Jon B. Hageman

UPLAND AGRICULTURE IN THE MAYA LOWLANDS: ANCIENT MAYA SOIL CONSERVATION IN NORTHWESTERN BELIZE*

In the 1970s scholars began to accept Maya terracing as the manifestation of ancient intensive agriculture and large populations. We examine many ancient terraces and berms excavated in the Three Rivers region of Belize, synthesize the geography and suggest the intent of terracing across the Maya Lowlands, and analyze the history of terracing and soil erosion. Terraces occur in several slope positions and diverted and slowed runoff, to build up planting surfaces that could maximize soil moisture. The first accelerated soil erosion occurred during the Preclassic period (1500 b.c.‐a.d. 250). Maya terracing started in the Early Classic period (a.d. 250–600) and spread across the Lowlands with the great population expansion of the Late/Terminal Classic period (a.d. 600–900). Thereafter, the Maya would largely forsake terracing. Though abandoned for a millennium, many terraces still function in todays tropical forests and burning milpas.

The Lineage Model and Archaeological Data in Late Classic Northwestern Belize

Central topics of anthropological study from the 1940s through the 1970s, kinship and lineage became largely discredited during the 1980s. Recent scholarship, however, has indicated that kinship and lineage, when considered as the products of social activity, can make important contributions to studies of living and past populations. This paper explores lineage as a model of social organization distinguished by specific activities practiced by members of Late Classic Maya social groups. This model is derived from cross-cultural literature on lineages, but practices associated with lineage organization are historically and culturally specific. A suite of archaeological correlates, based on practices endemic to the Late Classic Maya, is evaluated against a test case from northwestern Belize. The implications of a landscape populated by lineages during the Classic period argue that archaeological investigations of hinterland areas are an important complement to more traditional studies focused on nucleated site centers.

Power Plants: Paleobotanical Evidence of Rural Feasting in Late Classic Belize

Our recent investigations into food use and preparation at Guijarral, a small-scale Late Classic Maya settlement in Northwestern Belize, confirm Douglas’s observations on the codes embedded in foodways (Keller Brown and Mussell 1997b). Rapid regional population growth after 700 B.C. led to increasing land scarcity, which fostered new forms of social organization, including lineages. Archaeological and paleoenvironmental studies convincingly support that centuries of erosion contributed to Late Classic ecological and social milieus, and forced the pressing of ever more marginal lands into agricultural production. In this instance the marginal lands are hill slopes with thin soil coverage and lowland seasonal swamps, or bajos. Agricultural landscape modifications, including terraces and check dams, were critical to the sustainability of human habitation in these areas. Such features generated agricultural microenvironments near residential groups where people could access a wider range of foodstuffs apart from those like Zea mays (maize), Phaseolus sp. (beans), Cucurbita sp. (squash), grown using more traditional means of shifting agriculture.

House or Lineage? How Intracemetery Kinship Analysis Contributes to the Debate in the Maya Area

Houses and lineages are both named, corporate units of social organization defined in part on the connection between people and place. They are distinguished from one another by the relative emphasis on biological descent in societies organized on the basis of corporate group membership. Over the past 15 years, researchers have debated whether ancient Maya social organization was characterized by house or lineage organization. Drawing on ethnographic, epigraphic, and archaeological data, researchers have concluded that the ancient Maya had some characteristics of house societies, but that biological descent was an important principle. One relevant line of evidence conspicuously absent from this debate is biological distance analysis as a means of identifying patterns of biological relatedness within sites. In this chapter we review intracemetery analyses from Mesoamerica, focusing on the Maya area, and discuss what, if any, insight such analyses of biological spatial organization might bring to bear on the house versus lineage debate. We suggest that the use of biological distance analysis will not resolve debates about the relevant importance of house and biological lineage in ancient Maya society, but increasing incorporation of intracemetery analyses within existing research programs will help identify those the circumstances in which biological kinship was emphasized in Maya society. As such, intracemetery biodistance adds an important and independent line of evidence that is currently underutilized in studies of ancient Maya social organization.