The MAUP and the Milpa: Analytical Scale and the Problem of Lowland Maya Sustainability

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Researchers assess sustainability using spatial bounds, be they for a single community or the entire planet. But the specific boundaries we use matter greatly, because practices (and populations) that are unsustainable at one scale may be sustainable at another depending on a host of environmental, social, and technological variables. Assessments of sustainability, in any time and any place, are thus extremely vulnerable to the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem, or MAUP. What scale is appropriate to estimate a population's sustainability, in the ancient Maya Lowlands or elsewhere? How can we determine this parameter? This is a problem archaeology needs to grapple with as it seeks to contribute meaningfully to sustainability science while armed with settlement datasets that are often small, irregular, and archipelagic. In this paper, we propose strategies for mitigating the MAUP’s effect on sustainability reconstruction at local scales, and argue for the value of large-scale data aggregation to estimate the sustainability of regional settlement systems.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37545.0