A Statistical Examination of Settlement Patterns at Tikal, Guatemala

Abstract

The widely applied concentric zonation model for Classic period Maya centers, which specifies that high-ranking persons lived closer to the central civic-ceremonial precinct than low-ranking persons, is tested for the site of Tikal. Our method is to identify residential units from the Carr and Hazard (1961) Tikal maps and to compute labor investment costs of construction of residential units from variables derived exclusively from the cartographic data. Our finding is that the Tikal data do not substantiate the concentric zonation model.