Maya Wetlands: Natural and Anthropogenic

Summary

In our continuing endeavors to better understand Maya wetland formation and agricultural systems across the Maya Lowlands, we now compare natural and anthropogenic wetland field formation. Natural wetland processes can form patterned environments that may be similar visually to intensive, culturally modified, wetland systems. This paper will consider natural factors that can produce similar topography to Maya wetland fields. We will also present aerial photography, GIS, soil stratigraphy, and wetland chemistry to clarify the differences between natural wetland features, such as hogwallow, tree islands, ant mounds, and gilgai patterns, and intentional ancient canal and field systems. By developing new techniques to better quantify wetlands that have been culturally modified, it will be possible to improve upon previous models of identifying and mapping Maya agricultural systems and understanding other earth surface processes and forms.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Advances in Wetland Archaeology in the Americas

Keywords

Spatial Coverage