Space and Time for the Milpa-Forest Garden Cycle: A Model of the Ancient Maya Landscape of El Pilar

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes: Archaeological, Historic, and Ethnographic Perspectives from the New World / Paisajes: Perspectivas arqueológicas, históricas y etnográficas desde el Nuevo Mundo" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

As a critique of the temperate prejudice of the tropics, we embrace the hypothesis that the Maya forest represents a domesticated landscape to examine the settlement and environmental patterns of the ancient Maya of El Pilar. Recognizing that land use is dependent on knowledge, skill, and labor and the residential requirements of the landscape are not simply for field crops, we consider the whole production cycle for both human subsistence and animal habitat. This includes open fields emphasizing annual crops, succession of perennial building-focused products used in home and maintenance, and closed-canopy forests for products, major construction, and fruits. We define the potentially cultivable landscape by excluding architecture, considering how it would cycle from field to forest and back again. Using slope as a proxy of erosion and depressions as a proxy for lowlands, we assess our 14 km2 settlement survey around El Pilar by determining areas of infield and outfield cultivation with a land-use cycle of 20 years. We present our results as a model of sustainable land use in the Maya forest.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Landscapes: Archaeological, Historic, and Ethnographic Perspectives from the New World / Paisajes: Perspectivas arqueológicas, históricas y etnográficas desde el Nuevo Mundo

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32115