Many humans live in large, complex political centers, composed of multi-scalar communities
including neighborhoods and districts. Both today and in the past, neighborhoods form a …

Inequality is present in all human societies, but building a robust understanding of how that
inequality developed and persisted for centuries requires historical and archaeological data …

Inequality is present to varying degrees in all human societies, pre-modern and
contemporary. For archaeological contexts, variation in house size reflects differences in …

The peoples of southern Mesoamerica, including the Classic period Maya, are often claimed
to exhibit a distinct type of spatial organization relative to contemporary urban systems …

Access to social capital and valued resources modulates household decision-making as
people seek to occupy the best-quality patches of land available. Prior occupancy …

Land use practices have had important implications for structuring household inequalities
and broader political systems in the past. Our contribution examines settlement patterns in …

Present theory suggests that neighborhoods form through frequent, repeated face-to-face
interactions among people in groups of spatially co-located residences. Over time, layered …

Located at the western edge of the Classic Maya heartland, El Peru-Waka'was one of the
most densely aggregated urban cores in the Lowlands. With households packed next to …

The Classic Maya polities of Baking Pot and Lower Dover developed along two dramatically
different trajectories. At Baking Pot, the capital and associated apical elite regime grew …

Non-elite populations in the Maya lowlands interacted with one another across spatial
boundaries. However, documenting this interaction at the local level is difficult because …