Understanding ancient Maya water resources and the implications for a more sustainable future

Abstract

Archeological research often provides a glimpse into the daily lives and generational outcomes of our collective past, but rarely does it lead to significant effects on living (and possibly future) populations. Understanding the impact early civilizations had on their environment has been an active area of study since the 1950s. As one of the most vital resources, water is central to many of these scholarly endeavors. Research has shown that land use is a primary factor on the functionality of a watershed. Our hypothesis is that simulating past climate and hydrology of a watershed with probable land use scenarios can create a virtual experiment to explore a range of conditions for water availability and use in prehistoric landscapes. The ancient Maya lived in a varied environment with highly seasonal precipitation and landscapes that required vastly different water management strategies. Many of these ancient centers maintained dense populations that ultimately forced unsustainable land use practices. Our approach is to apply simulated climate projections to evaluate the hydrologic performance of watersheds surrounding the Classic Maya sites of Palenque, Mexico and Tikal, Guatemala. An important conclusion from our work at Palenque is that virtual data can provide a plausible framework for assessing the sustainability of water use strategies, past and present. This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Planning Water Science of Water > Water and Environmental Change Science of Water > Water Extremes

The drop that makes a vase overflow: Understanding Maya society through daily water management

“…As for other ancient civilizations, water was vital for the Maya. Many have studied the water systems in the Southern Maya lowlands, with varying results (Braswell et al, ; Chase & Chase, ; Crandall, ; Folan et al, ; French & Duffy, ; French, Duffy, & Bhatt, ; Gallopin, ; Gill, ; Lentz, Dunning, & Scarborough, 2015a; Lentz, Dunning, & Scarborough, ; Lucero, ; Lucero & Fash, ; Scarborough, , ; Scarborough et al, ; Scarborough & Gallopin, ; Scarborough & Lucero, ; Wyatt, ). This paper can only reference a subset of the huge number of water‐papers for the Maya, but it is obvious that in general water in the Maya area must have been associated with power relations.…”

Diversity in ancient Maya water management strategies and landscapes at Caracol, Belize, and Tikal, Guatemala

“…Each of these features provided a means for adapting water storage solutions to cope with the wet and dry seasonality of the Maya lowlands, sequestering water during the abundant wet season to provide for the multi-month dry season. The catchment and volume of these features requires detailed future analysis (sensu French & Duffy, 2014;French, Duffy, & Bhatt, 2013).…”

Open science in practice: Learning integrated modeling of coupled surface‐subsurface flow processes from scratch

“…The idea behind the development of PIHM was to support and realize the concept of “community models” for environmental predictions. After decades of development, the utility of PIHM spreads out to the areas of archeology [ French and Duffy , ; Jazwa et al ., ], critical zone processes [ Duffy et al ., ; Shi et al ., ], flood assessment [ Chen et al ., ], forest management [ Yu et al ., ], hydrologic data assimilation [ Shi et al ., , ], landscape evolution [ Zhang et al , ], land surface energy balance [ Shi et al ., ], scalable computing [ Kumar and Duffy , ], and snowmelt runoff simulation [ Kumar et al ., ; Wang et al ., ; Jepsen et al ., ]. A typical application workflow is shown in Figure .…”