Modeling the Milpa at Tikal: New Dimensions of the Carr and Hazard Map

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.

Much debate has surrounded population and land-use strategies of the Maya. Residential settlements are accepted as a proxy for population and areas without architecture would be available for subsistence. We examine the case of Tikal, where the existing map visually describes monuments, settlements, and topography of this major Late Classic period (600–900 CE) Maya civic center. We produce a new and comprehensive 12 km2 map of Tikal that incorporates details from the published 9 km2 map and integrates original data from the unpublished field notebooks provided by Robert Carr. Our project digitized the architecture and contours for the 12 km2 area to address questions of population and agriculture. Using GIS, we model the milpa-cycle and explore the potential of the traditional farming analogs to account for subsistence production in ancient times.

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): 36846.0