Environmentally transformative human use of land accelerated with the emergence of agriculture, but the extent, trajectory, and implications of these early changes are not well understood. An empirical global assessment of land use from 10,000 BP to 1850 CE reveals a planet largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists by 3,000 years ago, significantly earlier than land-use reconstructions commonly used by Earth scientists. Synthesis of knowledge contributed by over 250 archaeologists highlighted gaps in archaeological expertise and data quality, which peaked at 2000 BP and in traditionally studied and wealthier regions. Archaeological reconstruction of global land-use history illuminates the deep roots of Earth's transformation and challenges the emerging Anthropocene paradigm that large-scale anthropogenic global environmental change is mostly a recent phenomenon.One Sentence Summary: A map of synthesized archaeological knowledge on land use reveals a planet largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists by 3,000 years ago.

Episodes of population loss and cultural change, including the famous Classic Collapse, punctuated the long course of Maya civilization. In many cases, these downturns in the fortunes of individual sites and entire regions included significant environmental components such as droughts or anthropogenic environmental degradation. Some afflicted areas remained depopulated for long periods, whereas others recovered more quickly. We examine the dynamics of growth and decline in several areas in the Maya Lowlands in terms of both environmental and cultural resilience and with a focus on downturns that occurred in the Terminal Preclassic (second century Common Era) and Terminal Classic (9th and 10th centuries CE) periods. This examination of available data indicates that the elevated interior areas of the Yucatán Peninsula were more susceptible to system collapse and less suitable for resilient recovery than adjacent lower-lying areas.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Market economies are notoriously difficult to identify in the archeological record. This is particularly true in the subtropi cal Maya lowlands of Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize because most utilitarian items and consumables were made of highly perishable materials. We explore the hypothesis that ancient marketplaces can be identified through analysis of chemical residues in soils from open and easily accessible spaces in and about ancient Maya cities. We compared soil chemical sig natures from a credible ancient marketplace location in the specialized trade center of Chunchucmil, Yucatan, Mexico to those from a modern marketplace at Antigua, Guatemala. We found extraordinarily high concentrations of phosphorus and zinc in the soil of Chunchucmils proposed marketplace and the same high concentrations correlate well with food prepa ration and vegetable sales areas at the modern marketplace. These methods hold promise in resolving the vexing question of how large ancient Maya urban populations were sustained.

The conjunctive use of paleoecological and archaeological data to document past human-environment relationships has become a theoretical imperative in the study of ancient cultures. Geographers are playing leading roles in this scholarly effort. Synthesizing both types of data, we argue that large karst depressions known as bajos in the Maya Lowlands region were anthropogenically transformed from perennial wetlands and shallow lakes to seasonal swamps between 400 bc and ad 250. This environmental transformation helps answer several questions that have long puzzled scholars of Maya civilization: (1) why many of the earliest Maya cities were built on the margins of bajos, (2) why some of these early centers were abandoned between 100 bc and ad 250, and (3) why other centers constructed elaborate water storage systems and survived into the Classic period ( ad 250-900). The transformation of the bajos represents one of the most significant and long-lasting anthropogenic environmental changes documented in the pre-Columbian New World.

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a b s t r a c tThe measure of the "Mayacene," a microcosm of the Early Anthropocene that occurred from c. 3000 to 1000 BP, comes from multiple Late Quaternary paleoenvironmental records. We synthesized the evidence for Maya impacts on climate, vegetation, hydrology and the lithosphere, from studies of soils, lakes, floodplains, wetlands and other ecosystems. Maya civilization had likely altered local to regional ecosystems and hydrology by the Preclassic Period (3000-1700 BP), but these impacts waned by 1000 BP. They altered ecosystems with vast urban and rural infrastructure that included thousands of reservoirs, wetland fields and canals, terraces, field ridges, and temples. Although there is abundant evidence that indicates the Maya altered their forests, even at the large urban complex of Tikal as much as 40% of the forest remained intact through the Classic period. Existing forests are still influenced by ancient Maya forest gardening, particularly by the large expanses of ancient stone structures, terraces, and wetland fields that form their substrates. A few studies suggest deforestation and other land uses probably also warmed and dried regional climate by the Classic Period (1700-1100 BP). A much larger body of research documents the Maya impacts on hydrology, in the form of dams, reservoirs, canals, eroded soils and urban design for runoff. Another metric of the "Mayacene" are paleosols, which contain chemical evidence for human occupation, revealed by high phosphorus concentrations and carbon isotope ratios of C 4 species like maize in the C 3 edominated tropical forest ecosystem. Paleosol sequences exhibit "Maya Clays," a facies that reflects a glut of rapidly eroded sediments that overlie pre-Maya paleosols. This stratigraphy is conspicuous in many dated soil profiles and marks the large-scale Maya transformation of the landscape in the Preclassic and Classic periods. Some of these also have increased phosphorous and carbon isotope evidence of C 4 species. We synthesize and provide new evidence of Maya-period soil strata that show elevated carbon isotope ratios (d 13 C), indicating the presence of C 4 species in typical agricultural sites. This is often the case in ancient Maya wetland systems, which also have abundant evidence for the presence of several other economic plant species. The "Mayacene" of c. 3000 to 1000 BP was thus a patchwork of cities, villages, roads, urban heat islands, intensive and extensive farmsteads, forests and orchards. Today, forests and wetlands cover much of the Maya area but like so many places, these are now under the onslaught of the deforestation, draining, and plowing of the present Anthropocene.

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