Directional layouts in central lowland Maya settlement

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThis paper suggests the existence of non-random, directional patterns in the location of housemounds across the Late Classic Maya settlement landscape at Baking Pot, Belize, and then explores the wider implications of this patterning in the central Maya lowlands. It introduces an anisotropic method e based on nearest neighbour bearings and successive grid offsets e in order to explore possible rectilinear organisation in settlement layouts despite the presence of uneven and irregular patterns of archaeological dating and recovery. The results suggest a grid-like distribution of houseplots and, by implication, also a set of routes running throughout the housemound landscape and local Maya neighbourhoods during the site's Late and Terminal Classic history. Furthermore, different possible alignments in different parts of the site are tentatively regarded as an indication of shifting orientations to localised grids, following the shift in alignment of monumental architecture, as the settlement landscape expanded over time. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings with respect to the broader interpretation of Maya settlement patterns.

Integrating Point Process Models, Evolutionary Ecology and Traditional Knowledge Improves Landscape Archaeology—A Case from Southwest Madagascar

“…This is critical particularly in areas where archaeological investigation is still nascent. While the use of PPMs in archaeology as explanatory tools has increased in recent years [17,19,[21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31], they are still relatively underutilized and few studies have explicitly used them for predictive modeling of site distributions [32].…”

Smart Cities and Access to Nature: A Framework for Evaluating Green Recreation Space Accessibility

“…The results are then used to create an envelope of confidence intervals around the observed K function values. Following the point pattern analysis, we use the nearest neighbor approach [43] to quantify the degree of clustering or dispersion of points in a point pattern. This approach calculates the distances between each point (in this case, the green recreation spaces) and its nearest neighbors.…”

Cities Made of Boundaries

“…Recently, a nearest neighbour clustering approach was used in conjunction with dispersion to explore patterns in grid alignment and orientations amongst architectural groups. The approach was point (polygon centroid) based, so did not conform to the extensive data preparation conducted for BLT Mapping (Bevan et al 2013). An early GIS, not including conversions of all data and full functionality (Hutson pers.…”