In The Ancient Urban Maya: Neighborhoods, inequality, and built form, Scott Hutson presents a fresh perspective on large Maya settlements that moves well beyond the tired arguments of ‘were the Maya an urban civilization?’, or ‘can we really talk about Maya cities?’. While he certainly does lay out careful definitions of terms throughout the book, his approach to the urban Maya is based on the experiences of the residents of these ancient settlements, and how the agency of people from different social positions works to make cities enticing places to live. The book is based on the idea that the Maya did indeed live in cities and that those who resided in them chose to do so. This perspective is grounded in the principles of social archaeology and is a welcome contribution to Maya studies in what is an all too often atheoretical discipline.

The first chapter is an outstanding synthesis of the major issues surrounding the study of cities and urbanism. Hutson makes the useful distinction that, while low-density cities may exist, low-density urbanism does not. Therefore, he argues, the Maya did have a number of high-density, urban cities, but also a number of low-density cities that do not meet the criteria for urbanism, but which should still be considered analytically with their high-density counterparts. After reviewing seven components that are typically presented in definitions of cities, Hutson sees size, density, social differentiation and the presence of specialized functions as being the critical elements to a working definition. Following Monica Smith's work in South Asia, he argues for a polythetic definition, in which a settlement that exhibits any three out of those four characteristics should be considered a city. His arguments are careful and well reasoned, though it is worth noting (especially in the pages of the Cambridge Archaeological Journal) that this type of definition can be traced even further back in archaeology to the ‘polythetic groups’ of David Clarke (Reference Clarke1968; Reference Clarke1972), put forth during the heyday of processualism.

With the city defined, the actual focus of the book is on what attracts people to live in cities, given the host of unappealing conditions that emerge when humans live in dense settlements. What makes the social alienation, squalor, vermin and associated health issues worthwhile to the city-dweller? Hutson argues that neighbourhoods, multiplicity, the built form and the economy of cities are what draw people to them. Neighbourhoods provide familiarity that counteracts the anonymity of dense populations. Multiplicity refers to the opportunities created when an individual can intermingle with a broad group of people. Residents experience favourable symbolic and aesthetic impressions when in the presence of the monumentality and/or ornateness of a city's built forms. Finally, city economies provide streamlined exchange, and the social appeal of the spectacle of places like markets would have also been attractive. This framework is eloquently defined in the introductory chapter, setting up the rest of the text as a case study for Maya cities, their attractions, and the methods that might be employed to identify them archaeologically.

One of the positives of Hutson's book is that he does not claim to have solved all of the issues when applying his theoretical perspective to actual data. For each point he is trying to make, he lays out a number of possibilities, how they might appear in the archaeological record, and then tests them against the data. For example, in chapter 3, when positing how we might identify neighbourhoods archaeologically, he suggests that we might try to identify different types of clustering at sites. He argues that spatial clustering of houses, clustering around focal nodes, stylistic clustering and clusters of craft producers are all potential ‘neighbourhoods’ that might be identified archaeologically. In the following chapter, he and Jacob Welch put this model to the test by systematically searching the data from Chunchucmil for these very clusters. The results in most cases are ambiguous, other than some probable focal nodes around monumental architecture and a couple of likely craft-production clusters focused on quarries.

In chapter 5, Hutson examines wealth inequality in ancient cities as conveyed by architecture and portable goods. He then looks at spatial patterning of these traits to conclude that there are not wealth-based neighbourhoods in most Maya sites. He acknowledges certain flaws in methods, such as inaccurate architectural volumetrics in cases where building heights are unavailable, but has enough examples to convince the reader of the pattern (or lack thereof) that he is proposing. This lack of wealth-based neighbourhoods is then expertly tied back to the argument that multiplicity would have attracted people to Maya cities. If there was reduced segregation by wealth, then individuals would indeed have opportunities created by interacting with people of different status. At sites where arguments are made for inequality within kin groups living in close proximity (like at Copan and Coba), Hutson suggests that the multiplicity opportunities may have occurred at the corporate level.

There are many aspects of cities that Hutson views as better considered on a continuum, spectrum, or in terms of degrees. He says that cities should be thought of in terms of whether they are more or less urban than others (p. 18), while ancient economies are understood in terms of the degree of commercialization and market exchange (p. 62). There is a spectrum for how closely knit neighbourhoods might be (p. 85), Maya cities are on a continuum between being regal-ritual and administrative centres (p. 41), and there is a spectrum on which wealth is centred or dispersed at different sites (pp. 168–9). Even the paths at Chunchucmil are seen as spanning a range from accessible and busy to secluded and lightly trodden (p. 102). The question becomes: with so much proposed variation, does it become impossible to reasonably compare anything, not only cross-culturally, but simply among Maya cities? Maybe drawing or building on existing theories, such as de Montmollin's (Reference de Montmollin1989) ‘continua of variation’, could have helped to clarify how we can think about such diversity in a comparative context in explicit ways.

Another light criticism is that there are parts of the book where some of the calculations being used are not entirely clear. Chapter 2 addresses the issue of size and density (two of Hutson's components of cities) at Maya sites. It is not clear that there is a uniform method for population estimates across the different settlements discussed, and some of the modifications to existing numbers appear arbitrary or inconsistent, though this could probably be stated for most calculations of an ancient populace. Later arguments in the book regarding the capacity of patios to hold large segments of the population require the acceptance of the previously proposed numbers. The ambiguity is reduced a little for the sites in Yucatan like Chunchucmil (the most frequently cited data) and Sayil, where visibility of archaeological remains is exceptional and mapping is more thorough than at sites in the southern Lowlands.

This book may be considered the last great work on urbanism of the pre-LiDAR age in Maya archaeology. One reference is made to the LiDAR survey of Caracol and how it has helped to highlight clustering at that site, but otherwise it is left out of the book. On the one hand, LiDAR has not been as transformative in northern Yucatan archaeology where scrub vegetation makes it difficult to isolate ancient features. These same conditions are what allow for the visibility that makes the Chunchucmil (and other Yucatan) settlement data appropriate for Hutson's analyses. However, LiDAR in the southern Lowlands is drastically altering our understanding of site size and density, which will affect some of the specific examples used in the book. On the other hand, LiDAR could be the answer to some of the problems Hutson laments when examining wealth distribution. Accurate volumetric calculations of mounds from point clouds solves many (though not all) of the issues cited when trying to extract information from two-dimensional site maps. In his conclusion, Hutson hopes that the methods he proposes for analysing neighbourhoods, built form, multiplicity and the economy as attractions become useful tools for Mayanists to make sense of variability in Maya cities (p. 208). I think that he has achieved this goal, but more importantly has provided a new theoretical perspective on the Maya city that is going to be incredibly useful as preconceptions about Maya cities are altered in a post-LiDAR world.