12 research outputs found
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Water and landscape: Ancient Maya settlement decisions
In this chapter we present the major transitions in Maya history from the Late Preclassic through Terminal Classic periods in the Maya Lowlands, focusing first on major settlement and subsistence systems, followed by major social and environmental costs. We particularly focus on how the Maya built and relied on increasingly complex water and agricultural systems to adapt in the humid tropics where everything in life was rainfall dependent. The seasonality of rainfall required innovative strategies to contain water throughout the long dry season in the face of growing population and socio-political complexity. Drastic changes occurred when several prolonged droughts struck the Maya area, resulting in them exploring new areas and subsistence practices. The chapter concludes with a few thoughts on how understanding ancient Maya water and land use is relevant for today's issues regarding sustainable land and water use
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Tropical landscapes and the Ancient Maya: Diversity in time and space
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