Most population estimates for Maya sites are for the Late Classic period, a time of peak population in the Central Maya Lowlands. At Naachtun, Guatemala, a major city during the Early Classic that continued into the Late Classic period, researchers recently carried out an ambitious program of test pitting in residential areas; its aim was to model the growth of residential units during the entire Classic period and so better contextualize the rise of Classic Maya dynasties and the scale of their economic and political power. This article presents an improvement to the existing method for estimating population for periods preceding the population apex (in this case, the Early Classic period): it not only estimates the occupancy rate of residential units occupied pre-apex but also assesses their size, using a typology I developed based on their morphology and pattern of transformation.

Human responses to catastrophic natural events form an important research theme in archaeology. Using excavation and radiocarbon data, this article investigates the socio-cultural impact of the mid-first-millennium AD Tierra Blanca Joven eruption at San Andrés, El Salvador. The data, along with an architectural energetic analysis of the Campana structure at San Andrés, indicate that survivors and/or re-settlers made considerable efforts to construct monumental buildings immediately following the eruption, using volcanic tephra as construction material. Such re-building played important religious, social and political roles in human responses to the eruption. The study contributes to discussions about human creativity, adaptation and resilience in the face of abrupt environmental change.

Multispectral visual analysis has revealed new information from scarce fragments of a pre-Columbian document excavated in 1932 from a burial at Uaxactun, in Guatemala. The plaster coating from decomposed bark-paper pages of an Early Classic (c. AD 400–600) Maya codex bear figural painting and possibly writing. Direct investigation of these thin flakes of painted stucco identified two distinct layers of plaster painted with different designs, indicating that the pages had been resurfaced and repainted in antiquity. Such erasure and re-inscription has not previously been attested for early Maya manuscripts, and it sheds light on Early Classic Maya scribal practices.