Agriculture in the Ancient Maya Lowlands (Part 1): Paleoethnobotanical Residues and New Perspectives on Plant Management

Abstract

We focus on pre-Columbian agricultural regimes in the Maya Lowlands, using new datasets of archaeological wood charcoal, seeds, phytoliths, and starch grains; biological properties of plants; and contemporary Indigenous practices. We address inherited models of agriculture in the lowlands: the limitations of the environment (finding more affordances than anticipated by earlier models); the homogeneity of agricultural strategies (finding more heterogeneity of strategies across the lowlands than a single rigid template); the centrality of maize in agriculture (finding more reliance on root crops and tree crops than historically documented); the focus on the milpa system as food base (finding more agroforestry, homegardening, horticulture, and wild resource management than previously documented); the dominance of swidden strategies in agricultural practices (finding more diverse practices than accounted for in most models); and the foregrounding of maize crop failure in collapse models (finding more evidence of resilience and sustainable agricultural practices than predicted).

In Search of the Ancient Maya Foods. A Paleoethnobotany Study From a Non-elite Context in Sihó, Yucatán

“…Through approaches rooted in paleoethnobotany, researchers have been able to recover valuable information about plants that were consumed in the past (e.g. Morell-Hart et al 2022). These studies have…”

“…The ancient Maya people made extensive use of a wide range of plants and agricultural techniques to sustain themselves and to create diverse dishes (Fedick et al 2023;Morell-Hart et al 2022). Early ethnohistorical records documented by friars, encomenderos, and other agents of Spanish colonialism provide valuable insights into Maya people's dietary habits and emphasize the variety of plant foods they consumed.…”

“…Diverse inquiries have delved into various aspects, including social inequality (Cuéllar 2013), gastro-politics (Appadurai 1981), food preferences (Smith 2006), as well as identity, rituals, and feasts (Hastorf 2016), providing captivating insights into the broader context of food-related practices.Through approaches rooted in paleoethnobotany, researchers have been able to recover valuable information about plants that were consumed in the past (e.g. Morell-Hart et al 2022). These studies have…”

Tropical Agriculture, past and Present: Cross-Cutting Approaches to Global Challenges

“…As Briggs and colleagues (2006) stated, it is critical for archaeologists, archaeobotanists, and geoarchaeologists seeking to reconstruct prehistoric agrarian systems that we engage more systematically ecologists, foresters, agronomists, and soil specialists to better understand the environ-management of crops, a great diversity of agricultural methods has been invented almost everywhere to make plantations for cultivation and multiplication of plants. These involved management of soil, water, and vegetation through the construction of terraces, canals, and raised fields (e.g., Fedick et al 2022;Kirch 2006;McKey et al 2010;Rostain 2016), fire management (e.g., Arroyo-Kalin 2012; Woods et al 2009), agroforestry and arboriculture (e.g., Asouti and Fuller 2007;Dotte-Sarout 2017;Dussol et al 2021;Neumann et al 2012), and horticultural practices and successional crop systems (Ford and Nigh 2016;Morell-Hart et al 2022). The same advance in understanding these systems has been made regarding contemporaneous agricultural practices, which have now been shown to be deeply interwoven with historic skills and traditional knowledge of the landscape (Mollard and Walter 2008;Shepard et al 2020).…”

Maya Archaeology: Looking Forward

“…In concert, they served to foster the presumption that tropical forests were basically unsuitable for large, dense populations due to a reliance on swidden farming, tenets now shown to be historically inaccurate. 11 In the Maya lowlands, labor investments to intensify agrarian production have been extended back to early in the first millennium BCE (Hansen, The Origins of Maya States, 362).…”