SOIL CATENAS AND THE FUTURE OF SOIL CHRONOSEQUENCES IN THE MAYA LOWLANDS (Invited Presentation)

With each new discovery from remote sensing and field investigations, evidence grows for ever more anthropogenic soil impacts on the Maya Lowlands. Most of these impacts occurred from 3000 to 1000 or 500 years ago associated with formation of massive and widespread infrastructure (cities, temples, terraces, roads, fields). This ancient infrastructure expunged, buried, altered, and created soils, thus producing soil degradation and soil enhancement. All of these provide potential insight into soil formation because they provide time lines when soil change occurred and provide proxy evidence of past uses. This paper presents new and synthesized evidence of soil evolution over time on slopes, terraces, footslopes, and depressions both karstic and alluvial landforms. We develop models about soils in these landscape positions and propose a systematic approach to more fully study soil formation and human impacts over time on them. For example, soil crests in this landscape are areas the ancient Maya used for cities and farms, including terraced agriculture. We consider a group of crest soils and suggest studying aspects of soils across Maya infrastructure of known ages: buried soils from 4000 years ago and later and soils on Maya structures that date to the Early Preclassic, around 3000 years ago, the Late Preclassic, around 2000 years ago, the Late Classic, around 1200 years ago, and the Post Classic, around 500 years ago. New Lidar technology provides many newly discovered Maya features with slopes at specific gradients on mounds, plazas, terraces, and wetland fields. Thus we can hold many environmental factors constant. This paper considers the chronology, paleoproxy evidence, the typical soil tests to characterize soils and chronosequences, and what these lines of evidence can tell us about soil formation over time and about the early anthropocene of ancient Maya soil impacts.