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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2021
In the past, the study of ancient urbanism called out the singularity of the Maya case in a manner that left Mayanists with an outstanding theoretical debt to the rest of the scholarly field. With seeming dismay, V. Gordon Childe (1950: 9) unabashedly claimed: “[T]he minimum definition of a city, the greatest factor common to the Old World and the New will be substantially reduced and impoverished by the inclusion of the Maya.” His techno-economic argument for early urbanism (and, by extension, ancient sociopolitical complexity) was not supported by the Maya data as he understood them. His subsequent ten characteristics of ancient urbanism and sociopolitical complexity, then, were inescapably impoverished – that is, made less precise and more abstract – by the inclusion of the ancient Maya into the fraternity of ancient urban civilizations.
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