2022
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0275916
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Ancient Lowland Maya neighborhoods: Average Nearest Neighbor analysis and kernel density models, environments, and urban scale

Abstract: Many humans live in large, complex political centers, composed of multi-scalar communities including neighborhoods and districts. Both today and in the past, neighborhoods form a fundamental part of cities and are defined by their spatial, architectural, and material elements. Neighborhoods existed in ancient centers of various scales, and multiple methods have been employed to identify ancient neighborhoods in archaeological contexts. However, the use of different methods for neighborhood identification withi… Show more

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Cited by 24 publications
(17 citation statements)
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References 133 publications
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“…Attempts to examine wealth distribution at the intracenter level, such as within the neighborhoods at Chunchucmil (Hutson and Welch 2021) and centers in southern Belize (Thompson et al 2021), also prove difficult at El Pilar. Spatial methods to identify El Pilar neighborhoods have met with limited success (Thompson et al 2022), and labor investment data argue against a concentric-zone model of elite residences clustering near the monumental city center (Horn III et al 2020). An alternative approach taken by Marken (2023) assessed inequality within El Perú-Waka' at the urban core, near periphery, and far periphery, rather than among specific neighborhoods.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Attempts to examine wealth distribution at the intracenter level, such as within the neighborhoods at Chunchucmil (Hutson and Welch 2021) and centers in southern Belize (Thompson et al 2021), also prove difficult at El Pilar. Spatial methods to identify El Pilar neighborhoods have met with limited success (Thompson et al 2022), and labor investment data argue against a concentric-zone model of elite residences clustering near the monumental city center (Horn III et al 2020). An alternative approach taken by Marken (2023) assessed inequality within El Perú-Waka' at the urban core, near periphery, and far periphery, rather than among specific neighborhoods.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Despite the uncertainty of this method as a proxy of human population size ( 85 ), it is a valuable tool to identify spatiotemporal patterns in human settlements, as their outputs are similar to heatmaps of archaeological site frequencies ( 86 ). However, whereas simple point density analyses assume that the weight of the point occurs in a single location, KDE spreads the values over an area using a Gaussian distribution ( 87 ). Therefore, KDE produces smoother visualizations of archaeological site frequencies by mapping distribution between core areas (kernels) and surrounding neighborhoods ( 88 ).…”
Section: Methodsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…We used a bandwidth of 150 km based on the annual migration distance of extant hunter-gatherers (mean, 158.43 ± 2.95) ( 89 ). The bandwidth should not be interpreted as a yearly mobility radius but as a specific spatial framework that establishes an outer limit to the density estimation ( 87 ). Accordingly, we generated one raster file with the KDE for the NAI and the SAI from between 50 and 30 ka BP on 1 ka time step.…”
Section: Methodsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Although ongoing, this research has highlighted that while Maya cities shared much in common in terms of architectural forms and components, each lowland city was unique in terms of its settlement ecology, occupational history, and overall socioeconomic composition. Recent comparative studies of Maya settlement clustering (Thompson et al 2022), urban scaling (Smith et al 2021), and other lines of evidence, illustrate this variability in urban form and organization across the Lowlands.…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 94%