The constraints and conditions of water chemistry for human use of Maya tropical wetland fields

Summary

A large wedge of our planet is tropical, and archaeology and natural science have long histories of tropical research. But we still know comparatively little about human interactions in the tropics while rates of land and water use change that expunge ecological and archaeological records are accelerating. In this paper we focus on evidence for ancient wetland management in the Maya World, especially around the evidence for water chemistry in multiple watersheds of northern Belize. Here we synthesize the findings of water chemistry around ancient Maya wetland fields of the Rio Bravo, the New River, Booth’s River, Sierra de Agua, the Rio Hondo, and Freshwater Creek. We then will compare water chemistry with the other known environmental and historical parameters of wetlands. Our main goal is to understand which suites of water chemistry would have helped or limited ancient Maya uses. We will also consider what is intrinsically tropical about these variables’ relationships, recognizing the key lack of study on tropical wetlands.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Comparative Approaches to Complexity in the Tropics

Keywords

Spatial Coverage