Ancient Maya Use of Fauna from the Wetlands and Beyond

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and the History of Human-Environment Interaction in the Lower Belize River Watershed" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Understanding how the ancient Maya interacted with wetland environments has been a topic of research for roughly 50 years. Previous studies suggest these resource-rich environments provided a diverse assortment of flora and fauna for the ancient Maya to utilize. Wetlands provide an ideal environment for evaluating long-held claims about the overall ancient Maya diet, which often emphasizes a reliance on large-bodied terrestrial mammals like white-tailed deer and peccary with less emphasis on smaller, wetland fidelic species. From 2015 to 2019, we investigated human-wetland interactions, targeting midden deposits from Maya archaeological sites within the lower Belize River watershed where some of the largest tracts of wetlands are found in Belize. We present zooarchaeological results from sites located proximate to these wetlands. Results suggest small-bodied aquatic animals, particularly turtles, were a key component of the overall diet compared to terrestrial mammals. These data are further corroborated by the presence of ceramic net weights recovered from these sites, dating to the Classic–Postclassic transition (ca. AD 800–1200). This study offers insight into site-specific climate histories through swamp-fidelic fauna, which was still widely available in the wetlands of Belize despite long-term drought conditions that characterize the climate histories across much of the Maya Lowlands.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeology and the History of Human-Environment Interaction in the Lower Belize River Watershed   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33219