R Hutson
Biographic Data
| ID | 9805 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Hutson |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Hutson |
| SIGNATURE | HUTSON R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Kentucky |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4907-2876 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 625 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
From Leaky Pipelines to Watering Cans
Despite improvement over the past few decades, particularly for white, cisgender women, intersectional gender-based inequality remains prominent within anthropological archaeology and beyond. Building on critiques of the leaky pipeline metaphor laid out in the introduction to this themed issue, and drawing on Black, Indigenous, and Posthumanist Feminisms, we advocate for a metaphorical shift focused on care, inclusivity, and diversity—that of a g…
Changing the Landscape of Archaeological Publishing
Disseminating research is a key component of scholarly labor, but the costs and benefits of the current structure of academic publishing are underexamined within anthropology. This paper brings together a range of authors from across archaeology and cultural anthropology to summarize current issues in archaeological publishing and offer potential interventions at multiple scales. The paper is divided into five core topics. “Ideology” discusses th…
Different Destinations
In STEM fields, women tend to leak out of the pipeline to the professoriate. In archaeology, however, robust databases and chronological control reveal that there is no leakage from earning a PhD to tenure-track positions. Nor is there a leak from assistant professor to associate professor. Nevertheless, men get hired as faculty in PhD programs more often than women. This is important because PhD programs are research-intensive and train future l…
Sacbe 1 and Classic Maya Urban Culture
One of the most significant engineering accomplishments of Maya civilization is Sacbe 1, a raised road connecting the ancient urban centers of Yaxuna and Coba. Using new lidar data in concert with excavation, epigraphic inscriptions, and landscape reconnaissance, we show that settlement and an urban experience emanated westward from Coba along the sacbe. The leaders of Coba—in particular, an ambitious seventh-century queen—used the sacbe to expan…
Exclusivity in Early Maya Monumentality
Datasets from around the world suggest that people completed early monumental construction projects without long-term structures of hierarchy or authority. In the Maya area, some of the first monuments produced by semisedentary societies, such as those at Yaxuna and Ceibal, were built in the absence of substantial social inequality. The focus of these monuments was a relatively inclusive plaza. This article presents evidence of an eighth-century …
Settlement Scaling in the Northern Maya Lowlands
Settlement scaling theory predicts that higher site densities lead to increased social interactions that, in turn, boost productivity. The scaling relationship between population and land area holds for several ancient societies, but as demonstrated by the sample of 48 sites in this study, it does not hold for the Northern Maya Lowlands. Removing smaller sites from the sample brings the results closer to scaling expectations. We argue that applic…
Gender, Institutional Inequality, and Institutional Diversity in Archaeology Articles in Major Journals and Sapiens - Corrigendum
Realizing Value in Mesoamerica
Governance, Monumentality, and Urbanism in the Northern Maya Lowlands During the Preclassic and Classic Periods
Inequality, urbanism, and governance at Coba and the Northern Maya Lowlands
Gini coefficients for residential groups at Coba for roofed surface area, volume of architecture, and houselot space range from 0.423 to 0.551, fitting well within the range of many ancient and modern state-level cities and societies and other Mesoamerican centers. These values are also similar to other large, Classic period, Northern Lowland cities, such as Dzibilchaltun and Chunchucmil. These data do not support the idea that autocratic regimes…
Streets and Open Spaces
Angamuco and Chunchucmil are two of the few Mesoamerican cities with relatively complete street maps. These maps provide a rare opportunity to study how the bulk of the population moved through cities, how people worked together to organize a network of paths and open spaces, what kind of interactions these features afforded, and how they contributed to the formation of social identities. Having found that space syntax methods confirmed intuitive…
Gender, Institutional Inequality, and Institutional Diversity in Archaeology Articles in Major Journals and Sapiens
Studies in the sociopolitics of archaeology have shown patterns of inequality in publishing. Because this inequality affects the richness of perspectives on the past, the extent of unevenness requires continual documentation. This article explores gendered and institutionally based patterns of authorship in prominent archaeology journals, archaeology papers in general science journals, and Sapiens, a public-facing web magazine, from 2016 to 2021.…
Old Urbanites as New Urbanists? Mixing at an Ancient Maya City
