Soil and Water Chemistry: Aguada Fenix, Tabasco and Northern Belize

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Preclassic Maya Social Transformations along the Usumacinta: Views from Ceibal and Aguada Fénix" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Most of the Yucatan has no vestige of rivers; humans and ecosystems rely on rainwater catchment and soil and ground water. Along the southern margins of the Peninsula, however, lie rivers in Belize and Quintana Roo to the southeast and Tabasco and Campeche to the southwest. This paper considers the soil and water chemistry of the Middle Preclassic site of Aguada Fenix, Tabasco based on samples collected in 2018 and ongoing laboratory analysis for elements and minerals, carbon isotopes, and organics. Second, we compare these and other soil and water analyses to water control and wetland fields and canal systems in these regions of river convergence in Tabasco and northern Belize. Alfred Siemens and coauthors studied these wetland systems since the late 1960s across this whole zone from Veracruz to Belize. This oeuvre led to more wetland field studies, some of which presented evidence for early wetland field evolution in the Archaic and Preclassic and others for much later timing in the Late to Postclassic. Here, we provide new imagery from lidar and drones and soil and water evidence for wetland field evolution over Maya history.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Preclassic Maya Social Transformations along the Usumacinta: Views from Ceibal and Aguada Fénix

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24981