Paleoecology of Belizean Bajos

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Regional landscapes are the product of the long-term dynamics of human-environment interactions. Geographers have played a critical role in such work using a combination of historical, archaeological, geoarchaeological, and physical geographical approaches to help establish the time depth, spatial extent, and causation of both intentional and unintentional human-induced environmental change associated with pre-Columbian populations in the New World. This project will test a model suggesting that large karst depressions known as bajos in the Maya Lowlands region in and near the Yucatan Peninsula were transformed by human-activity from perennial wetlands and shallow lakes to seasonal swamps between 400 B.C. and 250 A.D. This model was developed during the conduct of fieldwork in northwestern Belize and neighboring portions of Guatemala. The principal investigator and his colleagues have argued that this environmental transformation helps answer several questions that have long puzzled scholars of Maya civilization: Why were many of the earliest Maya cities built on the margins of bajos? Why were some of these early centers abandoned between 100 B.C. and 250 A.D.? Why did other centers construct elaborate water storage systems and survived into the Classic period (250 -900 A.D.)? The transformation of the bajos represents one of the most significant and long-lasting human-related environmental changes documented in the Pre-Columbian New World. This project will use conjunctive method based on paleoecological and archaeological data to document past human-environment relationships. A significant limitation of the data collected to date on the anthropogenic transformation of bajos is the proximity of study sites to ancient urban areas where human impacts may have been most severe. This project will extend the sample from northwestern Belize into areas further removed from the region's major urban centers. If the model of environmental transformation can be shown to hold in bajos of various sizes and distances from urban settlements, it will solidify basic understanding of the nature and extent of this environmental change.This project will provide a much broader spatial and environmental sample of bajo soils and sediments than currently exists. Any variability in the nature of environmental change that is detected in these new samples will be readily correlated with the presence or absence, density, and distance of archaeological settlement in surrounding areas. A clearer picture therefore should emerge as to whether the transformation of bajos from perennial to seasonal wetlands was a ubiquitous phenomenon or a change largely limited to near-urban locations. If this model of bajo transformation represents conditions affecting much of the interior portions of the central and southern Maya Lowlands, it will have important implications for understanding changes that occurred in Maya civilization towards the end of the Preclassic, including the abandonment of El Mirador, Nakbe, and nearby large Preclassic urban centers. This research also has the potential to contribute to the corpus of evidence dismissing the "leyenda verde" or "pristine myth," the idea that the ecosystems of the New World were relatively undisturbed by pre-Columbian occupation. Furthermore, the project will provide field training experience for up to ten graduate students.