迹，并分析房屋、食物遗迹、工具和仪式物品中保存的日常生活证据。该小组将收集有关家庭经济活动（如维持生计的做法、手工艺品生产）以及家庭仪式活动（包括祭祖仪式）的数据。然后，这些数据将用于确定经济和仪式活动是主要在每个地区内组织还是在城市本身一级进行整合。

Dr. Michael Love, of California State University, Northridge, along with colleagues and students from US and Guatemalan universities, will conduct an archaeological investigation of early urbanism at the site of La Blanca, Guatemala. Previous scholarship on Mesoamerican urbanism has placed its first appearance in the Classic Period (ca AD 300- AD 900), but recent evidence suggests that urbanism began much earlier, during the Middle Preclassic period (ca 1000-600 BC). Urbanization is a phenomenon that brings into focus many topics of broad interest to the social sciences and the humanities. As a process, urbanization changed the relationships between many social and cultural variables including demography, economy, political structures, and religious practices. Analysis of first-generation urbanization therefore offers an important opportunity to achieve a holistic perspective on important changes in the human condition as well as a myriad of social issues. As one of the limited number of cases in the world where urban centers developed independently, Mesoamerica plays a major role in the worldwide comparative analysis of first generation cities and urbanism. As one of Mesoamerica's first settlements of urban scale, La Blanca is a key site in understanding first-generation cities.Love's research will examine how daily life was altered by urbanization and how people brought together in an early city negotiated their lives with one another. La Blanca was established when groups from a broad hinterland came together at a new location. This form of aggregation seems typical of early cities throughout the world. A primary question is whether these people of different backgrounds merged into a single new group, or whether they remained mostly independent of one another and maintained separate identities. Love's study will examine three different areas of the city and ask whether they were integrated with one another through a single hierarchical system, or whether the districts were autonomous and only loosely integrated with one another. Love and his colleagues will examine the material remains of a number of households in each district of La Blanca and analyze the evidence of daily life preserved in houses, food remains, tools, and ritual items. The team will collect data on household economic activity (such as subsistence practices, craft production), as well as domestic ritual activity, including rituals of ancestor veneration. Those data will then be used to determine whether economic and ritual activity were organized primarily within each district or integrated at the level of the city itself.