City and state: Urbanism, rural settlement, and polity in the Classic Maya lowlands

The development of cities represents a benchmark in the history of humanity. The highly visible nature of urban places, including the ruins of the capitals of ancient civilizations, their investigation has often been at the center of investigating and reconstructing the structure of regional political organization; though distinct conceptual entities study of the origin and evolution of "the city" and "the state" has often overlapped or been ambiguously conjoined. The jungle cities of the ancient Maya and, by extension, Classic period political units have long been presented as anomalous examples of prehistoric urbanism and states, lacking the size and economic diversity of more obvious" cases from Mesopotamia or highland Mexico. Several Maya centers, such as El Peru-Waka', however, exhibit a high degree of settlement nucleation, one of the demographic traits traditionally used to identify pre-industrial cities. More vitally, continued investigation of Maya urban and hinterland settlement indicate that while distinctive in form, Classic urban institutions fulfilled similar functional roles as those of other pre-industrial centers and capitals. In this dissertation, I discuss the spatial organization of Classic Maya urbanism through the analysis of settlement and chronological data from a 10 km2 full-coverage survey of the hinterlands of El Peru-Waka', Peten, Guatemala. Data collection focused on recording the distribution, form and chronology of urban and hinterland settlement, providing an expanded spatial context to better understand and interpret processual dynamics in local distributions of population, status and production.