{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0187125748502994, 'fraction_numerical': 0.002245508982035928, 'mean_word_length': 5.21860465116279, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
From Urban Core to Vacant Terrain

In Chapter 5, Eleanor Harrison-Buck and colleagues describe their use of drones to quickly and economically map roughly 7 km2 of plowed fields at the site of Saturday Creek in the middle Belize River Valley. They argue that Saturday Creek was a central node on the landscape from Preclassic to Colonial times, serving as an important crossroads between east-west and north-south transportation routes. The authors consider the dense settlement around the site core of Saturday Creek to be part of a larger monumental landscape and consider activities taking place in the vacant terrain on the fringes of the peri-urban settlement—what they refer to as the “heterotopia” (borrowing from Foucault). These spaces were separate from the settlement, but integral to its operation and included environments such as the pine ridge that served as an important transportation corridor, vast tracts of wetlands with ditched and drained agricultural fields, and broad floodplains with rich alluvial soils, which were likely places of cacao cultivation. The authors conclude that these “heterotopian” spaces in the monumental landscape are important to consider in settlement studies because they played a vital role in maintaining long-term, dense populations in urban and peri-urban centers like Saturday Creek.