ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Ancient Maya wetland fields revealed under tropical forest canopy from laser scanning and multiproxy evidence.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Maya Postclassic persistence in the Birds of Paradise Wetland Fields, Belize.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Modeling the rise and demise of Classic Maya cities: Climate, conflict, and economies of scale.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Late Archaic large-scale fisheries in the wetlands of the pre-Columbian Maya Lowlands.Science advances · 2024Article
- Machine learning-ready remote sensing data for Maya archaeology.Scientific data · 2023Article
- Mesoamerican urbanism revisited: Environmental change, adaptation, resilience, persistence, and collapse.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Decline in seasonal predictability potentially destabilized Classic Maya societies.Communications earth & environment · 2023Article
- Drought-Induced Civil Conflict Among the Ancient Maya.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Origins and spread of formal ceremonial complexes in the Olmec and Maya regions revealed by airborne lidar.Nature human behaviour · 2021Article
- Historical socioecological transformations in the global tropics as an Anthropocene analogue.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- A Congo Basin ethnographic analogue of pre-Columbian Amazonian raised fields shows the ephemeral legacy of organic matter management.Scientific reports · 2020Article
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8 authors.
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Abstract
We report on a large area of ancient Maya wetland field systems in Belize, Central America, based on airborne lidar survey coupled with multiple proxies and radiocarbon dates that reveal ancient field uses and chronology. The lidar survey indicated four main areas of wetland complexes, including the Birds of Paradise wetland field complex that is five times larger than earlier remote and ground survey had indicated, and revealed a previously unknown wetland field complex that is even larger. The field systems date mainly to the Maya Late and Terminal Classic (∼1,400-1,000 y ago), but with evidence from as early as the Late Preclassic (∼1,800 y ago) and as late as the Early Postclassic (∼900 y ago). Previous study showed that these were polycultural systems that grew typical ancient Maya crops including maize, arrowroot, squash, avocado, and other fruits and harvested fauna. The wetland fields were active at a time of population expansion, landscape alteration, and droughts and could have been adaptations to all of these major shifts in Maya civilization. These wetland-farming systems add to the evidence for early and extensive human impacts on the global tropics. Broader evidence suggests a wide distribution of wetland agroecosystems across the Maya Lowlands and Americas, and we hypothesize the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane from burning, preparing, and maintaining these field systems contributed to the Early Anthropocene.
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