The Development of Landesque Capital in the Maya Lowlands During the Middle Preclassic (original) (raw)
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Journal of Archaeological Research, 2023
Pre-Columbian food production in the Maya Lowlands was long characterized as reliant on extensive, slash-and-burn agriculture as the sole cultivation system possible in the region, given environmental limitations, with maize as the dominant crop. While aspects of this "swidden thesis" of Maya agriculture have been chipped away in recent years, there has been an underappreciation of the many forms of long-term capital investments in agriculture made by ancient Maya people. Here, we review the last three decades of research that has overturned the swidden thesis, focusing on long-term strategies. We demonstrate long-lasting agricultural investments by Maya people, in social capital including multigenerational land tenure, in cultivated capital including long-lived trees, and in landesque capital including soil amendments and landscape engineering projects, such as terracing and wetland modification.
The Real Business of Ancient Maya Economies: From Farmers Fields to Rulers Realms, 2020
Archaeological mapping, excavations, and investigations in 51 ancient cities of varying sizes in the Mirador Basin of northern Guatemala have revealed a variety of data relevant to the economic catalysts that were involved in the rise of social, political, and economic sophistication among the Preclassic Maya. New technologies recently implemented in the Mirador Basin and other areas of Mesoamerica are helping to reveal and understand the nature of sociopolitical structure and vital economies among early complex societies. It can be emphasized, though, that the real “business” of the early Maya dealt initially with agricultural productivity and the formation of an administrative centralized organization to deal with the lack of critical resources such as water. Importantly, a powerful distribution mechanism developed in the form of a sophisticated causeway system to distribute goods and commodities and facilitate unification among a web of sites in the Mirador Basin. The initial formation and success of these kick-starting administrative formations led to a variety of other economic indicators such as the importation of exotic shells, domestic fauna, obsidian, jade, basalt, granite, coral, ceramics, and other lithic tools. These exchanges demonstrate the varying degrees of social and economic power that provided the foundations of rank, status, and functional requirements during the rise of Maya civilization.
The Origins of Maya States, 2016
Recent archaeological investigations throughout the Maya lowlands have provided new data pertaining to the sophistication and complexity of early Maya "civilization." The resultant information , reviewed here in diachronic format and in synchronic contexts, provides an empirical foundation for conclusions and hypotheses that can be further investigated and tested.This chapter proposes that the first lowland Maya states began to emerge in the Middle Preclassic period (ca. 1000–400 BCE), perhaps jointly with thedevelopments at La Venta, and flourished during the Late Preclassic period (ca. 300 BCE–150 CE), led by developments in the Mirador Basin of northern Guatemala, and southern Campeche, Mexico. The resultant hypotheses derived from a series of multi-disciplinary investigations suggest: (1) The Preclassic lowland Maya developed one of the first states in Mesoamerica through a sequentially defined process that evolved into a four-tier hierarchy of settlement distribution and socio-political organization within a specific territorial area; (2) the origins of states in Mesoamerica, and in particular within the Mirador Basin, are found in the Middle Preclassic period, between ca. 1000 and 400 BCE, with more expansive states appearing by the latter part of the Middle Preclassic and the early Late Preclassic periods (ca. 400–200 BCE); (3) lowland Maya states were the result of autochthonous processes likely inspired and spurred by competitive ideologies and peer polity interactions, consistent with other models of political and economic evolution; (4) in a two-way process other Mesoamerican societies, including those on the Gulf and Pacific coasts and in the Mexican Highlands (see Chapters 3–5, this volume), provided important ingredients to contemporaneous Mesoamerican social and political identities which the lowland Maya adopted, adapted, and integrated in their social memory, while contributing some of their own innovations to other Mesoamerican societies in the process; (5) the economic, architectural, and ideological components of early lowland Maya society provided the cultural foundations for later Maya states in the Classic period.