ABSTRACT
“Peopling” ancient buildings through energetic studies allows to move beyond elites to all the laborers who contributed to construction efforts and may have only been represented by a tally mark, or less, in an administrator’s ledger. This chapter suggests that laborer-focused alternatives to labor control lead to a different perspective on monumental construction and what monumental architecture can represent. Like monumental architecture, labor is often seen as a monolithic, dehumanized entity. It focuses on El Castillo, a composite and diachronic feature on the high end of the Maya monumentality spectrum, and applies virtual techniques to expand architectural energetics. Virtual energetic incorporates virtual architectural reconstruction to visualize diachronic change, fill current gaps in the understanding of that change with supported hypotheses, and conduct energetic analysis with the benefit of a virtual and queriable dataset. The laborer perspective applied to El Castillo demonstrates the utility of alternative and complementary approaches to those focused on elites and labor control.
