Terraces, Quarries, and Berms, Oh My! Evaluating Land Use and Landscape Modification at the Ancient Maya City El Pilar

Summary

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

Ongoing research at El Pilar—an ancient Maya city located along the Belize/Guatemala frontier—has documented hundreds of landscape-modification features in the area surrounding the monumental civic center. The complexity and variety of these features, which include terraces, berms, quarries, check-dams, and aguadas, indicate the sophistication of Maya environmental manipulation and reveal potential aspects of socioeconomic organization within the city. Our full-coverage survey at El Pilar, guided by high-resolution lidar imagery of the area surrounding the city center, permits a broad-based inquiry into human-environment interactions in the tropical Maya Forest. This poster presents updated survey results from the 2019 field season and preliminary spatial analyses of cultural remains. We explore the distribution of landscape modification features and examine relationships between these features, settlement patterns, and topography to investigate land-use strategies around a major Classic Maya center.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32475