New Urbanists advocate for, among other things, spaces in cities where people of various backgrounds can interact. Yet not all interactions lead to the strong social bonds that make diverse communities more durable. The archaeological record provides rich examples of diverse communities that flourished. This article examines an ancient Maya city—Chunchucmil—where preservation of stone walls and pathways provides an unusual opportunity to reconstr…
Distributional Heuristics in Unlikely Places
New World households engaged in multiple forms of exchange: markets, redistribution, gifting, debt, reciprocity, and more. Determining the degree of prominence of each of these forms in ancient economies gives clues to the economic basis of leadership and the daily lives of households. A major method for inferring forms of exchange from household assemblages is Hirth's distributional approach. This paper applies the distributional approach to dom…
Roadwork
A multiyear field project focused on long-distance causeways between Uci and Cansahcab in Yucatan, Mexico, supports their use for processions and pilgrimages, their role in the creation of multisite polities, and their involvement in the constitution of local authority. Yet details of the causeways' construction suggest that people contested this authority. Work was central to these dynamics and comes in the form of labor as practice, investments…
Ancient Maya Rural Settlement Patterns, Household Cooperation, and Regional Subsistence Interdependency in the Río Bec Area
Research on intensive agricultural features contributes to the social relations of farming, including the means by which farmers mobilize labor and the possible destination of surplus. Lidar provides high-resolution data on ancient houses and agricultural features at a regional scale. This paper uses lidar data from NASA’s G-LiHT airborne imager to derive insights about rural demography, interhousehold cooperation, and subsistence interdependency…
A space of One's own
The Maya World
Reflecting on Pasuc Heritage Initiatives through Time, Positionality, and Place
This paper reports on heritage initiatives associated with a 12-year-long archaeology project in Yucatan, Mexico. Our work has involved both surprises and setbacks and in the spirit of adding to the repository of useful knowledge, we present these in a frank and transparent manner. Our findings are significant for a number of reasons. First, we show that the possibilities available to a heritage project facilitated by archaeologists depend not ju…
Ancient Maya Commerce
Nearly two decades of research at Chunchucmil, Yucatan, Mexico documented a thriving city of 40,000 people without the powerful kings and massive temples seen at other Maya centers. What brought people to this area, the driest in the Maya world, and how did they survive? Ancient Maya Commerce provides a pioneering study in economic anthropology, making the strongest case yet that ancient Maya economies were quite complex, containing markets in ad…
History, politics and meaning among the Classic Period Maya of the southern lowlands
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Small Buildings and Small Budgets
Despite the success of lidar in making ancient features visible in certain tropical environments, researchers often have difficulty using lidar to identify small, low, non-linear features. This study juxtaposes lidar data with data gathered from pedestrian survey along the Ucí-Cansahcab causeway, located in the Northern Maya lowlands, to assess the degree to which the invisibility of small buildings in lidar imagery affects demographic research. …
The Rewards of Participating in AAA-Wide Service
Sky-earth, lake-sea
Adapting LiDAR data for regional variation in the tropics
Reading the Past
The third edition of this classic introduction to archaeological theory and method has been fully updated to address the burgeoning of theoretical debate throughout the discipline. Ian Hodder and Scott Hutson argue that archaeologists must bring to bear a variety of perspectives in the complex and uncertain task of constructing meaning from the past. While remaining centred on the importance of hermeneutics, agency and history, the authors explor…
Beyond the buildings
Tourism in the Mundo Maya
Recovering social and cultural dynamics from plaster floors
Reconstructing Agricultural Self-Sufficiency at Chunchucmil, Yucatan, Mexico
The Pakbeh Regional Economy Program is studying the vexing questions of economic life among the ancient Maya in northwestern Yucatan, Mexico. The region constitutes an ideal laboratory in which to investigate these questions, as it has very limited agricultural potential and fewer options for intensification than are found in the southern and central lowlands, yet many times more people lived here during the Classic period than can eke out a livi…
Cultural Logic and Practical Reason
Since the 1980s, archaeologists have challenged the idea that prehistoric actions were guided primarily by practicality and expedience. Rubbish disposal, a superficially mundane activity, provides a critical case for exploring the depth to which cultural logics penetrate. Ethnoarchaeological research on discard behaviour in Mesoamerican houselots has modelled rubbish disposal as a matter of expedience predictable by factors such as density of set…
House Rules
