Let the Crops Speak for Themselves: How to Avoid Imposing Agroecological Assumptions at Altar de Sacrificios

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.

Any sizable population must be sustained by an adequate food supply. As such, estimates for high population densities in the Maya Lowlands must be met with an equal or greater productive capacity. The “Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities” symposium seeks to understand this on a site-by-site basis by relying on the method developed at El Pilar. In this paper, we report the same metric for Altar de Sacrificios in the Upper Usumacinta Confluence Zone. We compare it with a model that recognizes individual Maya people’s ability to adapt to local challenges, and that environmental variability at various scales differentially affects productive capacity. Specifically, we train a Random Forest model with productive capacities for the various indigenous seed and tree crops listed in the 1960 Mexican Agricultural Census, controlling for irrigation and fertilizer use along with local climatic, topographic, and edaphic factors. Paleoenvironmental reconstructions of regional-level climate during the Formative through Late Classic periods are then used to predict the maximum ideal productive capacity. We finally use local population estimates and the “lbmech” package for R to account for labor capacity and its spatial distribution. This allows for a reasonable maximum estimate based on the closest known case studies to archaeological observations.

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)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37519.0