Filled to the Brim: Estimating Lowland Maya Reservoir Capacities by Combining Survey, Soil Cores, and GIS

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

One of the limiting factors to settlement aggregation in the Maya lowlands is the availability of potable water. With few perennial surface rivers and lakes, the ancient Maya collected water from rainfall for consumption. In areas with high population densities, such as Classic period cities, this required engineering the built landscape to funnel water for collection and storage to various types of basins and formal reservoirs. This paper presents the results of a multiyear project collecting and analyzing surface and subsurface topographic data to improve methods for estimating the capacities of these water catchment features at the Classic Maya city of El Peru-Waka’, Petén, Guatemala. Typically, reservoir capacity estimates in the Maya area rely upon mapped surface topography to estimate storage volumes and occasionally employ subsurface excavations to increase depth measurements. The present study integrates data from terrestrial and lidar mapping with soil core transects to model the subsurface topography of a sample of reservoirs with GIS tools to more accurately estimate holding capacities at or near their time of use.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32224