September 2011, Daily News

Scientists Uncover Clues to How the Classic Maya Sustained Their Dense Populations

Mon, Nov 07, 2011

The Maya lowlands during the ancient Maya Classic period (250 - 900 A.D.) were known to have been among the densest populated areas in the world.  And archaeologists have estimated that, even in places such as the southern Maya Mountains area of Belize where geographic and other environmental conditions could be assumed to have mitigated population growth, population density has been estimated to have been approximately 300 persons per square kilometer at one time.

How did the ancient Maya sustain these numbers?

Recent studies shed new light on how they may have done it, and how they kept their people healthy.

By taking and analyzing soil samples and microscopic phytoliths from Classic Maya archaeological sites in Belize, coupled with ethnographic data drawn from living Maya groups, a team of researchers from Cleveland State University, University of Nevada and the PaleoResearch Institute, along with Q'eqchi Maya bushmasters and Q'eqchi Maya traditional healers in the field, have uncovered evidence that could reveal clues to a sustainable agricultural strategy used by the ancient Maya to manage and exploit a variety of nutritional and medicinal plants that were key to promoting general good health and sustaining large, dense populations. The researchers also suggest that application of this traditional knowledge and practice to today's communities may be the way of the future.

The team took soil samples from excavations conducted at three Classic Maya sites located in the Bladen Branch region of the southern Maya Mountains of Belize. They dug into ancient agricultural terraces at the site of Sahonak Tasar, and into several refuse deposits (known in the archaeological lexicon as middens) associated with known ancient residential or household sites at other classic Maya locations within the Bladen Branch region. They produced some eye-opening results.

First, based on the researchers' preliminary interpretation, the excavated layers or strata from the terraces at Sahonak Tasar revealed a practice of intense cultivation that involved management and diversion of rich soil runoff from the higher elevations, and alternate growing, burning, and flooding, a technique that, while growing the needed plants, also enriched the soil.  Researchers described it in their report as "a method of intense cultivation that is quite distinct from the way in which terraces have traditionally been seen as being used."[1] Moreover, they revealed, based on an analysis of the phytoliths recovered from the soil, that the ancients were growing a myriad of both nutritional and medicinal plants within the same terraced area, in contrast to the mono-cropping, or single crop, model often cited in literature about Maya agricultural practices.  

Reports the study team, "In short, not only was a unique soil enrichment process involving slope soil catchment, burning and flooding being utilized to maintain soil fertility but a myriad of plants were being grown on these terraces." [2]  

Secondly, examination of phytolith remains from ancient Maya household middens excavated at the sites of Quebrada de Oro and Ek Xux which, like Sahonak Tasar, were also in the Bladen Branch area, suggests that they grew and processed a variety of plants close to their homes (such as in household gardens) that were high in nutritional and medicinal value. Some of the medicinal plants, in particular, are known and documented to be used by traditional Maya healers to this day.

"We argue for the medicinal function of some of the plants identified in this study based on the evidence available to us," reports the researchers, "which although not enough to be conclusive, is enough to posit supportable hypotheses. The evidence comes in the form of analogous behavior observed among Maya healers today who use the same plants that we observed in the archaeological record for medicinal purposes.......Provided we accept these lines of evidence, a long-standing tradition of use of some of these plants by modern Maya may date to the time that the Bladen Branch region was being heavily settled in the Classic period and possibly earlier."[3]

Based on previous studies, it has been theorized that the ancient Maya used four main cultivation techniques: swidden agriculture (slash-and-burn), raised fields, irrigation, and terracing.  All of these methods often required some form of clearing of trees and wild vegetation in order to create the areas or fields necessary to cultivate their crops, as it was also required to build their associated cities. Many Mayanists contend that these techniques, particularly that of the swidden, led to deforestation, adversely effecting soil quality for crops needed to sustain the dense populations and thus contributing at least in part to the collapse of the Classic Maya civilization. More recent research, however, has supported a proposal for a fifth technique or practice, known as agro-forestry, which emphasized the preservation of trees actually within the limits of human settlements, rather than cutting them down to create large open spaces. In tandem with this, consistent with the agro-forestry paradigm, some scientists and scholars suggest that the ancient Maya people created and maintained household gardens that featured a complex variety of nutritional and medicinal plants designed to sustain their households and communities, posited as a kind of "decentralized" approach to supporting the denser populations in a sustainable way. Dr. Anabel Ford of the MesoAmerican Research Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for example, has done pioneering work in spotlighting ancient or traditional agricultural techniques that produced the "Maya Forest Garden", which is an unplowed, tree-dominated agricultural area that is cultivated year-round, designed to sustain biodiversity while producing plants that meet a variety of human needs, such as food, shelter, and medicine. (See the article, The Legacy of El Pilar: The Maya Forest Garden, by Anabel Ford.)

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A view of the remains of ancient Tikal within its forest environment. Tikal sported a massive population in what was considered to be an inhospitable swampland area in the Petén Basin. What really sustained centers like these in their heyday? Wikimedia Commons.

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A Maya Forest Garden. From The Legacy of El Pilar: The Maya Forest Garden, By Anabel Ford. Credit: BRASS/El Pilar

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The field research conducted in the Bladen Branch region is only the beginning, according to the researchers:

"More research needs to be conducted in order to reconstruct the precise details of the agricultural method undertaken at Sahonak Tasar. Future work will consist of deducing the time elapsed between the growing phases and the flooding and burning events, which are believed to be soil enrichment processes. Provided this fine chronology can be reconstructed, an entirely "forgotten" method by which the ancient Maya managed to harness the environment to sustain large populations may be further clarified, and perhaps applied to benefit people today, particularly the contemporary Maya, through sustainable healthful nutritional and medicinal plant growing scenarios."[4]

[1] Linking Past and Present: A preliminary paleoethnobotanical study of Maya nutritional and medicinal plant use and sustainable cultivation in the Southern Maya Mountains, Belize, by Marc A. Abramiuk, Peter S. Dunham, Linda Scott Cummings, Chad Yost and Todd J. Pesek, Ethnobotany Research and Applications, Vol. 9, p. 268.

[2] Linking Past and Present: A preliminary paleoethnobotanical study of Maya nutritional and medicinal plant use and sustainable cultivation in the Southern Maya Mountains, Belize, by Marc A. Abramiuk, Peter S. Dunham, Linda Scott Cummings, Chad Yost and Todd J. Pesek, Ethnobotany Research and Applications, Vol. 9, p. 268.

[3] Linking Past and Present: A preliminary paleoethnobotanical study of Maya nutritional and medicinal plant use and sustainable cultivation in the Southern Maya Mountains, Belize, by Marc A. Abramiuk, Peter S. Dunham, Linda Scott Cummings, Chad Yost and Todd J. Pesek, Ethnobotany Research and Applications, Vol. 9, p. 270.

[4] Linking Past and Present: A preliminary paleoethnobotanical study of Maya nutritional and medicinal plant use and sustainable cultivation in the Southern Maya Mountains, Belize, by Marc A. Abramiuk, Peter S. Dunham, Linda Scott Cummings, Chad Yost and Todd J. Pesek, Ethnobotany Research and Applications, Vol. 9, p. 270.