New regional-scale Classic Maya population density estimates and settlement distribution models through airborne lidar scanning

Vast tracts of tropical forest of the Yucatan Peninsula have remained largely uninhabited for the last 1000 years representing a rare opportunity to document the settled landscape of entire regions of an ancient civilization, the Classic Maya (300–900 CE), undisturbed by subsequent settlement. At the same time, limited access to this landscape has hindered regional scale surveys outside well-known major centers until recently. Today, airborne lidar mapping provides extensive and fine-grained data to document ancient Maya settlement on a previously unattainable scale.

Using updated analytical methods, here we aggregate a diverse set of public and privately commissioned lidar mapping, including reprocessed environmental lidar data from Southern Campeche and Southern Quintana Roo, Mexico with enhanced structure visibility, to update population estimates to between 9.5 and 16 million people in a large central area of the Classic Maya Lowlands. Beyond population density, we highlight a uniform model for the spatial organization of settlement and agriculture structuring political and economic interactions in urban and rural zones alike within a 95,000 km 2 area of the Central Maya Lowlands. The observed distribution of public plazas, residential zones and agricultural fields suggest that ancient Maya urbanism was more widespread, more populous and more efficiently structured for periodic interaction among elite and non-elites than previously thought.

One-Sentence Summary : Combining lidar data from environmental and archaeological surveys, this study presents updated population estimates and a uniform model for Classic Maya urban and rural settlement organization.