ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a diachronic sociopolitical and economic model of Calakmul, Campeche, Mexico. Calakmul is a regional capital situated in the geographical heartland of the lowland Maya area. The chapter suggests that perspective is from its temples, central plaza, and palaces situated on the artificially leveled dome on which the city center is built. It includes exposition of a royal court complex. The chapter employs the sixteenth-century ruling authority and settlement pattern of Chicxulub, Yucatan and the nineteenth-century Noh Cah Santa Cruz Maya, which also exercised a triadic form of government up to 1901. It provides a description of elite structures and discusses relative artifact distributions within elite structures. The chapter demonstrates the degree of publicness and accessibility to public structures by people living within, near, and outside the royal community through the distribution of figurines from Calakmul analyzed by Ruiz Guzman et al.
