Based on settlement patterns in the Río Bec micro-region, a study zone (100 km2) focused on the eponymous site, there is no evidence that any of the monumental groups underwent true processes of significant, sustainable nucleation on a broad sociopolitical level. This paper analyzes Río Bec settlement patterns in order to better understand why processes of agglomeration did not occur at the site. Our approach to this question consists of analyzing the spatial distribution of settlements in relation to their internal hierarchy, while taking in account evolution through time. The study was carried out at two different scales of analysis, and results are presented for both the “micro-region” and “nuclear zone” (159 ha) scales. The overarching objective of this contribution is to gain greater insight into the social dimensions of the processes that took place at Río Bec during the Classic period.

In an attempt to interpret Classic Maya elite and commoner residential patterns beyond usual assumptions about filiation, family cycle, and household economic adaptation, we explore the specific ways people were "living together," in the sense of the coresidence concept, in Maya societies conceived of as ranked societies, or "house societies," as created by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Beyond kinship and economic organization, residential patterns can be understood as part of long-term strategies designed by inhabitants to integrate their social unit into the politico-religious city. The residential system of the Río Bec zone, where a major research project was carried out from 2002 to 2010, offers a series of well-defined architectural solutions, some of them common to most central lowlands cities, while others are innovative as forerunners of the northern lowlands large multiroom palaces. This paper analyzes Late and Terminal Classic period Río Bec domestic architecture in order to outline the material correlates of coresidence, growth, ranking, and alliance within and between Classic Maya social groupings.One of the most difficult issues raised for Classic Maya society and urbanism bears on the way that social groups of any given entity related to its politico-religious system or, as Fox and colleagues (1996:796; see also Fash 1994:191; Gillespie 2000a:478; McAnany 1995:125; Marcus 2003:86) put it, "how various communities or parts of communities were articulated into larger political wholes." During the 1990s and early 2000s, while debates focused on political systems and their integration capacity (Chase and Chase 1996;Fox et al. 1996; Iannone 2002;Lucero 2003; Marcus 1998; Martin and Grube 2000; Rice 2004), less attention was given to their social basis and components, until more recently when regional projects began investigating intermediate social units situated between the community or polity level and the household level