Paleoecology and Geoarchaeology of the Buenavista Valley, Petén, Guatemala

Summary

This is an abstract from the "La Cuernavilla, Guatemala: A Maya Fortress and Its Environs" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

We have studied the long-term environmental change and geoarchaeology of the Buenavista Valley in the region of El Zotz and La Cuernavilla in Guatemala’s Petén through multiple NSF grants from the 2000s to an NGS Grant for fieldwork in 2022. Past studies focused on the El Zotz reservoir, other regional reservoirs, dam construction, and paleoecological records from the sediments of the El Palmar cival and the El Zotz reservoir. The El Palmar cival coring evidence indicated steady maize pollen and charcoal from the earliest samples in the Middle Preclassic to at least the Terminal Classic, though the adjacent settlement fell into decline by the Early Classic. Lidar evidence from around the cival and across the Petén indicated many other possible instances of canals and wetland fields. To test these wetland fields, we excavated and cored a prominent canalized field system and cored the nearby La Cuernavilla cival to depth over 3 m. The excavations uncovered numerous lithics and ceramics mostly dated to the Preclassic. Here we present these findings from the 2022 field campaign as well as stratigraphy, dating evidence, geochemistry, and aDNA evidence to test our earlier interpretations and whether this is an example of upland, bajo, wetland agriculture.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• La Cuernavilla, Guatemala: A Maya Fortress and Its Environs   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36935.0