Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Discussions of Maya agriculture and its relationship to population have followed a pendulum arc over the past century. Site mapping projects and regional-scale lidar surveys have shifted conceptions of Maya cities from small centers, supported by low-yield cultivation strategies, to populous urban landscapes incorporating agricultural terracing and raised fields in some areas. Archaeologists have continued to refine their understanding of how large populations provisioned themselves over the centuries of the Classic period apogee of Maya civilization (250–900 CE). This symposium represents the first large-scale comparative effort to address this issue using cutting-edge techniques of spatial analysis, remote-sensing data, and traditional ecological knowledge from living Maya farmers. Using the same methods, participants will combine settlement data and DEM-derived slope maps to quantify zones within and around their study areas suitable for traditional milpa-cycle agriculture or more intensive practices. The milpa model excludes terrain covered by architecture and home gardens at two different slope thresholds. Labor inputs can be tuned to reflect varying levels of intensification to reconcile with the estimated caloric needs of populations. Our work will explore potential variability in agricultural production at Maya cities and investigate strategies of traditional land use across multiple environments in the tropical Maya lowlands.

Other Keywords
Maya: Classic • Subsistence and Foodways • Digital Archaeology: GIS • Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling • Survey • Settlement patterns • Remote Sensing/Geophysics • population estimates • Agriculture • Land Use

Geographic Keywords
United Mexican States (Country) • Belize (Country) • North America (Continent) • Peten (State / Territory) • Yucatan (State / Territory) • Orange Walk (State / Territory) • Cayo (State / Territory) • Corozal (State / Territory) • Belize (State / Territory) • Stann Creek (State / Territory)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-13 of 13)

  • Documents (13)
Documents
  • Classic Maya Agriculture and Traditional Milpa-Cycle Practices in the Upper Belize River Valley (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only John Walden. Olivia Ellis. Claire Ebert. Julie Hoggarth. Jaime Awe.

    This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Classic Maya polities of the Upper Belize River Valley were situated in an especially rich alluvial environment, which may have served as a breadbasket for surrounding regions. The region was also one of the most densely settled regions of the Maya lowlands, showing evidence of...

  • Grasping the Green Giant: The Epistemology of Ancient Maya Agriculture (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian Chase.

    This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Agricultural production is a fundamental aspect of most societies, and research into agriculture has focused on invention, innovation, involution, intensification, and disintensification in varying forms worldwide. Generations of scholarship have accumulated knowledge and theorized...

  • Lend Me Your Ears: Modeling Traditional Maize Production at Las Cuevas, Belize (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Shane Montgomery. Holley Moyes.

    This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Las Cuevas region, situated on the southeastern edge of the Vaca Plateau in western Belize, consists of several medium-sized centers dispersed between low hills, steep ridges, and small seasonal swamps. Although occupied only briefly during the Late Classic period (700–900 CE),...

  • Let the Crops Speak for Themselves: How to Avoid Imposing Agroecological Assumptions at Altar de Sacrificios (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrés Mejía Ramón. Jessica Munson. Jill Onken. Lorena Paiz Aragón.

    This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Any sizable population must be sustained by an adequate food supply. As such, estimates for high population densities in the Maya Lowlands must be met with an equal or greater productive capacity. The “Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities” symposium seeks to understand this on a...

  • The MAUP and the Milpa: Analytical Scale and the Problem of Lowland Maya Sustainability (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Luke Auld-Thomas. Marcello Canuto.

    This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Researchers assess sustainability using spatial bounds, be they for a single community or the entire planet. But the specific boundaries we use matter greatly, because practices (and populations) that are unsustainable at one scale may be sustainable at another depending on a host of...

  • Modeling Agricultural Production in the Mopan Valley, Belize (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Bernadette Cap. Jason Yaeger. M. Kathryn Brown.

    This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Modeling agricultural yields provides one way to examine questions of Classic Maya agricultural practices and land management, with follow-on implications regarding intensification, household sustainability, and exchange practices. In this paper, we use models to examine whether milpa...

  • Modeling the Milpa at Tikal: New Dimensions of the Carr and Hazard Map (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Stone Shi. Megan Kresse. Thomas Moran. Anabel Ford. Robert Carr.

    This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Much debate has surrounded population and land-use strategies of the Maya. Residential settlements are accepted as a proxy for population and areas without architecture would be available for subsistence. We examine the case of Tikal, where the existing map visually describes...

  • Modeling the Milpa-Cycle at Classic Period El Pilar: A New Method for Assessing Maya Subsistence Production (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sherman Horn. Justin Tran. Anabel Ford.

    This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya city El Pilar was founded in an ecotonal location, where the karstic ridgelands of the greater Petén grade into the alluvial Belize River Valley and coastal plain. Established early in the Middle Preclassic (ca. 1000 BCE), El Pilar grew into a major center that...

  • Modeling the Milpa-Cycle: A GIS-Based Approach to Envisioning Ancient Maya Land Use and Traditional Agricultural Practices (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Tran. Anabel Ford. Sherman Horn III.

    This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Traditional ecological knowledge from living Maya farmers informs us of a storied heritage of agricultural production within the tropical Maya lowlands that traces its lineage to the development and height of ancient Maya civilization. In studying the Maya milpa-cycle, a 20-year...

  • Regional Agricultural Potential at the Aguacate Sites, Western Belize (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Fries.

    This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya settlements of the Aguacate region of western Belize feature a dispersed settlement pattern spread across a highly varied landscape. Both soil and water resources are unevenly distributed across the region, interspersed with karst outcrops and ridges. Nonetheless,...

  • Settlement Pattern and Land Use at Holtun, Guatemala (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Melvin Rodrigo Guzman Piedrasanta. .

    This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Maya archaeology, agricultural cycles are the cornerstone of multiple research topics that intertwine daily life, ideology, political economy, and settlement systems. In archaeological research, land-use can be indicative of social organization and provisioning strategies. In this...

  • Subsistence in the Peripheries: Modeling Ancient Maya Milpa Cycles in Western Honduras and Southern Belize (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Richards-Rissetto. Amy E. Thompson.

    This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient Maya agricultural practices varied based on heterogenous landscapes across the Maya Lowlands. While such variations may cause hesitation in comparative models, we find utility in assessing such differences to understand dynamic past human behaviors. Following the methods...

  • You Can Bet on the (Rural) Farmer: Agriculture and Urbanism at Postclassic Mayapán (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Caroline Antonelli. Timothy Hare.

    This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Mesoamerica, recent scholarship emphasizes the importance of urban smallholders, or intensive production by urban residents. The acquisition of regional lidar imagery of urban centers and surrounding landscapes reveals that the spatial limitations of production were often far more...