There Are Holes in Our Argument: Karst Landforms and Multispecies Flourishing in Northeastern Yucatan, Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper considers the development of agriculture and society in northeastern Yucatán, Mexico, drawing on evidence from lidar imaging, paleoethnobotany, and isotopic studies. We focus on geological features known as dolines, sinkholes, or rejolladas—round, low areas that dot the regional ground surface. The ecological characteristics of such features (e.g., deep soils, greater moisture) provide opportunities for multispecies flourishing. Within sinkholes, assemblages of plant and animal species as well as geological elements generate emergent properties that differ across features. Human occupants of the region detected and explored the diverse opportunities presented by these microenvironments. While sinkholes have been the focus of scholarly attention for what they enable, equally important is the way these landforms resist agricultural and political economic pressure—they are not amenable to certain land management strategies and pose limits to overexploitation. Their abundant and random distribution make them difficult to monopolize at a large scale. Taking a landscape perspective, we consider the demonstrated, potential, and failed interactions of species within sinkholes. We examine how the presence of dense, distributed sinkholes, which serve as reservoirs for tropical forest species, shaped regional sociopolitical development.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36442.0