D. Moore, Patricia A. Urban, Edward M. Shortman, and David Webster, Ashmore challenges the assumption that ballcourts functioned as public architecture in ancient Maya society. It suggests alternately that they instead functioned as a “lived space” more closely resembling households and private dwellings than public architecture like temples. The article argues that since the ballcourt was associated strongly with the supernatural, it functioned as a place where political and cosmological drama unfolded. In the article Spatial Orders in Maya Civic Plans, Ashmore and Jeremy Sabloff address how the way the Maya laid out their cities, specifically their civic and ceremonial centers, reflects their beliefs about the universe and their place in it. They claim that landscape archaeology can be used to determine how the Maya conducted their politics and how they ran their government. Several archaeologists have criticized this approach for its lack of objectivity and for being ungrounded in empirical data. Critics have also claimed that it is too reliant on speculation. Publications References External links American archaeologists 1948 births 2019 deaths University of Pennsylvania alumni University of California, Riverside faculty University of California, Los Angeles alumni American women archaeologists People from Los Angeles 21st-century American women