ABSTRACT
The Classic Maya ceremonial centre of Lubaantun lies in the southern part of Belize (British Honduras) some 27 km from the Caribbean coast, in the low foothills that begin to rise from the coastal plain towards the Maya mountains to the north-west. The site was discovered at the beginning of this century and excavated in 1926-7 by the British Museum (Joyce, 1926; Joyce et ah, 1927). By 1970 the area in which it lay had become a backwater in Maya archaeology; for this reason, and because the previous work had shown Lu baantun to be a site with several idiosyncratic features, further investigations were carried out in that year. They included the mapping of the ceremonial centre and part of the surrounding area of settlement, excavation within the ceremonial centre to establish the cultural sequence, and ecological survey to determine the resources available within the site exploitation territory (Hammond 1970a, 1970b, 1971a, 1971b). The ceremonial centre, its surround ing settlement and other sites in the area were all found to date to the Late Classic period of the eighth and ninth centuries a .d ., a discovery that raises important questions about Maya political and demographic history (Hammond, 1970a, p. 222); the purpose of this paper, however, is to examine how the spatial patterning of these relatively short-lived political entities is suscep tible to analysis by the use of locational models.