This paper presents results of excavations from three house lots at Chunchucmil, a Classic-period site in northwestern Yucatan, Mexico. Each of the three house lots contains multiple residential structures organized around patios with temples on the east side of the patio. The boundaries of the house lots are clearly marked by low walls that encircle the architecture and non-mounded space. These house lots were occupied by multiple-family groups …
Gendered Citation Practices inAmerican Antiquityand Other Archaeology Journals
Citation is one of many practices affected by the sociopolitics of archaeology. Examination of citation practices inAmerican Antiquity, theJournal of Field Archaeology, Ancient Mesoamerica, andSoutheastern Archaeologyyields mixed results with regard to equity issues for women. InAmerican Antiquity, theJournal of Field Archaeology, andAncient Mesoamerica, men cite women at rates that are statistically similar to the rates at which women cite women…
Site and Community at Chunchucmil and Ancient Maya Urban Centers
Classic Period lowland Maya urban centers often lack sharp boundaries due to progressive dispersal of residential settlement. This dispersal gives rise to questions about the concept of site and the notion of community affiliation. Research on settlement patterns at Chunchucmil, an urban center in NW Yucatan, Mexico, dating to the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., explores the issue of site boundaries and the social and economic implications of such bo…
Self-Citation in Archaeology
Small Buildings and Small Budgets
Despite the success of lidar in making ancient features visible in certain tropical environments, researchers often have difficulty using lidar to identify small, low, non-linear features. This study juxtaposes lidar data with data gathered from pedestrian survey along the Ucí-Cansahcab causeway, located in the Northern Maya lowlands, to assess the degree to which the invisibility of small buildings in lidar imagery affects demographic research. …
Adapting LiDAR data for regional variation in the tropics
Technoshamanism
1999). Technoshamanism: Spiritual healing in the rave subculture. Popular Music and Society: Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 53-77
Living in the City
In this paper we illustrate the distinctive settlement patterns of the city of Chunchucmil during its largest occupation in the middle of the Classic period (a.d.400–650). The unusually dense urban settlement showcased a network of boundary walls andchichbessurrounding residential groups and narrow streets winding between the tightly bounded houselots. Using a sample of 392 completely and unambiguously bounded houselots, we review the basic chara…
Built space and bad subjects
This article examines the creation, renovation and negotiation of built space at Monte Albán, Oaxaca, Mexico, from 500 BC to AD 700, in order to document power relations and the construction of identity at the ancient site. Specifically, I detect strategies of domination in the deployment of monumental constructions in residential areas of the site, and coeval strategies of resistance in alterations of domestic space. These alterations reappropri…
Old Urbanites as New Urbanists? Mixing at an Ancient Maya City
New Urbanists advocate for, among other things, spaces in cities where people of various backgrounds can interact. Yet not all interactions lead to the strong social bonds that make diverse communities more durable. The archaeological record provides rich examples of diverse communities that flourished. This article examines an ancient Maya city—Chunchucmil—where preservation of stone walls and pathways provides an unusual opportunity to reconstr…
Sky-earth, lake-sea
The Art of Becoming
In their 1995Latin American Antiquityarticle, Haviland and Haviland argued that the people who produced much of the graffiti of Tikal were depicting visions from altered states of consciousness. In this paper, I argue that there is room for alternative interpretations. Comparison with children"s drawings from across the world suggests that children or people without training in Maya representational conventions authored a portion of the graffiti.…
Roadwork
A multiyear field project focused on long-distance causeways between Uci and Cansahcab in Yucatan, Mexico, supports their use for processions and pilgrimages, their role in the creation of multisite polities, and their involvement in the constitution of local authority. Yet details of the causeways' construction suggest that people contested this authority. Work was central to these dynamics and comes in the form of labor as practice, investments…
Sacred Landscapes and Building Practices at Uci, Kancab, and Ucanha, Yucatan, Mexico
During the emergence of regional hierarchy around the site of Uci in northwest Yucatan, Mexico, ordinary people affected power relations in at least two ways. First, in the Late Preclassic and Early Classic periods, Uci had the largest ceremonial center and the largest population within a 20 km radius. Uci also physically linked itself to smaller settlements, such as Kancab and Ucanha, by means of a broad stone causeway. Yet Kancab and Ucanha's q…
Geochemical analysis of Late Classic and Post Classic Maya marketplace activities at the Plazas of Cobá, Mexico
Lines of evidence for ancient exchange plazas may include trade routes and trade artifacts, urban open space near public structures, and rock alignments denoting market stalls, but regular patterns in soil chemical concentrations also point to marketplace use. We applied geochemical and geospatial analysis of the floors of the main Plaza of Group B and Plazas A, H, and J of Group D at Cobá, Mexico, to discover the chemical residues of phosphorus …
