Modeling of the Impacts and Sustainability of Ancient Maya Hunting: An Interdisciplinary Ecological and Archaeological Study

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The environmental impact of sizable Late Classic ancient Maya populations remains a persistent question in archaeology. To date, studies of ancient Maya environmental impacts have focused primarily on land-cover change and the conversion of forest to agricultural fields, orchards, and habitation areas. In contrast, few empirical studies have focused on the impact of the ancient Maya on local wildlife populations. The current interdisciplinary study thus combines archaeological settlement data and ecological modeling of prey depletion to determine the potential extent of hunting impacts around ancient Maya communities. Our approach allows for the manipulation of parameters to generate and test hypotheses regarding how system properties (e.g., human population size, archaeological site distribution, hunting frequency and distance, species growth rate, and prey selection) influence the spatial imprint of ancient Maya hunting. Through this process, we can identify thresholds or tipping points beyond which hunting of particular species would likely have become unsustainable, and the combination of parameters that give rise to such behavior. This is key to understanding the range of possible scenarios that would have led to unsustainable use of wildlife resources in the past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36303.0