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

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.