Synergy through Disunity, Science as Social Practice
In “The Scientific Nature of Postprocessualism”, VanPool and VanPool (1999) attempt to demonstrate that the sometimes hostile debate between processualist and postprocessualist archaeologies disguises substantive intellectual similarities. The most important similarity is their conformity to a refined definition of science. This definition is based on seven criteria that, as a group, demarcate science from nonscience. VanPool and VanPool pay inad…
Ancient Maya Rural Settlement Patterns, Household Cooperation, and Regional Subsistence Interdependency in the Río Bec Area
Research on intensive agricultural features contributes to the social relations of farming, including the means by which farmers mobilize labor and the possible destination of surplus. Lidar provides high-resolution data on ancient houses and agricultural features at a regional scale. This paper uses lidar data from NASA’s G-LiHT airborne imager to derive insights about rural demography, interhousehold cooperation, and subsistence interdependency…
Ancient Maya Commerce
Nearly two decades of research at Chunchucmil, Yucatan, Mexico documented a thriving city of 40,000 people without the powerful kings and massive temples seen at other Maya centers. What brought people to this area, the driest in the Maya world, and how did they survive? Ancient Maya Commerce provides a pioneering study in economic anthropology, making the strongest case yet that ancient Maya economies were quite complex, containing markets in ad…
How Material Culture Acted on the Ancient Maya of Yucatan, Mexico
This paper looks at how materiality in a specific sense (e.g., aspects of raw materials) contributes to materiality in a broader sense (e.g., the mutually constitutive relations between people and things). We embark from the point that common materials, such as stone and perishable containers (baskets, gourds), shape people's social interactions and their physical sensibilities. The use of very large stones for buildings in and around Ucí, a loca…
Technoshamanism
1999). Technoshamanism: Spiritual healing in the rave subculture. Popular Music and Society: Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 53-77
Carnival and Contestation in the Aztec Marketplace
Synergy through Disunity, Science as Social Practice
In “The Scientific Nature of Postprocessualism”, VanPool and VanPool (1999) attempt to demonstrate that the sometimes hostile debate between processualist and postprocessualist archaeologies disguises substantive intellectual similarities. The most important similarity is their conformity to a refined definition of science. This definition is based on seven criteria that, as a group, demarcate science from nonscience. VanPool and VanPool pay inad…
Gendered Citation Practices inAmerican Antiquityand Other Archaeology Journals
Citation is one of many practices affected by the sociopolitics of archaeology. Examination of citation practices inAmerican Antiquity, theJournal of Field Archaeology, Ancient Mesoamerica, andSoutheastern Archaeologyyields mixed results with regard to equity issues for women. InAmerican Antiquity, theJournal of Field Archaeology, andAncient Mesoamerica, men cite women at rates that are statistically similar to the rates at which women cite women…
Built space and bad subjects
This article examines the creation, renovation and negotiation of built space at Monte Albán, Oaxaca, Mexico, from 500 BC to AD 700, in order to document power relations and the construction of identity at the ancient site. Specifically, I detect strategies of domination in the deployment of monumental constructions in residential areas of the site, and coeval strategies of resistance in alterations of domestic space. These alterations reappropri…
Embodied archaeology
Many of the approaches considered thus far – processualism, structuralism, Marxism – lack adequate consideration of the agent. This lacuna was filled in part by the discussion of agency in the concluding section of the previous chapter. Nevertheless, a close reading of that section shows that in our presentation of different forms of agency, we never paid close attention to the nature of the agent that exercises (or is exercised by) agency. We we…
Reading the Past
The third edition of this classic introduction to archaeological theory and method has been fully updated to address the burgeoning of theoretical debate throughout the discipline. Ian Hodder and Scott Hutson argue that archaeologists must bring to bear a variety of perspectives in the complex and uncertain task of constructing meaning from the past. While remaining centred on the importance of hermeneutics, agency and history, the authors explor…
House Rules
This paper presents results of excavations from three house lots at Chunchucmil, a Classic-period site in northwestern Yucatan, Mexico. Each of the three house lots contains multiple residential structures organized around patios with temples on the east side of the patio. The boundaries of the house lots are clearly marked by low walls that encircle the architecture and non-mounded space. These house lots were occupied by multiple-family groups …
Recovering social and cultural dynamics from plaster floors
