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Extra resources for The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, Volume 2, Part 1: Mesoamerica

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After a pause owing to political unrest in Mexico and Central America, systematic surveys of Maya sites were carried out by Teobert Maler and Alfred Maudslay in the late nineteenth century. The tradition of accurate systematic mapping was established and carried on from about 1920 to 1958 by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which instituted a series of surveys of major sections of the Maya area, both highlands and lowlands. Of course, given the immensity of the task, the Carnegie research members were unable to map more than site centers in some cases.

Up to the late nineteenth century, ad hoc stylistic classification of artifacts was occasionally done based both on the museum traditions of the West and on the spreading influence of Thomsen's work in Denmark in working out the old-stone, new-stone, and other technological bases for human cultural development. In Mexico these efforts eventuated in a series of clay figurine types for the Basin of Mexico that were truly taxonomic. Attempts to place these into some sort of temporal sequence by Seler, Boas, Gamio, and others were more or less successful but were left with the strong residual uncertainty that such seriation studies always include.

Eventually, the map covered 18 square kilometers and included many smaller-scale dwellings, conclusively demonstrating the urban nature of larger Maya cities and yielding population estimates of 60,000 to 80,000 (Carr and Hazard 1961; Haviland 1969). To continue with the Maya area, many single-site maps have since been completed, including the recently published map of Calakmul, a preindustrial city of at least 50,000 (Folan et al. 1996). Meanwhile, Ian Graham and his collaborators, as a complement to his hieroglyphic text survey, have systematically remapped and newly mapped many Maya lowland urban centers and published them in his Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions {1975 passim).

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