WETLAND FORMATION AND ANCIENT MAYA LAND USES IN THE MAYA LOWLANDS

Wetland agriculture was an important interaction between the ancient Maya and the environment, but we still know little about the chronology, productivity, and formation of these systems. We use a new suite of paleoecological proxies for understanding soil geomorphology and ancient Maya use of the Birds of Paradise, Chan Cahal, and newly studied wetland fields of Belize. Multiple methods include carbon isotopic ratios, elemental analysis, pollen, phytoliths, macro-botanicals, and soil and water chemistry. These wetlands lie in perennially moist coastal plain depressions and floodplains with water tables that vary seasonally from 2 m below the surface to above the surface. These floodplain wetlands have experienced aggradation over the last 2500 years by five different mechanisms: accelerated soil erosion, climatic change, flooding, field building, and a water table rise of water sources saturated with calcium and sulfate ions. This latter mechanism is a rarer geomorphic process of environmental change that occurred across periods of intensive Maya land use. At Chan Cahal and the Birds of Paradise, the ancient Maya responded to environmental change in piecemeal and preplanned, large-scale efforts to build 900-meter-long ditches to carve out new land for agricultural uses during the Classic Period (c. 1700-1100 BP). This correlates in time with intense and widespread demographic and climatic changes. We compare these findings with other models of ancient Maya wetland use over time and space and present new findings on wetland formation and ancient Maya wetland interactions across northern Belize.