Mesoamerican City Urbanization

加州州立大学北岭分校的迈克尔·洛夫博士将与美国和危地马拉大学的同事和学生一起，对危地马拉La Blanca遗址的早期都市主义进行考古调查。以前对中美洲城市化的研究首次出现在古典时期(约公元300-公元900年)，但最近的证据表明，城市化开始得更早，在中世纪前古典时期(约公元前1000-600年)。城市化是一种现象，它引起了社会科学和人文科学广泛关注的许多话题。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机会，可以对人类状况的重大变化以及各种社会问题实现全面的看法。作为世界上城市中心独立发展的为数不多的案例之一，中美洲在第一代城市与城市化的全球比较分析中发挥着重要作用。作为中美洲首批城市规模的聚居地之一，La Blanca是了解第一代城市的关键地点。Love的研究将研究城市化如何改变日常生活，以及早期城市中的人们是如何相互协商生活的。La Blanca是当来自广阔腹地的群体聚集在一个新的地点时建立的。这种聚集形式似乎是世界各地早期城市的典型。一个主要的问题是，这些不同背景的人是合并成了一个新的群体，还是他们基本上保持着彼此独立，保持着各自的身份。乐福的研究将考察这座城市的三个不同区域，并询问它们是通过单一的等级制度相互整合的，还是这些区域是自治的，彼此之间只是松散地结合在一起。洛夫和他的同事们将检查La Blanca每个区的一些家庭的物质遗骸，并分析保存在房屋、食物残留物、工具和仪式物品中的日常生活的证据。该小组将收集关于家庭经济活动(如谋生做法、手工艺生产)以及家庭仪式活动的数据，包括祭拜祖先的仪式。然后，这些数据将被用来确定经济和仪式活动是主要在每个区内组织的，还是在城市本身一级整合的。

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.