Soils, Water, and Agriculture in the Maya Lowlands: Lidar and Paleoproxies Reveal New Perspectives on Complexity and Resilience

Summary

This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Questions of human subsistence, impacts, and response to environmental change have driven decades of research on ancient life in the Maya Lowlands. While traditional geoarchaeology and paleoecology methods have already documented a rich variety of agricultural and subsistence options in the Maya Lowlands, the lidar mapping revolution of the last decade has deepened these questions and their answers in extent, scope, magnitude, and meaning. In this paper, we synthesize the results of our three-plus decades of research on Ancient Maya agriculture and resource use in Belize, Mexico, and Guatemala, including soil and water resources, and present the results of our latest lidar, field validation, and laboratory campaigns in the Maya Lowlands. Our first lidar collection was in 2016; our coalition group of several archaeological project partners in Northwestern Belize collected another set of lidar data in 2022, extending our 2016 aerial coverage. Meanwhile our teams conducted field seasons in Guatemala in 2022, and in Belize in 2023 to follow up on features identified in lidar for these respective regions through field survey and excavation. We present our recent field and lab validation results from Northwestern Belize in the context of our other studies across the region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• “The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya, Part II

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39601.0