No abstract

The ninth century collapse and abandonment of the Central Maya Lowlands in the Yucatán peninsular region were the result of complex human-environment interactions. Large-scale Maya landscape alterations and demands placed on resources and ecosystem services generated high-stress environmental conditions that were amplified by increasing climatic aridity. Coincident with this stress, the flow of commerce shifted from land transit across the peninsula to sea-borne transit around it. These changing socioeconomic and environmental conditions generated increasing societal conflicts, diminished control by the Maya elite, and led to decisions to move elsewhere in the peninsular region rather than incur the high costs of maintaining the human-environment systems in place. After abandonment, the environment of the Central Maya Lowlands largely recovered, although altered from its state before Maya occupation; the population never recovered. This history and the spatial and temporal variability in the pattern of collapse and abandonment throughout the Maya lowlands support the case for different conditions, opportunities, and constraints in the prevailing human-environment systems and the decisions to confront them. The Maya case lends insights for the use of paleo-and historical analogs to inform contemporary global environmental change and sustainability.Mesoamerica | complex systems | land management

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 195.34.79.79 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 17:44:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsAncient civic centers materialize ideas of proper spatial organization, among the Maya as in other societies. We argue that the position and arrangement of ancient Maya buildings and arenas emphatically express statements about cosmology and political order. At the same time, the clarity of original spatial expression is often blurred in the sites we observe archaeologically.Factors responsible for such blurring include multiple other influences on planning and spatial order, prominently the political life history of a civic center. Specifically, we argue here that centers with relatively short and simple political histories are relatively easy to interpret spatially. Those with longer development, but relatively little upheaval, manifest more elaborate but relatively robust and internally consistent plans. Sites with longer and more turbulent political histories, however, materialize a more complex cumulative mix of strategies and plausibly, therefore, of varying planning principles invoked by sequent ancient builders. We examine evidence for these assertions by reference to civic layouts at Copa'n, Xunantunich, Sayil, Seibal, and Tikal.En los antiguos centros cfvicos se materializan ideas acerca de la organizacion espacial adecuada, tanto entre los mayas como entre otras sociedades. En este estudio se propone que la ubicacion y la disposicion de antiguos edificios y espacios abiertos mayas expresan enfaticamente ideas respecto a la cosmologfa y el orden polftico. Al mismo tiempo, la claridad de la expresion espacial original a menudo es difusa en los sitios arqueologicos, debido a muchas otras in;Quencias en la planeacion y el orden espaciales, sobre todo la historia de la vida polftica de cada centro cfvico. Espeefficamente proponemos que los centros que tienen historias polfticas cortas y simples son relativamente faciles de interpretar espacialmente, mientras que aquellos con desarrollos mas prolongados, aunque con agitacion polftica limitada, presentan una planeacion interna mas elaborada y relativamente fuerte. Sin embargo, en los asentamientos con historias polfticas largas y mas turbulentas, se materializa una mezela ma's compleja de estrategias y, presumiblemente, en consecuencia quienes los construyeron se basaron en una amplia variedad de principios de planeacion. En este estudio exploramos las evidencias para fundamentar estas propuestas refiriendo a la disposicion cfvica de Copan, Xunantunich, Sayil, Seibal y Tikal.Recognizing and interpreting spatial order has a long and rich history, with inquiries from varied perspectives and many disciplines (e.g...

Research Articles: "Doc2b is a high-affi nity Ca 2+ sensor for spontaneous neurotransmitter release" by A. J. Groffen et al. (26 March, p. 1614). Several author affi liations were not footnoted properly; three corrected affi liations follow.

This article represents a systematic effort to answer the question, What are archaeology’s most important scientific challenges? Starting with a crowd-sourced query directed broadly to the professional community of archaeologists, the authors augmented, prioritized, and refined the responses during a two-day workshop focused specifically on this question. The resulting 25 “grand challenges” focus on dynamic cultural processes and the operation of coupled human and natural systems. We organize these challenges into five topics: (1) emergence, communities, and complexity; (2) resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse; (3) movement, mobility, and migration; (4) cognition, behavior, and identity; and (5) human-environment interactions. A discussion and a brief list of references accompany each question. An important goal in identifying these challenges is to inform decisions on infrastructure investments for archaeology. Our premise is that the highest priority investments should enable us to address the most important questions. Addressing many of these challenges will require both sophisticated modeling and large-scale synthetic research that are only now becoming possible. Although new archaeological fieldwork will be essential, the greatest pay off will derive from investments that provide sophisticated research access to the explosion in systematically collected archaeological data that has occurred over the last several decades.