The access to water and the engineered landscapes accommodating its collection and allocation are pivotal issues for assessing sustainability. Recent mapping, sediment coring, and formal excavation at Tikal, Guatemala, have markedly expanded our understanding of ancient Maya water and land use. Among the landscape and engineering feats identified are the largest ancient dam identified in the Maya area of Central America; the posited manner by which reservoir waters were released; construction of a cofferdam for dredging the largest reservoir at Tikal; the presence of ancient springs linked to the initial colonization of Tikal; the use of sand filtration to cleanse water entering reservoirs; a switching station that facilitated seasonal filling and release; and the deepest rock-cut canal segment in the Maya Lowlands. These engineering achievements were integrated into a system that sustained the urban complex through deep time, and they have implications for sustainable construction and use of water management systems in tropical forest settings worldwide.archaeology | resilience | intensification | tropics | paleoecology H ow human populations have used currently threatened environments in a sustainable and managed manner over time can be addressed through archeology and its multidisciplinary collaborations (1). Today, in the geographical core of Classic Maya civilization (A.D. 250-800)-the tropical forest of Petén, Guatemala (a subtropical moist forest in the Holdridge system) (2)-short-fallow slash-and-burn agriculture, logging, and cattle ranching have significantly affected portions of the ecosystem and limited access to potable water (3, 4). Nevertheless, within this biophysical context, one of the earliest and most long-lived tropical civilizations flourished. Maya water and land uses were significantly affected by highly seasonal precipitation and karst physiography, which accommodated little perennial surface water. In response, the ancient Maya developed a complex system of water management dependent on water collection and storage devices. The hydraulic system was cleverly tailored to the biophysical conditions and adaptively engineered to the evolving needs of a growing population for more than 1,000 y (5-7). By identifying how a tropical setting was altered using a Stone Age technology, methods and techniques associated with long-lived and sustainable landscape engineering are revealed. Establishing baseline assessments of human impact on an environment before the extraction and depletion of resources by recent technological advancements may allow an evaluation of current technology's effects and the origins of unintended ecological as well as social consequences.The ancient low-density urban community of Tikal, Guatemala, was recently examined by way of water and landscape assessments (8-10).* Our intent was to document the evolution of a tropical wet-dry engineered landscape (11) and the manner in which the site was altered from its initial colonization (Middle to Late Preclassic, 600 B.C. to A.D. ...

Human settlement of the Caribbean represents the only example in the Americas of peoples colonizing islands that were not visible from surrounding mainland areas or other islands. Unfortunately, many interpretive models have relied on radiocarbon determinations that do not meet standard criteria for reporting because they lack critical information or sufficient provenience, often leading to specious interpretations. We have collated 2484 radiocarbon determinations, assigned them to classes based on chronometric hygiene criteria, and constructed Bayesian colonization models of the acceptable determinations to examine patterns of initial settlement. Colonization estimates for 26 islands indicate that (i) the region was settled in two major population dispersals that likely originated from South America; (ii) colonists reached islands in the northern Antilles before the southern islands; and (iii) the results support the southward route hypothesis and refute the “stepping-stone model.”

No abstract

This paper describes a geospatial model that was developed to be the basis for applying models from human behavioural ecology (HBE). Specifically, the logic of the ideal free distribution (IFD) is narrowed and applied to the post‐colonisation spread of intensive agriculture in order to predict the order and locations of its expansion. The island of Rapa, Austral Islands, is used to highlight the utility of this method. Rapa is an ideal location due to the prominent use of intensive irrigated taro agriculture and its role in explanations of the social development of territoriality on the island. The use of similar geospatial models has wider implications for island archaeology in furthering the understanding of diachronic settlement patterns.