Garden Soils: Assessing the Viability of Soil Phosphate Analysis in the Archaeological Identification of Ancient Maya Kitchen Gardens

Summary

The study of ancient Maya intensive, intra-site agricultural systems has gained new interest in recent years as a valuable way of interpreting numerous aspects of the ancient Maya’s daily life. However, ancient kitchen gardens, specifically, are usually difficult to identify by traditional archaeological techniques because of their lack of architectural structures and other identifying features. To compensate for this, Phosphate analyses are being used to positively identify kitchen gardens that are invisible to standard archaeological techniques. The general archaeological community trusts these methods to be a reliable way of testing soils in archaeological sites for specific agricultural features, even though there has been little research conducted to conclusively prove this assertion. In response to this lack of research, this project investigates the viability of Phosphate analysis. This will be determined by a comprehensive literary review of previous and current research and an analysis of the data presented within them. While Phosphate testing has been used to identify general agricultural features, the chemical signatures produced from these methods only give vague information about the soil and what was done to it, making them unreliable to definitively discern a kitchen garden, which was used for specific agricultural purposes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage