Lunch Club provides affiliates of the Stanford Archaeology Center with a community-oriented forum for engagement with current issues in archaeology. On March 4, 2026,  we will host Dr. Rodrigo Solinis-Casparius from the Univeristy of Illiniois at Chicago and Co-curator of Field Museum.

Abstract:

People move. When we do, we shape our cities by creating networks of movement behaviors in the form of trails, roads and pathways. This is true on every urban settlement in our planet. Thus, ancient settlements and their ancient roads are essential to understand the roles that movement plays in the spatial configuration of a city and the daily life of its residents. Here, I present a novel approach to identify and study >1,000-year-old pathways using remote sensing (lidar), computational analyses, and traditional archaeological work like survey and excavation in a massive Mesoamerican urban center in Western Mexico.