Exploring Mesoamerican Routes of Travel and Exchange: Least Cost Paths and the Southern Maya Area

Eugenia Robinson, PhD, Research Fellow, Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University

GIS-based Least Cost Path (LCP) analysis provides new insights into interactions among human groups and areas in prehistoric Mesoamerica. Least Cost Path (LCP) analysis models routes of travel for trade or communication, shedding light on the economic, social and political functions of individual sites on the routes.  A recent focus of work has been in the Southern Maya Area. This presentation will explore how LCP analysis amplifies our understanding of dynamic cultural interregional interaction by linking nodes such as the major highland Maya site Kaminaljuyu with key entities on the Pacific coast, the Maya lowlands, Veracruz, and the Mexican highland site Teotihuacan; the routes of trade goods for Copan; and of interregional connections within the Maya highlands as revealed by obsidian distributions.

Eugenia Robinson has her PhD from Tulane University and is now a Research Fellow of the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane.  She is a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Montgomery College and the Director of the Proyecto Arqueológico del Área Kaqchikel.  Her interests are regional settlement and landscape studies, the use of the GIS-based analyses for modeling routes of travel and interaction, and rock “art” in the Kaqchikel Maya Highlands,  Her recent co-edited publication is a collection of studies titled “Routes, Interaction and Exchange in the Southern Maya Area.”

The January, 2024, monthly lecture will be hosted in person as well as virtually. The meeting will be held in the lecture theatre of the Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives, located at M and 17th Streets, NW, Washington, D.C. Photo ID is required to enter the building. Doors to the in-person meeting will open around 6:30 PM and light refreshments will be available before the lecture. For those of you who cannot make it to the Sumner School in person, the lecture will be live streamed via Zoom but you must pre-register to attend virtually. Click HERE to register.

All monthly lecture meetings of the Pre-Columbian Society are free and open to the public.