DOI: 10.60507/fk2/26gmyd
title: Digital supplementary materials of the project "Asymmetrical Dependency and Resource Control Among the Classic Maya of the Southern Lowlands"

description: Premodern societies in tropical environments lived under extreme conditions that influenced their social structure. In the Classic Maya society in the Southern Maya Lowlands of the Yucatan Peninsula, human–environment interactions contributed to the emergence of strong inequalities between different social groups. But in which way were these groups entangled with each other? 
 This project was developed in the context of a PhD dissertation (Graf 2026) and includes different types of data. The research project explored different forms of asymmetrical dependency among the Classic Maya. It considered distinct individual actors and social roles (captives, servants, dwarfs), and intergroup relationships between households and neighborhoods. The latter was studied by examining the role of essential resources, i.e., tangible and intangible things that are considered vital or morally necessary for individuals in their social environment. The goal consisted of identifying unbalanced power relations based on the control of essential resources and revealing the social mechanisms that legitimated these asymmetrical relationships in society.
 The project pursued a multidisciplinary methodology consisting of different approaches from environmental archaeology, digital archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, ethnohistory and linguistics. Archaeological fieldwork was conducted in the western periphery of Tzikin Tzakan and southwest Tamarindito in the Petén region of Guatemala. Remote-sensing and ground-truthing techniques were used to create a representative sample of resource zones, residential areas, infrastructure, and certain landscape features. This data was processed in a geographic information system in order to study interaction spheres and draw their spatial connection using Least Cost Path and other analyses. Apart from the archaeological case study, forms of asymmetrical dependency in the Classic Maya society were reconstructed by conducting a lexical analysis of emic terms in different Mayan languages (emic = from an intracultural view).
 It was concluded that various forms of asymmetrical dependency existed in the Classic Maya society, including captive-taking, patronage, servitude and exploitation for tribute and corvée labor. Furthermore, it was pointed out that fictional kinship relations and moral values, including the moral aspect of resources, played a crucial role in legitimizing these asymmetrical relationships.
description: R, 4.0 to 4.4
description: QGIS, 3.40.10 (LTR)
description: SAGA, 8.4.0
description: GRASS GIS, 8.4.1
description: Agisoft Metashape Professional, 1.7.4
description: The digital supplementary material includes multiple datasets from different aspects of the project. On the one hand, they include reviews in tabular form on theories (geopolitical models for the Classic Maya, Suppl.-1) and methods (geophysical applications in the Latin America and the Caribbean, Suppl.-2). On the other, archaeological and technical data is provided, including the excavation database (Suppl.-4), material analyses (Suppl.-6 and 7), postprocessing scripts and documents (Suppl.-3, 5 and 11), and multiperspective approaches on resource preferences and dietary behaviors, as well as ethnographic and corpus-linguistical data (Suppl.-8, 9, 10 and 12).