Lend Me Your Ears: Modeling Traditional Maize Production at Las Cuevas, Belize

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.

The Las Cuevas region, situated on the southeastern edge of the Vaca Plateau in western Belize, consists of several medium-sized centers dispersed between low hills, steep ridges, and small seasonal swamps. Although occupied only briefly during the Late Classic period (700–900 CE), aerial lidar and pedestrian survey have revealed a complex network of civic architecture, residential constructions, terraces, and ditched fields. In order to understand past approaches to tropical land use and management in this portion of Mesoamerica, it is necessary to model the productivity and limitations of milpa cultivation strategies on local, regional, and interregional levels. This paper, as part of a comparative effort between multiple research projects across the Maya Lowlands, combines spatial analyses of remotely sensed data with traditional ecological knowledge to examine the relationship between the milpa-cycle, population estimates, and agricultural intensification during the Classic Period (250–900 CE) apex of Maya civilization.

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): 37538.0