Remote Sensing of Constructed Landscapes in Northern Guatemala

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Innovations and Transformations in Mesoamerican Research: Recent and Revised Insights of Ancestral Lifeways" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Maya sites of San Bartolo and Xultun, Guatemala, provide compelling evidence for ancient Maya agricultural interventions and shifting perspectives about the regional ecological landscape. The first line of evidence is visual: murals there catalog political and religious narratives that were centrally concerned with ecological processes and their associated food and water systems that sustained human settlement in the region. By the Classic period, rulers of the region cast themselves less as intermediaries with divine forces (as during the Preclassic), and more as divine forces in and of themselves to which nature was subject. Thus, the visual record bookends an era of massive political, economic, and social change across the region, revealing shifts in how rulers in the San Bartolo-Xultun region positioned themselves to the public in relation to natural forces and the divine. This relationship is indicated by our second line of evidence: more than a millennium’s worth of archaeological data about long-term productivity of agricultural landscapes and constructed niches, provided through the use of a spatially explicit crop model (GriDSSAT) parameterized by optical satellite imagery and lidar aerial datasets, further highlighting the evolving landscape-scale and process-focused applications of remote sensing in archaeology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Innovations and Transformations in Mesoamerican Research: Recent and Revised Insights of Ancestral Lifeways   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35743.0