“Stories of Ancient Resilience in the Maya Lowlands: Ancient Maya Hydrologic Landscapes”

The symbolic and social life of water was just as important to the Maya as their intricate hydraulic engineering. LiDAR mapping and fieldwork verification including geochemistry and paleoecology have confirmed more ancient Maya wetland agricultural sites in the Maya Lowlands than previously known, signifying its importance to the ancient Maya, and shedding new light on the spatial scale of hydrologic engineering, agricultural productivity, sustainability, and agricultural inputs to the Early Anthropocene. The Ancient Maya constructed a variety of hydrologic structures to manage soil moisture and water, including reservoirs, dams, canals, and wells. We use LiDAR mapping and site verification through multi-proxy evidence including water chemistry and soil chemistry, ecofacts and artifacts, and carbon dating for wetland fields’ and other hydrologic features’ origins and use, focusing on Northwestern Belize. This work draws from our three-decade record of studying Neotropical humanized landscapes and wetland agroecosystems and more recent quantification from ground-verified LiDAR imagery, and then places ancient Maya wetland agriculture in Belize and the Maya lowlands in the context of growing research on the broader Americas, and global research on the impacts of early agriculture on climate and the onset of the Early Anthropocene. 

Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach is Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin, where she holds the Raymond Dickson Centennial Professorship of Liberal Arts, and is co-Director of the Beach/Butzer Geoarchaeology Labs. She served as Department Chair from 2014-2018, as the first woman to ever lead the Department. Dr. Luzzadder-Beach is Associate Faculty of the Theresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and was Fellow of the C.B. Smith Centennial Chair in U.S.-Mexico Relations from 2014-2019. Her research specializes in Hydrology and Geoarchaeology of the Maya World, Geomorphology, Water Chemistry, and Spatial Statistics. She is a Fellow and Past President of the American Association of Geographers, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and her B.A. in Geography from California State University at Chico.