Site Interaction and Political Geography in the Upper Usumacinta Region during the Late Classic

Description

This work applies a conjunctive approach drawing from two lines of research to offer a reconstruction of the political organisation of the Upper Usumacinta region during the Late Classic: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and analysis of hieroglyphic inscriptions. The author begins by creating a Digital Terrain Model for the region in order to model movement across the landscape, reconstructing territorial size and communication routes between polities based on cost-surface analysis. Using information from inscriptions combined with the ‘Gravity Model’, he then creates a series of maps that offer a reconstruction of the political organisation of the region, identifying critical points in the history of the region. These results offer a more dynamic view on how the political contestants of the Upper Usumacinta shifted their alliances from one to another of the hegemonic powers, and how these changes were reflected in the political geography of the region.