Join the Middle American Research Institute (MARI) for their 20th Annual Tulane Maya Symposium. This year’s keynote address by Dr. M. Charlotte Arnauld will be on Cities of the Maya People in the Rainforest and held in NOMA’s Lapis Center for the Arts. 

The lecture will begin at 6:30 pm, followed by a reception in the adjacent Coleman Courtyard at 7:30 pm.

Registration for the lecture and following reception is free and open to the public.

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About the Lecture

The ancient Maya cities were places of daily sociopolitical and economic interaction, like all cities, yet with a high proportion of agricultural activities. As fixed places of concentrated population in the lowland rainforest with scattered and seasonal resources, the clustering of Maya settlements caused structural tensions between the place of residence and the place of subsistence production for the peasants, and, above all, specific construction strategies and neighborhood-level social dynamics. During the Terminal Classic period, these dynamics led to acute sociopolitical tensions between kings and nobles and, following the collapse of dynasties, to gradual urban transformations, until the lowland urban system was almost completely relocated during the eleventh century.

About the Speaker

Dr. M. Charlotte Arnauld is Emeritus Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Laboratoire Archéologie des Amériques, France). As a Mesoamerican archaeologist, she has directed or co-directed five long-term projects in Guatemala and Mexico. She specializes in Maya urban studies, exploring neighborhood dynamics and population mobility as part of her broader work in social archaeology. Her co-edited volumes include The Neighborhood as a Social and Spatial Unit in Mesoamerican Cities, Mobility and Migration in Ancient Mesoamerican Cities, and Building an Archaeology of Maya Urbanism. She has published in the Journal de la Société des Américanistes, Ancient Mesoamerica, and the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.