Site-Planning Principles and Concepts of Directionality among the Ancient Maya

Abstract

Many societies use architecture for symbolic expression, and often buildings or other constructions constitute maps of a culture's worldview. Archaeological identification of such ideational expressions is receiving renewed attention, in the Maya area as in many other regions. Excavations in 1988-1989 in Groups 8L-10 through 8L-12, Copán, Honduras, were designed to examine a particular model of ancient Maya site planning and spatial organization, in which the principles of architectural arrangement and their directional associations derive from Maya cosmology. This paper describes the model and its archaeological evaluation at Copán and discusses interpretive implications of the specific results obtained, in the context of other ongoing studies in epigraphy, iconography, and archaeology.