Two factors conspire right now to
emphasize to me the importance of ancient Maya urban demography. First, I
finished reading David Webster’s new book, The
Population of Tikal (Webster 2018). Second,
today I returned from a Working Group of the Social Reactors Project at the Santa Fe Institute , where our focus was on Maya cities and settlements.
Needless to say, we talked a lot about population.
One of the most important things one
can know about a city or settlement is its size. How many people lived there?
Over what area? (and, consequently, What was the density and how did it vary?)
These are fundamental observations in many disciplines that study cities and
settlements, from urban history to urban economics, to urban geography. In chapter
3 of my current book, Urban Life in the
Distant Past, I make the case for the importance of knowing the sizes of
cities in the past (Smith n.d.).
Webster’s book reviews past population
estimates for Tikal (and other Maya sites and regions). These are judged to have
been too high, largely on the basis of comparative studies of regional
population densities of early states in other parts of the world. “By
overestimating Classic Maya populations, we have created problems that do not
exist” (p. 3):
1. Why were Maya
populations so large and dense compared to other early states
2. How could the
landscape support so many people,
3. How can we explain
the huge population drop with the Classic Maya collapse?
But wait, how can you compare an urban
density at Tikal to a regional density for other regions? Isn’t that a
comparison of apples and oranges? Those familiar with David Webster’s past work
will get this right away: The Maya did not have cities, and therefore the
concept of urban population density is moot!
“I prefer not to call any part of this landscape a ‘city’.” (p. 35). OK,
maybe instead of “urban” we should call inner Tikal, “The area close to the
pyramids that had a higher density than the outlying areas.” But this would still
cast doubt on many of Webster’s comparisons.
Another problem I have with the new
book is that much of the quantitative data are presented within the text, and
not in tables. Yes, there are a few data tables with some pertinent information.
But I get confused, for example, when he gives a population estimate for Tikal
of 10,000 (p. 52, paragraph 2), an area estimate of 452 square km (p.52, paragraph
7), and an overall density of “100-175 people per sq. km” (same paragraph). Huh?
10,000 people divided by 452 sq km is a density of 22.1 persons per sq km. One
of these figures must be off.
I must admit that this is a pet peeve:
If you use quantitative data, put them in a table! I struggled throughout the
book with this. Yes, there are a couple of tables with data. But where making
detailed comparisons and analyses of population and density data throughout the
book, the figures are only found in the text, not in tables. Putting
quantitative data into the text but not in a table makes it difficult for
readers to re-use or analyze the data.
I’ll stop here, this is not a book
review. The book is fun to read, like most of David Webster’s work, and I
learned a lot. But the basic quantitative treatment, and the lack of a good
conceptual framework for urbanism, or for regional settlement variation, limits
the value of the book.
Our working group on Maya settlement
included my colleagues in the Social Reactors Project, plus Jerry Sabloff,
Bernadette Cap, Adrian Chase, Julie Hoggarth, and Heather Richards-Rissetto. Sarah
Klassen, who works on urban issues at Angkor, also participated. See a short description of the session here.
Instead of giving a report of our
workshop on Maya settlement, I’ll just mention a few key points.
First, we have found data on several
regional settlement systems where area scales with population in a superlinear
fashion. That is, larger sites are LESS DENSE than smaller sites; This is the
opposite of all other agricultural societies we have studied (see our papers here). So, Maya settlement differs from other agricultural societies in
ways that remain hard to pin down. We have a paper in the works, and plans for
more collaborations and research in the future.
Second, some Maya settlements are very
much like settlements in other areas, and some are very different. Not too
surprising, I guess, but we discussed some of the patterns.
Third, Angkor looks very different from
the Maya cities. It had a very dense urban core, with planned orthogonal
neighborhoods surrounding major temples, surrounded by a large sprawling area
of temples, houses, and reservoirs, In comparison, Maya urban cores seem only
slightly higher in density than their outer neighborhoods. I’m starting to
wonder about the usefulness of Roland Fletcher’s (2009; 2012) concept of “low-density urbanism” as a category that
includes the Classic Maya and Angkor.
Fourth, we discussed the use of LiDAR for analyzing the sizes and layouts of Maya cities.
We spent some time comparing Tikal and
Caracol. My view is that Caracol was a large, integrated urban center, while
Tikal was a much smaller city of ca. 16 sq km. (I know the Chases will agree
about Caracol, but I’m not sure of their views of Tikal). A key question –
indeed, one of our targeted themes at the working group – is the nature of
settlement boundaries. I don’t see any evidence for clear boundaries at Tikal.
However, there does seem to be a drop-off in density beyond the central 16 sq
km mapped by Carr and Hazard, which favors bounding the city there (see table).
