2 Tropical Landscapes and the Ancient Maya: Diversity in Time and Space

Abstract

Archaeologists have begun to understand that many of the challenges facing our technologically sophisticated, resource dependent, urban systems were also destabilizing factors in ancient complex societies. The focus of IHOPE‐Maya is to identify how humans living in the tropical Maya Lowlands in present‐day Central America responded to and impacted their environments over the past three millennia, and to relate knowledge of those processes to modern and future coupled human–environment systems. To better frame variability in ancient lowland Maya development and decline, the area that they once occupied may be subdivided into a series of geographical regions in which the collected archaeological data can be correlated with environmental differences. Although beginning as small agricultural communities occupying a variety of ecological niches in the humid tropics of Mesoamerica, the ancient Maya became an increasingly complex set of societies involved in intensive and extensive resource exploitation. Their development process was not linear, but also involved periods of rapid growth that were punctuated by contractions. Thus, the long‐term development and disintegration of Maya geopolitical institutions presents an excellent vantage from which to study resilience, vulnerability, and the consequences of decision‐making in ancient complex societies.

Conceptualizing socio‐hydrological drought processes: The case of the Maya collapse

“…[], who derived an annual rainfall record from a stalagmite taken from Tecoh cave that is located in the north east of the Northern Lowlands (see Figure ). Mean annual rainfall is much lower (i.e., 1120 mm versus 1800 mm [ Chase et al ., ]) at this location than at Tikal, so the data of Medina‐Elizalde et al . [] have been scaled by a factor of 1.607.…”

“…Many of the water challenges the world is facing today can be better addressed by understanding societal development in the past [ Mithen and Black , ; Chase et al ., ]. There are many approaches for increasing our understanding of societies and ecosystems in the face of water scarcity.…”

8 The “Othering” of Maya Political Economies

“…Not all environmental challenges, such as droughts or hurricanes, are regionally manifested in the Maya area, and for this reason, unaffected regions could have provisioned impacted areas within reasonable transport distances (Freidel and Shaw 2000;Masson and Freidel 2013, figure 8.13). Notable differences in rainfall across portions of the Yucatán peninsula (Chase et al 2014), allowed for productive diversity and variable effects of climatic fluctuations of the sort that drive exchange dependencies. For these reasons, commerce was an integral component of the long-term sustainability of Maya states in a tropical environment.…”

“…The site-based, rather than regionally-based, research of many projects in the Maya area contributes to generating a smorgasbord of viewpoints, along with a laissez-faire attitude that tolerates interpretations of major organizational differences between sites within the same periods and zones of the Lowlands. It is important to acknowledge, on the other hand, that settlements of different sizes, political importance, and of relatively central or peripheral positions should differ in terms of factors such as wealth, the degree of occupational specialization, and economic connectedness to the greater Maya region or beyond (Chase et al 2014;Iannone, Prufer, and Chase 2014). But allowing for such variation should be viewed as a matter of degree, rather than presence or absence of foundational modes of institutional organization (such as commerce) that underwrote options for political and economic prosperity in general.…”

A distribution analysis of the central Maya lowlands ecoinformation network: its rises, falls, and changes

“…It has become clear through the study of pollen and sediment cores from rivers and lake bottoms that the Maya lowlands have been subject to radical environmental changes, both in the past and today. These may come from global influences on regional climates (Gunn et al 1995, Gunn and Folan 2000, Brenner et al 2003, anthropogenic modification of local landscapes (Chase andChase 2014, Lentz et al 2014), or more usually both (Chase and Weishampel 2016). Depending on the utility of vegetation species that provided construction, shade, and food, these species can be used as indications of anthropogenic modification of a local landscape (Hightower et al 2014).…”