Farms and forests: Spatial and temporal perspectives on ancient Maya landscapes

Abstract

Hills rose around us on every side, and, for that country, the scene was picturesque, but all waste and silent. The stillness of the grave rested upon the ruins, and the little notes of a flycatcher were the only sounds we heard (Stephens 1843, p. 113). So wrote the American explorer John L. Stephens of his visit to the ruins of Xculoc, Campeche, Mexico in 1842. Through the works of Stephens, Waldeck, Maler, Maudsley, and other nineteenth century adventurers and scholars the ruins of ancient Maya Civilization were brought to the attention of the outside world (Wauchope 1965). It is perhaps these glimpses of forest-draped ruins that gave rise to the over-used epithet 'the mysterious Maya'. While such scenes of ancient cities moldering in the forest still exist in parts of the Maya Lowlands (Fig. 23.1), rapid repopulation and deforestation is transforming forest to fields and pastures and laying bare the relicts of the ancient Maya and a once densely populated landscape. This is not the first time that the Maya forest has been in retreat. In its multifarious forms, the forest has waxed and waned many times over the past several millennia, largely at the hands of the ancient Maya, though climate changes may also have contributed to changes in vegetative cover. In this light, the Maya are hardly mysterious. Over the centuries, like people everywhere they strove to wrest a living from their environment, adapted often with great success to the rhythms of the region's tropical wet-dry climate, and sometimes failed - episodes that were marked by human population decline and forest resurgence. Over the past three decades, the spatially and temporally variable nature of the Maya Lowlands environment has become more widely appreciated, though it remains far from completely understood. A thorough review of the history of human-environment interactions in the Maya Lowlands is impossible in a few pages. In this chapter we highlight a few case studies that illuminate both the broader trends of that history as well as the nuances brought about in part by the varied nature of the lowland environment. Our review focuses particularly on the period from about 300 BC to around 900 AD; that is, from the Maya Late Preclassic through Terminal Classic period. It was during these 1400 years that Maya peoples accomplished their most enduring deeds in art and architecture, and during which their effects upon the landscape were most profound. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010.