Abstract
The concept of low-density urbanism has developed in archaeology over the past 20 years to characterize settlements that display the same types of features as nucleated cities (monumental architecture, services provided for a hinterland, division of labor, class differences) but lack dense populations. Ancient cities that emerged in tropical regions typically resemble a distributed urban network (Scarborough and Isendahl 2020) with interconnected and regularly spaced monumental nodes scattered among dispersed residences and agricultural land. The monumental nodes in the region did not permanently house dense populations but drew the countryside into a habitual pattern of centripetal movement to frequent religious, economic, and administrative services provided there. We demonstrate that the Gulf lowlands of Mexico exemplify this type of urbanism, and we highlight its features related to land use, governance, and longevity. Given the formidable challenges of understanding a distributed urban network, we advocate approaches that do not impose hierarchical interpretations or discrete territories but, rather, explore them as a network of places.
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Acknowledgments
We acknowledge decades of interactions and conversations with dozens of colleagues working within and outside the Gulf lowlands that contributed to the data and interpretations presented here. They are too numerous to list. We thank Gulf colleagues for their research that made a review possible. We thank the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografia (INEGI) for providing open-source LiDAR data and for providing the original point cloud in LAS format for limited areas. Alanna Ossa, Michael Smith, Scott Hutson, Takeshi Inomata, and four anonymous reviewers provided valuable suggestions to improve the text but are not responsible for the final version. Finally, we thank Gary Feinman and Linda Nicholas for inviting us to contribute this review.
The article represents a collaboration process throughout, but Stoner conducted the remote sensing analysis, most of the database construction, and produced figures and statistics. Each drafted some of the topics, and both contributed to all the editing and organization. We forged a compromise at times when we had contrasting views of data, or we mentioned alternatives.
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Stoner, W.D., Stark, B.L. Distributed Urban Networks in the Gulf Lowlands of Veracruz. J Archaeol Res 31, 449–501 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-022-09178-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-022-09178-4