Modeling Agricultural Production in the Mopan Valley, 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.

Modeling agricultural yields provides one way to examine questions of Classic Maya agricultural practices and land management, with follow-on implications regarding intensification, household sustainability, and exchange practices. In this paper, we use models to examine whether milpa agriculture was viable as the primary agricultural strategy in Belize’s Mopan valley during the Late Classic period, including the polities of Xunantunich and Buenavista del Cayo. We use lidar data to identify which areas of the landscape were conducive to milpa farming and which areas were intensified with terraced fields. We use multiple algorithms to create population estimates, using settlement data derived from pedestrian survey and lidar mapping. We contextualize the results in light of the valley’s heterogeneous landscape, mosaic of agricultural intensification, and marketplace-based economy.

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): 37265.0