Research Reports in Belizean Archaeology, Vol. 17, 2020, pp. 341-352. Copyright © 2020 by the Institute of Archaeology, NICH, Belize. 28 A NEIGHBOURLY DAY IN THE BEAUTYWOOD? EXPLORATORY SPATIAL ANALYSIS OF SETTLEMENT PATTERNS AT EL PILAR Sherman Horn III, Anabel Ford, Paulino Morales Ongoing Lidar ground-truthing operations have produced full coverage survey maps for approximately 12 km 2 of the El Pilar Archaeological Reserve, revealing a complex settlement mosaic of residential units, monumental groups, landscape modification features, and apparently vacant terrain. Visual inspection of the master map suggests patterns of settlement and land use, reflecting a series of choices by members of the ancient community at El Pilar. Residential settlement generally conforms to favorable topography, but the distribution of smaller monumental groups, and the apparent concentrations of domestic structures on other types of terrain suggest social factors played a role in determining settlement location. This paper presents exploratory spatial analyses of settlement patterns at El Pilar. We examine the distribution of residential and monumental groups across the site to search for socially meaningful spatial divisions, such as neighborhoods. Our analyses include information on labor invested in residential groups to examine potential wealth inequalities in local settlement clusters – possible neighborhoods – and to explore how people of different social statuses populated the landscape at El Pilar. Introduction The second decade of the 21 st -Century witnessed a revival of urban organization studies among archaeologists, with renewed attention placed on social units intermediate in scale between households and the settlements they comprised (e.g., Arnauld et al., eds. 2012; Hutson 2016; Pacifico and Truex, eds. 2019; Smith 2010). These settlement divisions – whether categorized as neighborhoods, formed by “bottom-up” processes of residential nucleation, or districts, established by “top- down” directives from political authorities (Smith 2010) – provided settings for the most intensive interactions in complex societies with large urban centers. Regular, face-to-face interactions characterized daily life in ancient urban settings and created the social networks that bound individuals into communities, and recognizing intermediate-scale units has increasingly become an important focus in settlement archaeology. This paper presents exploratory spatial analyses of survey data from El Pilar, a major Maya center straddling the Belize/Guatemala frontier, to investigate settlement patterns. We examine the relationships among monumental and residential structures to evaluate hypotheses of settlement preference and wealth inequality, and we explore distributions of mapped residential units to search for settlement clusters that may represent neighborhoods (Smith 2011). The distribution of public architecture provides an additional avenue to investigate potential partitioning of the landscape by those in power at El Pilar. After briefly reviewing previous research that provides the methodological foundations for our study, we discuss the application of three spatial analysis techniques – average nearest neighbor analysis, kernel density mapping, and correlation analysis between site attributes and Euclidean distance – to the El Pilar dataset and interpret the results. Survey at El Pilar is ongoing, and the mapping of additional residential and monumental groups will undoubtedly affect our understanding of spatial clustering in future seasons. The results presented here therefore represent the first steps in an evolving analysis of settlement patterns at El Pilar, although their utility in generating data for more detailed hypotheses and sophisticated tests is clear. Identifying Maya Neighborhoods – Some Issues and Approaches The recognition and study of neighborhoods in ancient Mesoamerican cities has a relatively long history, although most of this work, until recently, has been done outside the Maya Lowlands. Neighborhoods comprising foreign ethnic enclaves and craft producers at the densely occupied Central Mexican city Teotihuacan, for example, have been a significant focus of research since the 1970s (Millon 1973; see Manzilla 2012, Smith 2010 for recent reviews). The clear spatial demarcation of residential units in grid-aligned Teotihuacan, and a long history of excavation,