Land Systems Architecture and Ecology as Infrastructure in Cities and Regions across the Maya Lowlands

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Relying on the lens of ecological urbanism this paper describes the diversity of long-term patterns of urbanization and agricultural intensification on regional landscapes in the Maya lowlands of southern Mexico and Central America. Best described as a mosaic, the Maya lowlands offers an important landscape narrative about how food and food systems were integral elements of urban systems across the Maya lowlands over centuries. To discuss the relationships between food systems and urban landscapes, we first discuss the landscape and settlement patterns in the Central Peten, specifically the Tikal region. Second, we scale up to describe the early results of a collaborative research project that is investigating these patterns across the entire geography of the Maya lowlands through a comparative inventory and analysis of lidar transects extending from the states of Chiapas north to Yucatan and Quintana Roo. These data offer a uniquely expansive survey of anthropogenic landscape modification and land use resilience across the region. This information challenges traditional perspectives of urban, peri-urban, and rural, while offering a critical narrative of landscape, food systems, and community resilience in the context of modern land use change and pressures across the diverse ecology of the lowlands.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32185