HUMAN AND NATURAL CHANGES IN MAYA LOWLANDS WETLANDS OVER THE HOLOCENE

Wetlands and other water bodies provide natural laboratories for collecting ecofacts and artifacts to test hypotheses about the drivers of environmental change, including human agency. The degree to which that human agency is shaping environmental change has driven discussion of a new era called the “Anthropocene” for the past half century and in diverse fields. In this paper we consider the Mayacene or Maya Anthropocene based on the relative amount of environmental change and the geoarchaeological markers of Maya Civilization, with a special focus on Maya Lowlands Wetlands. Our work over the last two decades in the Maya Lowlands has produced and tested models of human-environmental interaction in wetland formation and change. These models are based on several lines of evidence for how much the Maya changed their environment, and include the characteristic geomorphological, geochemical, archaeological, and paleoecological records deposited in hydrologic contexts. The Mayacene includes characteristic stratigraphic markers that indicate the period of large-scale changes across the Maya Lowlands. These include the well-known “Maya Clays” occurring in many depositional environments. The second are carbon isotope ratios that show increases of δ13C in depositional sediments associated with radiocarbon dates to the Maya period. The third marker includes building materials still present in the landscape, which include limestone, plaster, and ceramics; some wattle and daub; and plant materials. The fourth marker is in food production, including pollen from economic species, and landesque capital features such as wetland fields, terraces, canals, dams, and anthrosols. All of these continue to influence ecosystems, sediment chemistry, and physical landscapes. The lines of published information present clear evidence of vast changes. Yet our studies have covered only a small part of the Maya World, therefore it is clear that we are still at an early stage in understanding and connecting the spatial and temporal impacts of the Ancient Maya on wetlands, to better delineate the Mayacene.