Origins of the Biological–Cultural Heritage of the Maya Forest

Dear Colleagues,

Despite the evidence of successful tropical adaptations provided by the settlements and monuments of the Maya civilization, traditional Maya land use strategies have been maligned as primitive. Agricultural methods documented at the time of the conquest were legislated against in the Colonial period and oppressed in the 19th century, and yet they demonstrate persistence and resilience to this day. Denigrating the milpa forest garden cycle as shifting agriculture fails to identify the quality of dynamic regeneration. The landscape is utilized in an asynchronous cycle that includes open fields of annual crops, perennial succession providing products used in the home, and closed-canopy forests for fruits and construction materials. This edited collection addresses the question of sustainability using cutting-edge techniques of spatial analysis, remote sensing data, and traditional ecological knowledge from living Maya farmers. Combining settlement data and DEM-derived slope maps to quantify thresholds to define areas suitable for traditional milpa cycle agriculture or more intensive practices, this collection of papers examines the landscape of the Maya forest. The collective authors each model milpa cycle to test the limits of land use at specific ancient centers in the Maya forest. The work explores potential variability in the agricultural production of the Maya and investigates strategies of traditional land use in the tropical Maya lowlands. The results guide a discussion of the sustainability and sufficiency of the milpa cycle within the Maya forest with implications for similar strategies around the world.

Tropical forests are regularly dismissed as fragile landscapes with resources that are inadequate for sustaining large populations without substantial alteration. This is the very attitude currently putting these environments at risk. Yet, long-surviving food production practices, involving sophisticated understandings of forest ecology and the benefits of managing vegetation for land cover, suggest Indigenous populations in the tropics did indeed develop sustainable practices, skills, strategies, and methods to support themselves in such environments. The example of the Maya milpa-forest-garden is one case among many, which is worthy of detailed investigation to identify traditional ecological knowledge from the past that can inform development programs and policies of the future.

The aim of the Special Issue is to gather a collection of archaeologists working with Lidar working with Geographic Information Systems to examine areas of architecture and cultivable lands in the Maya forest.

Dr. Anabel Ford
Dr. Sherman W. Horn III
Guest Editors

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• tropical mesoamerica
• Maya Lowlands
• settlement pattern
• agriculture
• sustainability
• lidar