Every society in the past has built and maintained some sort of domestic, or residential, architecture for the purposes of shelter, social gathering, activity space, and material storage. Environmental conditions, social structure, and cultural expression influence the type and style of domestic architecture developed by a society. Maya domestic architecture is typical of tropical or subtropical regions with abundant natural resources for building. Investigations of Maya domestic architecture provide insight into Maya social life, family structure and relationships, as well as daily activities and productive pursuits.
The two major sources of information on Maya domestic architecture are material remains of houses excavated by archaeologists and structures constructed by “modern Maya” people. Archaeological investigations of ancient Maya houses and related domestic architecture are a more recent development in the discipline. Most early archaeologists were attracted to the grandeur and...
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McCurdy, L. (2014). Architecture of the Maya: Domestic Architecture. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_9882-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_9882-1
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