Large-Site Archaeological Methods at Sayil, Yucatan, Mexico: Investigating Community Organization at a Prehispanic Maya Center

Past Maya communities were composed of a number of social, political, and economic components that were bound together in specific ways. Understanding how such components were organized at the scale of the entire community to form a single functioning entity is an important archaeological issue that is presently not well understood. To address this issue, large-scale research into community organization has been initiated at the Terminal Classic (A. D. 800-1000) Puuc center of Sayil. A program of broad-scale surface collections has systematically covered almost 1.5 km2 of the site's mapped urban area (3.5 km2). Preliminary results from the 1990 field season are providing data related to important components of the community such as social differentiation, economic and subsistence specialization, and the spatial structure of political and religious organization. This study is contributing toward the development of new methods for exploring large archaeological sites and can be employed ultimately to address broader issues concerning societal transformations among the Prehispanic Maya.

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