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. This content downloaded from 91.229.229.210 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 18:33:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsHow the ancient Maya of the central Yucatecan Lowlands managed their water and land resources remains poorly knownX although crucial to an understanding of ancient political economy. Recent archival research and field data suggest the widespread use of artificially altered, natural depressions for the collection and containment of water, both for potable consumption and agricultural ends. During the Classic period (A.D. 250-900) several of the principal cities in the Maya area constructed their largest architecture and monuments at the summit of hills and ridges. Associated with these elevated centers-"water mountains"-were sizable, life-sustaining reserroirs quarried into their summits. The effect of this town-planning design was the centralization of a primary and fundamental resource. Although elite managers controlled the water source, other decentralizing forces prevented anything similar to Wittfogel's "total power. " However, by ritually appropriating the everyday and mundane activities associated with water by the sustaining population, elites used high-performance water ritual as manifest in the iconography to further centralize control. The significance of modifying the urban landscape in the partial image of the ordinary water hole defines the extraordinary in Maya ritual.El tema de como los mayas antiguos de las tierras bajas del centro de Yucataon administraron sus recursos de agua y tierra permanece raqufticamente explicado, aunque esto se considera muy importante para llegar a entender la economfa polftica antigua. Recientes investigaciones de los archivos e informacion del campo insinuan el extenso uso de las depresiones naturales modificadas artificialmente, para la recoleccion, y el represamiento del agua, para los consumos domeosticos y agrfcola. Durante el perfodo Cla'sico (250-900 d. C.) varias de las ciudades principales en el aorea Maya construyeron la arquitectura mayor y los monumentos en la cima de los cerros y lomas. En asociacion con estos centros elevados-"las montanas de agua"-habfa grandes depositos de agua, las reservas de sostenimiento de vida excavados en sus cimas. El efecto de este diseno de planificacion de asentamientos fue la centralizacion de un recurso principal y fundamental. Aunque los administradores de la eolite controlaban la fuente del aguaX otras fuerzas descentralizadoras prevenlan cualquier cosa que fuera similar al "poder totalizador" de Wittfogel. Sin embargo, al apropiarse ritualmente de las actividades cotidianas y mundanas asociadas con el agua por parte de la populacion a la que mantenfan, los administrador...

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. ...

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.

Prehispanic water management in the Maya Lowlands emphasized collection and storage rather than the canalization and diversion accentuated in highland Mexico. Reexamination of site maps of the ancient Maya city of Tikal, Guatemala, has revealed an important, overlooked factor in Maya centralization and urban settlement organization. In a geographical zone affected by an extended dry season and away from permanent water sources, large, well-planned reservoirs provided resource control as well as political leverage.

Tikal has long been viewed as one of the leading polities of the ancient Maya realm, yet how the city was able to maintain its substantial population in the midst of a tropical forest environment has been a topic of unresolved debate among researchers for decades. We present ecological, paleoethnobotanical, hydraulic, remote sensing, edaphic, and isotopic evidence that reveals how the Late Classic Maya at Tikal practiced intensive forms of agriculture (including irrigation, terrace construction, arboriculture, household gardens, and short fallow swidden) coupled with carefully controlled agroforestry and a complex system of water retention and redistribution. Empirical evidence is presented to demonstrate that this assiduously managed anthropogenic ecosystem of the Classic period Maya was a landscape optimized in a way that provided sustenance to a relatively large population in a preindustrial, low-density urban community. This landscape productivity optimization, however, came with a heavy cost of reduced environmental resiliency and a complete reliance on consistent annual rainfall. Recent speleothem data collected from regional caves showed that persistent episodes of unusually low rainfall were prevalent in the mid-9th century A.D., a time period that coincides strikingly with the abandonment of Tikal and the erection of its last dated monument in A.D. 869. The intensified resource management strategy used at Tikal-already operating at the landscape's carrying capacity-ceased to provide adequate food, fuel, and drinking water for the Late Classic populace in the face of extended periods of drought. As a result, social disorder and abandonment ensued.he Late Classic period (A.D. 600-850) was a time of unprecedented architectural, astronomical, and artistic achievement at Tikal, one of the leading urban centers of the ancient Maya realm. It was also a time of meteoric population growth at this bustling cultural center. Notwithstanding its prominence as a major Maya polity, how Tikal's leaders and farmers managed to provide food, fuel, and other sustenance for its many occupants has never been fully understood or quantified.To best assess resource potential at Tikal, we first defined an extraction zone that was extrapolated from archaeological settlement data by creating a Voronoi diagram (1, 2) (Fig. 1). Essentially, this approach proscribes a proportional boundary between Tikal and its surrounding contemporaneous communities: namely, Motul de San Jose, El Zotz, Uaxactún, Xultun, Dos Aguadas, Nakum, Yaxha, and Ixlu. Using this technique, including assigning greater economic clout to Tikal using a 2:1 weighting scheme (see section on the Voronoi diagram in SI Materials and Methods), we calculated that its Late Classic resource extraction zone encompassed ∼1,100 km 2 . This is the area from which the residents of Tikal could obtain their necessary food, fuel, construction timbers, and other living essentials.Superimposing the Voronoi Diagram over satellite images of modern Tikal (2, 3) (Fig. 1), which is mostly...

Complexity is both a buzzword and a paradigm in the biophysical sciences and, increasingly, the social sciences. We define “social complexity” as the nonlinear escalation of costs and emergent infrastructure with rising energy use and concentrated power as societies develop. Two paths to social complexity are technotasking, which relies on technological break-throughs and is often politically hierarchical, and labortasking, which relies on skilled labor pools and is often heterarchical. We suggest several pathways to greater degrees of complexity and present two case studies emphasizing the role of labor-tasking; an in-depth review of the ancient Maya and a shorter introduction to the recent Balinese. Both of these complex societies used labortasking to adapt to local ecological limitations in semitropical settings. These societies used heterarchical organizations to accretionally engineer and manage their environments, strategies that promoted long-term resilience. Case studies such as these provide a nuanced picture of different paths to social complexity and highlight their relative costs, benefits, and potential for long-term sustainability.

Forty-three years later these words still ring true, but are too seldom followed (Fedick 1996). For several years, we have been engaged in a multidisciplinary programme of research in northwestern Belize and neighbouring areas of Guatemala, eliciting a comprehensive, integrated picture of changing ancient Maya landscapes (Scarborough & Dunning 1996; Valdezet al.1997). Our goals include a reconstructive correlation of environmental and cultural history, including the relationship between changes in water and land management and political economic organization. This work is still in progress and our understanding is far from complete (Dunning & Scarborough 1997).

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