Reconstructing Agricultural Self-Sufficiency at Chunchucmil, Yucatan, Mexico
The Pakbeh Regional Economy Program is studying the vexing questions of economic life among the ancient Maya in northwestern Yucatan, Mexico. The region constitutes an ideal laboratory in which to investigate these questions, as it has very limited agricultural potential and fewer options for intensification than are found in the southern and central lowlands, yet many times more people lived here during the Classic period than can eke out a livi…
Self-Citation in Archaeology
Uncorrelated Inequalities
Tourism in the Mundo Maya
Cultural Logic and Practical Reason
Since the 1980s, archaeologists have challenged the idea that prehistoric actions were guided primarily by practicality and expedience. Rubbish disposal, a superficially mundane activity, provides a critical case for exploring the depth to which cultural logics penetrate. Ethnoarchaeological research on discard behaviour in Mesoamerican houselots has modelled rubbish disposal as a matter of expedience predictable by factors such as density of set…
Beyond the buildings
Site and Community at Chunchucmil and Ancient Maya Urban Centers
Classic Period lowland Maya urban centers often lack sharp boundaries due to progressive dispersal of residential settlement. This dispersal gives rise to questions about the concept of site and the notion of community affiliation. Research on settlement patterns at Chunchucmil, an urban center in NW Yucatan, Mexico, dating to the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., explores the issue of site boundaries and the social and economic implications of such bo…
Dwelling, Identity, and the Maya
Dwelling, Identity, and the Maya offers a new perspective on the ancient Maya that emphasizes the importance of dwelling as a social practice. Contrary to contemporary notions of the self as individual and independent, the identities of the ancient Maya grew from their everyday relations and interactions with other people, the houses and temples they built, and the objects they created, exchanged, cherished, and left behind. Using excavations of …
Archaeology as Political Action by Randall H. McGuire
Midiendo una metrópoli
Chunchucmil, centro urbano del noroeste de Yucatán, fue uno de los sitios mayas más extensos y densamente poblados del Clásico Temprano, aunque no tiene textos glíficos ni pirámides enormes. Diez temporadas de mapeo han revelado que el sitio tuvo un patrón de asentamiento complejo que se puede dividr en varias zonas, basándose en datos tales como: la presencia de conjuntos arquitectónicos ceremoniales, la densidad de residencias y el nivel depart…
The Art of Becoming
In their 1995Latin American Antiquityarticle, Haviland and Haviland argued that the people who produced much of the graffiti of Tikal were depicting visions from altered states of consciousness. In this paper, I argue that there is room for alternative interpretations. Comparison with children"s drawings from across the world suggests that children or people without training in Maya representational conventions authored a portion of the graffiti.…
Gender, Complexity, and Power in Prehistory
“All That Is Solid…”
This paper applies structuration theory and semiotics to interpret the results of a recently completed total coverage pedestrian survey to the east of Yaxuna, Yucatan. Data from this survey suggest that a social group centered at the site of Tzacauil vied for political clout in the Late Preclassic period through the construction of a triadic acropolis 3 km from Yaxuna. This group also initiated but did not complete a new experimental construction…
Living in the City
In this paper we illustrate the distinctive settlement patterns of the city of Chunchucmil during its largest occupation in the middle of the Classic period (a.d.400–650). The unusually dense urban settlement showcased a network of boundary walls andchichbessurrounding residential groups and narrow streets winding between the tightly bounded houselots. Using a sample of 392 completely and unambiguously bounded houselots, we review the basic chara…
Sacred Landscapes and Building Practices at Uci, Kancab, and Ucanha, Yucatan, Mexico
During the emergence of regional hierarchy around the site of Uci in northwest Yucatan, Mexico, ordinary people affected power relations in at least two ways. First, in the Late Preclassic and Early Classic periods, Uci had the largest ceremonial center and the largest population within a 20 km radius. Uci also physically linked itself to smaller settlements, such as Kancab and Ucanha, by means of a broad stone causeway. Yet Kancab and Ucanha's q…
Maya heritage
This article discusses two aspects of heritage – entanglement and transformation – that became clear during a recent cultural heritage project in Yucatan, Mexico. Regarding entanglement, heritage becomes relevant only when coupled with other concerns, ranging from politics to livelihood to personal biographies. An unpredictable array of entanglements came into being during the project and these entanglements elevated the impact and visibility of …
Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (34 works) · Archaeology (31 works) · Geography (25 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Maya (22 works) · History (21 works) · Latin American history and culture (17 works) · Political science (16 works) · Art (13 works) · Computer Science (13 works)