Regional Agricultural Potential at the Aguacate Sites, Western 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 ancient Maya settlements of the Aguacate region of western Belize feature a dispersed settlement pattern spread across a highly varied landscape. Both soil and water resources are unevenly distributed across the region, interspersed with karst outcrops and ridges. Nonetheless, residential features can be found throughout the entire area. It remains to be determined how these settlements were provisioned. The model used here combines project settlement data and a digital elevation model to assess which parts of the project area may have been utilized for milpa agriculture. The resulting data are then used to estimate calorie production for the region and reassess existing population estimates in light of the potential for local agricultural production.

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): 37079.0