Diversity, Resiliency, and IHOPE-Maya: Using the Past to Inform the Present

How can the past inform the present? Archaeologists working though IHOPE-Maya seek to address this question by using archaeological data and ecological reconstructions to explore human-nature couplings. Maya archaeologists are revitalizing and contemporizing the field to focus on issues relevant today: the socio-natural boundary and the coupled human-nature dynamic. The ancient Maya occupied a diverse range of tropical environments that permits a comparative exploration of past permutations in adaptive responses and may also be instructive concerning issues of overexploitation. The variety of places that the Maya occupied afforded diverse opportunities and constraints. By providing access to long-term historical interactions between peoples and their landscapes, archaeology is uniquely qualified to define, examine, and interpret topics like sustainability, resilience, and vulnerability that are as equally significant to the past as they are to the present. Because Maya archaeology is well positioned to analyze ancient variability in political structures and cultural adaptations that can be related to differential societal success and decline, the discipline can contribute to broader, more current, debates concerning climate change, population limits, urban forms, landscape modifications, and stability. The research being undertaken by IHOPE-Maya hopes to serve as a catalyst for transforming the field