WATER CHEMISTRY AND THREE MILLENNIA OF HUMAN-HYDROLOGIC INTERACTIONS IN THE MAYA LOWLANDS

There have been many papers on water resources and the Ancient Maya but few using water quality and water chemistry as proxies. For this session on geoarchaeology at the micro-scale, we focus on the molecular scale and what we can learn about water use and environmental potentials from geochemistry. While more research has been published for the northern portion of the Yucatan Peninsula, (in Modern day Mexico), less is known about the hydrogeochemistry of the southern Yucatan Peninsula portions of Belize and of the Peten Region of Guatemala, in the heart of the Maya Lowlands. This paper presents newly collected data and synthesized original field and lab data sets from decades of water chemical analyses across Northern Belize and Northern Guatemala, showing sharp contrasts in chemistry and habitation. We also compare results with those for the northern half of the Yucatan Peninsula and the Northern Maya lowlands, to continue to create a larger regional picture of surface water, groundwater, and hydrogeologic influences, interactions, opportunities, and limitations for ancient and modern water uses in the region. One specific problem with the region’s water chemistry that influences modern and ancient water use and geomorphology is the presence of high amounts of calcium and sulfate in certain aquifers. This results from gypsum lithologies and we present new links between these lithologies, groundwater chemistry, and impacts on soils as the gypsum precipitates out of solution.