Bioarchaeology: Interpreting behavior from the human skeleton

Zinacantan: A Maya Community in the Highlands of Chiapas.

We review historical, current, and projected future impacts of four classes of anthropogenic disturbance-extraction, pollution, reclamation, and changing climate-on Caribbean mangrove ecosystems (mangal). These disturbances occur, respectively, at increasing spatial and temporal scales, and require increasing recovery time. Small-scale selective extraction has little system-wide effect, but regeneration is slow even on single hectare clear-cuts due to rapid soil acidification. Petroleum is the primary pollutant of Caribbean mangal, and results in tree defoliation, stand death, and loss of associated sessile and mobile animal species. Hydrocarbons persist in mangrove sediments for decades, and are correlated with increasing seedling mutation rates. Chemical, industrial, and urban wastes are associated with increased heavy metal content of seedlings, stand die-back, reduced system-wide species richness, and higher incidence of Vibrio spp. (shellfish poisoning). Mangal has been reclaimed for urbanization, industrialization, and increasingly, for tourism. Overall, the region is losing mangrove forests at 1 percent per yr, although the rate is much faster on the Caribbean mainland (- 1.7% yr-1) than it is on the islands (=0.2% yr-1). The region's fisheries are declining at a similar rate, as most commercial shellfish and finfish use mangal for nurseries and/or refugia. Few Caribbean states have legislation or enforcement capabilities to protect or manage mangal, although at least 11 international treaties and conventions could be applied to conserve or sustainably use these forests. These treaties may protect riverine and basin mangal, but are likely to be moot with respect to fringing mangal, which may vanish as a consequence of global climate change. Growth enhancements of mangroves resulting from increasing atmospheric CO2 probably will not compensate for negative effects of concomitant rises in regional sea level.

Anthropogenic Disturbance of Caribbean Mangrove Ecosystems: Past Impacts, Present Trends, and Future Predictions

The ninth century collapse and abandonment of the Central Maya Lowlands in the Yucatan peninsular region were the result of complex human–environment interactions. Large-scale Maya landscape alterations and demands placed on resources and ecosystem services generated high-stress environmental conditions that were amplified by increasing climatic aridity. Coincident with this stress, the flow of commerce shifted from land transit across the peninsula to sea-borne transit around it. These changing socioeconomic and environmental conditions generated increasing societal conflicts, diminished control by the Maya elite, and led to decisions to move elsewhere in the peninsular region rather than incur the high costs of maintaining the human–environment systems in place. After abandonment, the environment of the Central Maya Lowlands largely recovered, although altered from its state before Maya occupation; the population never recovered. This history and the spatial and temporal variability in the pattern of collapse and abandonment throughout the Maya lowlands support the case for different conditions, opportunities, and constraints in the prevailing human–environment systems and the decisions to confront them. The Maya case lends insights for the use of paleo- and historical analogs to inform contemporary global environmental change and sustainability.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/109/35/13908.full.pdf

Classic Period collapse of the Central Maya Lowlands: Insights about human–environment relationships for sustainability

Over the past two decades, household studies have coalesced into a recognized subfield within archaeology. Despite this relatively short history, household archaeologists are now taking a leading role in epistemological shifts that are placing people and their practices and differences at the center of archaeological interpretations of the past, rather than subsuming these into the “noise” of passive and depersonalized depictions of ancient social systems. As Maya archaeologists have played a critical role in the development of household archaeology, examining recent trends in Maya household research provides a perspective on the directions of both Maya studies and household archaeology more generally. This article explores three interrelated trends: (1) understanding ordinary people; (2) understanding social diversity among households; (3) understanding households in articulation with the broder social universe. Through a discussion of these three trends, this review uses Classic Maya household archaeology as a case study to illustrate how household research has led to the development of theoretically rich and empirically substantive understandings of an ancient society, which repeople the past and foreground the active roles of and structural constraints on ancient people.

