Maize is a cultigen of global economic importance, but when it first became a staple grain in the Americas, was unknown and contested. Here, we report direct isotopic dietary evidence from 52 radiocarbon-dated human skeletons from two remarkably well-preserved rock-shelter contexts in the Maya Mountains of Belize spanning the past 10,000 years. Individuals dating before ~4700 calendar years before present (cal B.P.) show no clear evidence for the consumption of maize. Evidence for substantial maize consumption (~30% of total diet) appears in some individuals between 4700 and 4000 cal B.P. Isotopic evidence after 4000 cal B.P. indicates that maize became a persistently used staple grain comparable in dietary significance to later maize agriculturalists in the region (>70% of total diet). These data provide the earliest definitive evidence for maize as a staple grain in the Americas.

From the perspective of Central and South America, the peopling of the New World was a complex process lasting thousands of years and involving multiple waves of Pleistocene and early Holocene period immigrants entering into the neotropics. These Paleoindian colonists initially brought with them technologies developed for adaptation to environments and resources found in North America. As the ice age ended across the New World people adapted more generalized stone tools to exploit changing environments and resources. In the neotropics these changes would have been pronounced as patchy forests and grasslands gave way to broadleaf tropical forests. We document a late Pleistocene/early Holocene stone tool tradition from Belize, located in southern Mesoamerica. This represents the first endogenous Paleoindian stone tool technocomplex recovered from well dated stratigraphic contexts for Mesoamerica. Previously designated Lowe, these artifacts share multiple features with contemporary North and South American Paleoindian tool types. Once hafted, these bifaces appear to have served multiple functions for cutting, hooking, thrusting, or throwing. The tools were developed at a time of technological regionalization reflecting the diverse demands of a period of pronounced environmental change and population movement. Combined stratigraphic, technological, and population paleogenetic data suggests that there were strong ties between lowland neotropic regions at the onset of the Holocene.

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This meta-analysis uses seven previously published fish assemblages from sites in the northern Maya lowlands to evaluate if environmental or human social factors, such as elite status, provided impetus for the increased emphasis on coastal trade during the Terminal to Postclassic periods. Following the political decline of sites in the central and southern Maya lowlands during the Terminal Classic period, the northern Maya lowlands rose in prominence. As political systems changed, so too did economic systems. Using species area curves, richness, nestedness, non-metric multidimensional scaling, evenness, and differences in habitat, this paper addresses to what degree fish trade in the northern Maya lowlands was driven by habitat differences, site distance from the coast, time period, or social status. The results indicate social factors, rather than environmental, explain more of the variation in the fish taxonomic composition at each site. The different taxonomic communities are explained less by specific environmental factors, recovery methods, or identification procedures than by site distance from the coast and social context of the site (i.e., elite versus non-elite). These data demonstrate that meta-analyses can explain how access-based differences—such as site distance from the coast or due to the social context of a particular assemblage—are expressed among large faunal datasets within complex societies.

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