Beyond the Birds of Paradise: A Geoarchaeological Investigation of Large Ancient Maya Linear Wetland Features

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Growing scholarship since the 1980s has focused on ancient Maya–wetland interactions after raised field agriculture was revealed in northern Belize. From this, mounting evidence indicates extensive reliance on seasonal and perennial wetlands for ancient Maya farming, aquaculture, and water retention across the region. These systems would have served as major sources for food production and oases against the seasonal wet/dry hydroclimate and episodic long-term drying of the neotropics. The Birds of Paradise (BOP) wetland fields of NW Belize are one such system with use starting in the Late Preclassic, ~2000 BP, and lasting through the Postclassic (after 1000 BP). Lidar imagery from 2016 and 2022 revealed a group of linear wetland features downstream of BOP that span more than 730 m and may have been fed by runoff from nearby wetland canals. Our goals here are to test multiple hypotheses for these features by dating with AMS, identifying connections to waterways through hydrological modeling, and detecting evidence of construction and use through soil chemistry, isotope geochemistry, particle size analysis, and aDNA. Our early results show evidence for complex constructions throughout the region connected to a network of transportation corridors and the wetland fields, canals, and broader watershed.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeology of Wetlands   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40377.0