Whereas Caracol has various features
that seem to signal a spatial and social integration over a large area
(causeways, replicated patterns of civic architecture pointing to the integration
of different areas, and a continuous stretch of agricultural terracing). Outside
of the core area, Tikal lacks these things. All those areas beyond several km
from downtown Tikal – these must have been rural areas, the hinterland of the
city of Tikal. This is a provisional analysis. I want to analyze the density
patterns objectively (kernel density analysis), to see whether there is indeed
a zone of declining density (well, more precisely, I want a student to do this…).
We should do such analyses for all of the Maya (and other!) sites that are well
mapped. Intra-urban density distributions are a big unknown for ancient cities,
but we now have the data and methods to work on this question.
This
table shows a bit of density data. I was having trouble finding the
information, buried in Webster’s text, so I got the Maya figures from a nice
table in a paper by Barbara Stark (Stark 2014).
Note the drop of 50% in density beyond the central 16 sq km. Teotihuacan
figures are from a paper now under review (Smith,
et al. n.d.).
I think it would help if archaeologists
could agree on a series of zones over which to calculate population density. Density
is, in fact, a very complex phenomenon for modern cities, with lots of relevant
measures (Campoli, and MacLean 2007; Dovey, and
Pafka 2014). But for archaeology, it is best to concentrate on straight
population density (persons per hectare), calculated over one of several
spatial units (depending on available data and on research questions). I
suggest five relevant units, as follows:
1. Regional density, 1: Large
area.
For a large zone including several urban centers. E.g., the southern Maya
lowlands. Useful for large-scale comparisons (of the type Webster makes with
other regions).
2. Regional density, 2:
Urban hinterland.
Density over the hinterland of a city. E.g., Copan Valley. Useful to compare
settlement in, say, the Copan Valley with the Belize River Valley.
3. Urban density: whole
city
(all of Tikal or Caracol, or Teotihuacan). This is probably the most useful
measure for urban comparisons. Of course, one must first identify the
boundaries of the urban settlement….. We discussed this at SFI, and I am
working on some methodological guidelines.
4. Epicenter density: The population
density of residences clustered around the ceremonial core. Not sure if this
should include the civic areas or not. I am less confident in this unit,
compared to the others.
5. Neighborhood density: Density of a
delimited neighborhood or zone. This is useful for several reasons: (1) To
compare neighborhoods within a city; (2) To generate density data where
whole-site information is not available. For example, consider Mohenjo-daro.
Several neighborhoods have been completely excavated, but the residential
patterns of the entire site are not clear.
If you were looking for solid data or conclusions
about Maya urban demography here, I am sorry to disappoint you. This field is
in its infancy. Culbert and Rice (Culbert, and
Rice 1990) was a crucial work, but there has been very little work since
then. Webster’s new book is a step in the right direction, but we need many
more such analyses (with lots of data in tables!). But I am more optimistic now
than I’ve been for some time now. The session at SFI made some progress, and I
see some good research coming out of these and other archaeologists in the near
future. I am itching to work on settlement delineation at a variety of sites,
using quantitative spatial methods. And, finally, I know that a number of
prominent Mayanists agree that urban demography is important, and I look
forward to more work in the near future.
References
Campoli,
Julie and Alex S. MacLean (2007) Visualizing
Density. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Cambridge, MA.
Culbert,
T. Patrick and Don S. Rice (editors)
(1990) Precolombian Population History in the Maya Lowlands. University of
New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
Dovey,
Kim and Elek Pafka (2014) The Urban Density Assemblage: Modelling
Multiple Measures. Urban Design
International 19:66-76.
Fletcher,
Roland (2009) Low-Density, Agrarian-Based Urbanism: A
Comparative View. Insights (University of
Durham) 2:article 4.
Fletcher,
Roland (2012) Low-Density, Agrarian-Based Urbanism: Scale,
Power and Ecology. In The Comparative Archaeology of Complex
Societies, edited by Michael E. Smith, pp. 285-320. Cambridge University
Press, New York.
Smith,
Michael E. (n.d.) Urban
Life in the Distant Past: Archaeology and Comparative Urbanism. (book in
progress).
Smith,
Michael E., Abhishek Chatterjee, Sierra Stewart, Angela Huster and Marion Forest (n.d.)
Apartment compounds, households, and population at Teotihuacan (paper under review).
Stark,
Barbara L. (2014) Ancient Open Space, Gardens, and Parks: A
Comparative Discussion of Mesoamerican Urbanism. In Making Ancient Cities:
Space and Place in Early Urban Societies, edited by Kevin D. Fisher and
Andy Creekmore, pp. 370-406. University Press of Colorado, Boulder.
Webster,
David (2018) The
Population of Tikal: Implications for Maya Demography. Archaeopress,
Oxford.
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