Forest resources estimation for the ancient city of Yaxnohcah

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Forest Management and Landscape Transformation: Anthropological Perspectives from the Americas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Lake sediments have been a source of information on vegetation and precipitation change in the Maya area. However, for interior areas of the Yucatan Peninsula where perennial surface water is reduced, the use of proxy data about vegetation and rainfall patterns of the past can also be derived from wetlands. Besides cores in reservoirs for pollen analysis, the identification of archaeological charcoal and eDNA from Yaxnohcah complemented the understanding of the past forest composition. Additionally, the survey of the modern forest provided diversity values, distribution of the vegetation communities, and biomass calculations. To estimate the forest resources that the ancient city of Yaxnohcah had for its development, we used the modern forest as a base to interpret the vegetation change suggested by the archaeobotanical remains. Forest surveys were combined with lidar-based biomass evaluations to achieve a precise estimation of currently available forest resources. A biomass value was obtained for the whole Yaxnohcah extractive zone. Also, a small-scale analysis was done in one settlement complex to estimate the forest's modifications from past activities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Ancient Forest Management and Landscape Transformation: Anthropological Perspectives from the Americas

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52925