New Directions in Classic Maya Household Archaeology

Between 1984 and 1989, the San Diego State University Mopan–Macal Triangle Project carried out six extended seasons of fieldwork oriented toward documenting the internal sociobehavioral structure and organization of a representative Classic period community in the southern Maya Lowlands The project also undertook to delineate the spatial boundaries of several such contiguous communities and to test a selected set of alternative models for Classic period political organization at the local and regional levels This article summarizes our approach to understanding political organization and presents our preliminary conclusions: a model of the so-called segmentary state type as recently espoused by several researchers best approximates the reality of internal political organization at the single polity level during the Late Classic period of the southern Maya Lowlands

Late Classic Lowland Maya Political Organization and Central-Place Analysis: New insights from the Upper Belize Valley

OUT OF THE PALACE DUMPS: Ceramic production and use at Buenavista del Cayo

The term “Protoclassic,” employed regularly but inexplicitly in the literature of lowland Maya archaeology, has become increasingly nebulous and ambiguous in both meaning and usage. This paper reviews the history and use of the term and presents a formal redefinition of the Protoclassic as a ceramic stage based explicitly and exclusively on ceramic criteria. Some suggestions regarding future use of the term also are offered. The paper further addresses and resolves a number of persisting questions regarding Protoclassic orange wares, including problems concerning the actual existence of the “Aguacate ceramic group.” and the relationships of Aguacate-group pottery to other emergent orange wares of the terminal Late Preclassic and initial Early Classic periods. The nature and significance of the “Holmul I Style,” the “Floral Park Ceramic Sphere.” and the relationships of the two to each other and the larger, redefined “protoclassic” ceramic stage also are examined. A spatial distribution for protoclassic ceramics considerably expanded over what has ever been reported previously is described, and Chronometric data are presented to support a revised chronology for the protoclassic ceramic stage. Finally, ceramic data are offered that suggest a real subdivision of the protoclassic ceramic stage into an early, emergent facet originating entirely within Late Preclassic lowland traditions, and a later, fully “Classic” facet corresponding to the early Tzakol (Tzakol 1) ceramic horizon.

The Lowland Maya “Protoclassic”

The prehistoric Lowland Maya supported an elaborate civilization, which reached peak population densities in the tropical forests of Guatemala, Belize and southern Mexico during the Classic period between AD 300 and 900. It has been proposed that the Maya turned to labour-intensive construction of raised planting platforms in wetlands for year-round cultivation. Excavations at San Antonio Rio Hondo, northern Belize1, provided the first archaeological data for this hypothesis. In our analysis of data from the San Antonio site, we conclude that the only indisputable evidence that prehistoric wetland cultivation occurred comes from a time before peak population of the Classic period, and that the technique required less labour than previously envisioned. Exploitation of swampy terrain initially involved dry-season cropping without extensive ditching and later ditching, probably for soil drainage.

Prehistoric Maya wetland agriculture and the alluvial soils near San Antonio Rio Hondo, Belize

Despite more than two decades of extensive and highly productive research programs by a series of institutions and individuals focusing specifically on the Preclassic archaeology of the Belize River Valley, understanding and appreciation of the region's ceramic tradition and interpreted culture history today effectively remain based on, and dependent on, unmodified conceptual formulations from the 1940s through the 1960s. These incorporate a view of the zonal Preclassic ceramic sequence as the physical embodiment of a uniform and even unitary local producer–consumer system tied directly and genetically to the later Classic and Postclassic Maya inhabitants of the region. In this paper, we question both these assumptions and the soundness of the conceptual constructs (ceramic complexes) and framework (ceramic sequence) on which they are based. We examine the content and analyze the composition of the Belize Valley Middle and Late Preclassic ceramic complexes as dynamic, composite, producer–consumer circulation assemblages rather than as static, synthetic archaeological units, and we conclude that they reflect a much more complex socioeconomic, cultural, and sociopolitical landscape than has yet been recognized and appreciated by other investigators. We propose the presence and interaction within the valley during the Middle and Late Preclassic of at least two distinct dialectal, ethnic, or ethnolinguistic groups, and we argue that the local cultural tradition emerging in the area by the ceramic Protoclassic represented a ranked amalgamation of these. The paper also presents the first comprehensive and complete type-variety typologies for the Middle through Late Preclassic ceramic complexes of the upper Belize Valley, incorporating both new data from the 1980s and 1990s and substantive revisions of earlier work by J. E. S. Thompson and James C. Gifford.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0956536103142034

Joseph W. Ball

Papers

Late Classic Lowland Maya Political Organization and Central-Place Analysis: New insights from the Upper Belize Valley

OUT OF THE PALACE DUMPS: Ceramic production and use at Buenavista del Cayo

The Lowland Maya “Protoclassic”

Prehistoric Maya wetland agriculture and the alluvial soils near San Antonio Rio Hondo, Belize

RECONSIDERING THE BELIZE VALLEY PRECLASSIC: A case for multiethnic interactions in the development of a regional culture tradition