While some researchers have questioned the degree of lowland Maya urbanism, this chapter demonstrates that Chunchucmil was a major urban center, with a population of 30,000-40,000 people and the highest settlement density of any site in the Maya lowlands. Located along a vigorous maritime trade route, it developed as a city in the late Early Classic (AD 400-650) with a complex infrastructure and market economy to accommodate its residents and the influx of rural anD foreign visitors. This paper looks at the production and construction of urban spaces by Chunchucmil’s residents and how lived experience helped to create a distinctive built environment.
In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree or the arcades' curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurement of its space and the events of its past. . . . As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all of Zaira's past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corner of streets, the gratings of windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1974 [1972]:10)
In this chapter we reconstruct the experience of urbanism in ancient
Chunchucmil, a large Classic Maya urban trading center in northwest
A. MAGNONI,
T. ARDREN,
S. R. HUTSON, AND B. DAHLIN
Figure 5.1 Map of the Chunchucmil region showing the different ecological areas and map of the Maya region (drawn by authors).
Yucatan (Figure 5.1). First, we define the material characteristics of urbanism at Chunchucmil and then we focus on the social experience of living in a distinctive Maya urban center. Just like the explorer Marco Polo in Italo Calvino's novel (1974 [1972]), Invisible Cities describes to the emperor Kublai Khan a myriad of fantastic cities with a multiplicity of forms and inhabitants - each unique and distinct in its own way and each being the result of the relations between peoples and their places; we also attempt to show that Chunchucmil is substantially different from other Classic-period cities in the Maya region. In addition, in agreement with what Marco Polo says about the city of Zaira, we understand that the description of a city's material characteristics and its spatial measurements is
Limited unless we recognize that peoples' actions, memories, stories, and lives have been engraved in and have shaped the materiality of the urban landscape.
Space and
IDENTITY at
Chunchucmil
There is no agreement on the criteria used in the definition of ancient or modern cities (Marcus and Sabloff 2008; Smith 2003). Even today criteria for defining modern cities, mostly based on population size, vary from country to country. For the definition of preindustrial cities, population size and density, aerial extent of the site, and presence of specialization are some of the major criteria used by most researchers (e. g., Sanders and Webster 1988). Other scholars have chosen to define cities as central places that fuLfill political, economic, religious, and sociocultural functions to their hinterland, regardless of their population size (e. g., Blanton 1976, 1981; Hardoy 1999[1962]; Marcus 1983). In Mesoamerica, there has been much debate and speculation about the level of cultural complexity and the degree of urbanism reached by ancient Maya centers (Chase and Chase 1996; Ciudad Ruiz et al. 2001 Demarest 1992; Folan 1989; Fox et al. 1996; Haviland 1970; Kurjack 1999; Marcus 1983, 1993; Martin and Grube 1995; Sanders and Webster 1988; Webster 1997; Webster and Sanders 2001; and articles in Trejo 1998). Contrasts between the Central Mexican highland centers and the sites of the Eastern Mesoamerican lowlands have been emphasized, often to suggest that Maya centers were not truly urban (Sanders and Webster 1988; Webster and Sanders 2001). Maya sites have been characterized as having a dispersed settlement (Bullard 1960; Drennan 1988; Freidel 1981). This lack of compact nucleation has often been used to argue against the urban nature of these centers. Researchers agree that the dispersed settlement of Maya sites is the result of the incorporation of the rural into the urban by retaining field space that was intensively cultivated (Becker 2001; Chase and Chase 1998; Chase et al. 2001; Cobos 2001; Drennan 1988; Dunning 1992; Killion et al. 1989; cf. Stark, Chapter 11 In this volume).
Many Mayanists prefer to use a functional definition of urbanism based on the sociopolitical functions of sites rather than their demographic characteristics because population size and density of Maya sites was much smaller than that of most Old World cities or Central Mexican cities. The application oF Richard Fox's (1977) typology of preindustrial cities to Mesoamerica confines all Mesoamerican centers into two major categories: regal-ritual cities or administrative cities (Sanders and Webster 1988). This is
Misleading because it fails to capture the diversity of urban forms, and thus reduces the variability of Mesoamerican cities (Chase et al. 1990; Cowgill 2004; Smith 1989). According to this typology, most Mesoamerican centers and all Maya sites are considered regal-ritual centers, whereas only a few administrative cities existed in the Basin of Mexico (Sanders and Webster 1988; Webster 1997; Webster and Sanders 2001). Although Fox's typology was useful in the 1980s for understanding the close ties between ritual theater and nascent urbanism within the Maya area, the strict dichotomy of two separate categories of city has not held up over time. Evidence for large-scale speciaLized craft production and administration has now been documented at many royal Maya cities (Moholy-Nagy 1997) while small hamlets with little architectural complexity have yielded noble burials (Hageman 2004). A new model of Maya urbanism that accounts for the multiplicity of urban forms is needed. In this chapter, we provide a detailed account of a distinctively large trading city in the Maya area. The data discussed here form a basis for further comparative examination in order to build a more complex and nuanced model of Maya urbanism.
A. MAGNONI,
T. ARDREN,
S. R. HUTSON, AND B. DAHLIN
World History
