Using Animal Remains to Reconstruct Ancient Landscapes and Climate in the Central and Southern Maya Lowlands (co-authored with Kitty Emery) (original) (raw)
Animal remains from Maya archaeological deposits provide a valuable proxy for reconstructing landscape history and the potential role of human activities and climate. Both human-induced habitat destruction and climate change have been proposed as causal to several Maya cultural transitions including the Classic Maya "collapse". Current environmental reconstructions rely on paleoenvironmental data from lakebed and other non-archaeological sedimentary cores. These are difficult to correlate with archaeological chronologies and generally record conditions at considerable distances from ancient Maya settlements. We use animal remains from Preclassic through Postclassic archaeological sites as proxy data for changing terrestrial and aquatic habitats in the central and southern Maya lowlands. We find that terrestrial fauna record highly site-specific landscape conditions while aquatic fauna from small water systems (swamps, creeks, and reservoirs) may reveal correlations with regional climate conditions. Animal remains provide a local record that can add site-level detail to regional paleoenvironmental reconstructions and can be directly linked to the cultural deposits that are used to define cultural events at each site.
Sign up for access to the world's latest research.
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.