Full metadata
Title
Urban Life at Caracol, Belize: Neighborhoods, Inequality, Infrastructure, and Governance
Description
This research combines traditional archaeological analysis with lidar data to investigate infrastructure, residential architecture, and neighborhoods in a completely new way. Taken together, these analyses show the shape and form of this city during its apogee in CE 650, while providing a deeper understanding of its civic administration through the use of multiple urban levels (citywide, district, neighborhood, and residential/plazuela). Independently, any one of these results may provide an incomplete picture or inaccurate conclusion, but, when conjoined, the analyses interdigitate to shed light on the city as a whole. This research showcases the physical infrastructural power of this city through the widespread distribution of its urban services among the city’s districts while still highlighting tiers of urban services among districts. It reinforces the idea of household architectural autonomy through the lack of standardization in the built environment, while also highlighting the relative equality of residences. And, it emphasizes both citywide and neighborhood-based similarities in categorical identities that would have facilitated collective action among individuals in the past by reducing the friction to initiate collective endeavors. Taken together, these results suggest both autocratic and collective governance, and views from different urban levels when combined provide a more detailed perspective on the multiple interacting and concurrent processes that determined urban life and structure in the past. These analyses also hold the potential to shed light on other governance practices in future comparative urban research on archaeological, historical, and modern cities. However, the initial findings reported in this dissertation suggest that Caracol enjoyed a more collective system of governance processes despite the hieroglyphic record of a lineage of rulers.
Date Created
2021
Contributors
- Chase, Adrian Sylvanus Zaino (Author)
- Smith, Michael E. (Thesis advisor)
- Nelson, Ben A. (Committee member)
- York, Abigail M. (Committee member)
- Peeples, Matthew A. (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Topical Subject
Resource Type
Extent
430 pages
Language
eng
Copyright Statement
In Copyright
Primary Member of
Peer-reviewed
No
Open Access
No
Handle
https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.2.N.161876
Level of coding
minimal
Cataloging Standards
Note
Partial requirement for: Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2021
Field of study: Anthropology
System Created
- 2021-11-16 04:52:38
System Modified
- 2021-11-30 12:51:28
- 2 years 11 months ago
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