Condiciones de vida y demografía en El Meco: Centro cívico-ceremonial secundario maya de Quintana Roo, México

Abstract

Paleoepidemiological and paleodemographic analysis in Mayan populations is a topic that has been done in separated ways by researchers, arriving to interpretations slanted by the scarce conjunction of these complementary areas which approach bioanthropological studies. Plus still, the lack of this type of studies in the Mayan area of Quintana Roo, is one more element for the vagrant knowledge of life conditions and nutrition as well as of the demographic behavior that reigned in this region and in centers considered as secondary, in front of the primacy that has been given areas like Chichen Itzá in Yucatan, Copán, in Honduras or El Caracol, in Guatemala. The investigation now presented versed on the knowledge of life conditions and demography of El Meco in Quintana Roo, considered as a secondary coastal urban center in the late Posclassic. The data show that these inhabitants present better conditions of health and nutrition, through the analysis of episodic stress indicators (enamel hipoplasias), specific stress indicators (cribra orbitalia and porotic hiperostosis) and accumulative stress indicators (stature and demography), when comparing them with their near neighbors for the same impermanence. In the same way, with paleodemographic data and new epidemic elements, we endorse some inferences about the main economic activities: the trade and the use of the marine resources. The bioanthropological research in the Maya area of Quintana Roo, therefore, shown promising starting from theoretical and methodological elements that have been maturing in the last decades.