ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a long-term mapping project designed to create a database of all known Maya sites, inspired originally by E. Wyllys Andrews V. To date, more than 5,000 Maya archaeological sites have been located and positioned on a master map, and data suitable for GIS analysis have been recorded in a public-access website. Data have been used by a wide range of scholars, by graduate and undergraduate students, and by primary and secondary school students and their teachers. One of our early Will Andrews-inspired projects was computer-based-bringing LANDSAT data, rst available in 1978, to the PC level for further analysis. We were interested then in a project that fascinated many others, including Tom Sever and Charles Duller: recognition of Maya sites from remote sense data. Over the last 18 years, that interest has evolved into a longlasting project. The project is the Electronic Atlas of Ancient Maya Sites (EAAMS; Brown and Witschey 2000, 2001, 2002, 2010; Witschey and Brown 2001, 2002). It is a compendium of site-location data and other information about published Maya sites. Details of the organization of the site data, our earlier research, and data in a form for use with Google Earth may all be found on our project website (https://MayaGIS.smv.org). Archaeological research on the ancient Maya has traditionally focused on the site as the unit of study and analysis. Most projects focus on mapping and excavating a single site and, furthermore, they often devote most of their efforts to studying monumental ceremonial and public buildings. The late 1950s and early 1960s witnessed archaeological projects that began to correct the disproportionate attention given to the temples, tombs, and palaces. The Carnegie Institution mapped almost all of Mayapan, in Yucatan (Jones 1950, 1952, 1957). E. Wyllys Andrews IV and the Middle American Research Institute mapped Dzibilchaltun and beyond (Stuart et al. 1979). Members of the University of Pennsylvania Tikal Project mapped much of that site (Carr and Hazard 1961), and eventually extended their survey to sample the outskirts of the city (Puleston 1974, 1983). Later in the 1960s and 1970s, interest developed in rural settlement, which turned out to be surprisingly dense (Thomas 1981). None of this work, although extremely valuable in its own right, helped us understand the overall pattern of Maya settlement during a particular period.
