Settlement Continuity and Change in the Central Peten Lakes Region: the Case of Zacpeten

Abstract

During the 8th and 9th centuries AD that part of the Maya lowlands which is now the Department of Peten, Guatemala, witnessed dramatic cultural transformations that have traditionally been collectively characterized as the Maya «collapse.» Many large Late Classic (AD 500-900) civic-ceremonial centers were virtually abandoned, as evidenced by the cessation of construction of monumental architecture, a rapid decline in the production of carved altars and stelae, and the disappearance of other arts and crafts commonly associated with Classic Maya elites (Culbert 1973). Scenes of warfare on Cycle 10 (AD 830-1090) sculpted monuments (Schele and Grube 1995), evidence of late Late Classic construction of defensive fortifications at some sites (Demarest 1993; Demarest et al. 1995; Inomata, Triadan and Wolley 1993; McNair and Drake 1995; Pugh 1995, 1996), and the apparent general abandonment of Classic-period residential structures throughout the region (Rice and Culbert 1990), have suggested to some scholars that the «collapse» was accompanied by civil and political unrest (Demarest and Valdes 1995), and characterized by dramatic loss of population (Culbert 1988). Until recently, central Peten was thought to have remained largely uninhabited until late (ca. 13th-15 th centuries AD) inmigration of Maya groups from the northern Yucatan peninsula, as related in Yucatecan native histories recorded after the Spanish conquest (Barrera Vasquez and Morley 1949). These migrations satisfactorily explained for many Mayanists the presence of «Itzb Maya populations

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.