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Ecology and Ritual: Water Management and the Maya
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How the ancient Maya of the central Yucatecan Lowlands managed their water and land resources remains poorly known, although crucial to an understanding of ancient political economy. Recent archival research and field data suggest the widespread use of artificially altered, natural depressions for the collection and containment of water, both for potable consumption and agricultural ends. During the Classic period (A. D. 250-900) several of the principal cities in the Maya area constructed their largest architecture and monuments at the summit of hills and ridges. Associated with these elevated centers—”water mountains”—were sizable, life-sustaining reservoirs quarried into their summits. The effect of this town-planning design was the centralization of a primary and fundamental resource. Although elite managers controlled the water source, other decentralizing forces prevented anything similar to Wittfogel's “total power.” However, by ritually appropriating the everyday and mundane activities associated with water by the sustaining population, elites used high-performance water ritual as manifest in the iconography to further centralize control. The significance of modifying the urban landscape in the partial image of the ordinary water hole defines the extraordinary in Maya ritual.
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... The Maya civilization in Mesoamerica (around 2000 B.C.-1500 A.D.) faced significant challenges with water availability due to the seasonal nature of rainfall in the region. In response, the Maya developed a range of water management techniques, including the construction of reservoirs, cisterns, and channels to capture and store rainwater [64]. These systems were critical for supporting large urban populations in regions that lacked permanent rivers. ...
... The city collects stormwater through an extensive network of drains, canals, and reservoirs that capture rainwater for reuse [66]. This approach echoes ancient techniques used by civilizations such as the Maya, who also relied on reservoirs and cisterns to store rainwater during periods of drought [64]. ...
... These projects not only reduce flood risks but also replenish groundwater supplies, making the city more resilient to drought. Los Angeles' use of rainwater harvesting echoes the practices of ancient civilizations such as the Maya, who developed systems of reservoirs and cisterns to capture rainwater during periods of seasonal rainfall [64]. In modern Los Angeles, the use of permeable pavements, detention basins, and urban water gardens helps mitigate water scarcity while reducing the impact of urban runoff on local ecosystems. ...
As urban centers worldwide face the escalating impacts of climate change, rapid urbanization, and increasing water scarcity, the need for sustainable water management practices to enhance urban resilience in the Anthropocene has become critical. This study explores how ancient water management practices—including Roman aqueducts, Maya rainwater harvesting systems, and ancient Chinese flood control techniques—can be adapted to address contemporary water challenges in modern cities. We evaluate these historical practices through a lens of contemporary environmental pressures, including climate change, urbanization, and resource scarcity. By integrating ancient methods with modern technologies, we propose adaptive solutions to enhance urban water resilience. Case studies from five cities (Singapore, Copenhagen, Mexico City, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia) illustrate how modern green infrastructure, inspired by ancient techniques, is being successfully implemented to manage stormwater, mitigate urban flooding, and improve water conservation. By integrating historical practices with modern technologies—such as advanced filtration systems and water recycling—these cities are enhancing their water resilience and sustainability. The findings suggest that urban planners can draw valuable lessons from historical systems to design adaptive, climate-resilient cities that balance human needs with ecological sustainability. This paper concludes with actionable recommendations for future urban planning, emphasizing the importance of decentralized water systems, nature-based solutions, and community engagement to ensure sustainable urban water management in the Anthropocene.
... Los estudios de Scarborough (1996, 1998) y Scarborough et al. (2003 hacen hincapié en la forma en que los antiguos mayas de las tierras bajas de Yucatán central administraron sus recursos hídricos e indican que comprender esto es crucial para entender la economía política antigua. Scarborough (1998) sugiere que el uso generalizado de depresiones naturales alteradas artificialmente para la recolección y contención de agua, tanto para consumo potable como para fines agrícolas, constituyó la arquitectura y los monumentos de varias de las principales ciudades del área maya durante el período Clásico (250-900 d. ...
... Los estudios de Scarborough (1996, 1998) y Scarborough et al. (2003 hacen hincapié en la forma en que los antiguos mayas de las tierras bajas de Yucatán central administraron sus recursos hídricos e indican que comprender esto es crucial para entender la economía política antigua. Scarborough (1998) sugiere que el uso generalizado de depresiones naturales alteradas artificialmente para la recolección y contención de agua, tanto para consumo potable como para fines agrícolas, constituyó la arquitectura y los monumentos de varias de las principales ciudades del área maya durante el período Clásico (250-900 d. C.). ...
El objetivo de la presente investigación fue examinar, mediante la teoría de grafos y el análisis bibliométrico, la producción científica relacionada con la gestión ancestral del agua. El desarrollo metodológico constó de dos fases. La primera fase consistió en un mapeo científico del área mediante un análisis bibliométrico de la producción científica registrada en Scopus y Web of Science. La segunda fase consistió en un análisis de red que permitió establecer los documentos más destacados sobre el manejo ancestral del agua, así como determinar las principales perspectivas en las que se enmarcan las investigaciones actuales en este campo. Los resultados evidencian que en los últimos cinco años se ha publicado el 43 % de las investigaciones realizadas en este campo. La producción científica por países muestra que Estados Unidos y China lideran la producción científica. La red de coocurrencia de palabras confirma la relación entre un suministro y manejo adecuados del agua y la sostenibilidad del recurso hídrico, del suelo, del riego y, por ende, de los cultivos agrícolas. El análisis de la red ha arrojado dos perspectivas de interés para futuras investigaciones: 1) experiencias y lecciones del manejo del agua de las culturas antiguas para el presente, y 2) estructuras y uso de materias primas en las hidrotecnologías ancestrales. Las perspectivas para futuras investigaciones sobre el manejo ancestral del agua son numerosas, en especial aquellas que articulan las lecciones aprendidas del pasado y las preocupaciones actuales.
... Archaeologists have debated the role of water management in the emergence of a Maya elite class and the political systems that promoted social inequality. For some researchers, due to the challenges of accessing water during dry periods in the Maya Lowlands, the control of reservoirs and other permanent water sources was instrumental in the development and maintenance of elite rulership, both functionally and ritually [63][64][65][66][67]. Alternatively, other archaeological data suggest that, at some sites, hydrological infrastructure was evenly spread across the community and controlled at the household level [34,[68][69][70][71]. ...
Landscape-oriented approaches in archaeology have moved beyond site-based research to interpret how people have engaged with, modified, and constructed the environment and how the legacies of these activities continue to influence land use. In the Maya Lowlands, landscape archaeology is related to the analysis of settlement patterns, households, agricultural intensification, and water management. The increasing availability of LiDAR data has revolutionized the mapping of archaeological landscapes under vegetation, especially in tropical environments like the Maya Lowlands, but researchers still emphasize site-oriented settlement densities and infrastructure. Furthermore, the accessibility of drone-based LiDAR platforms has the potential to collect data across several seasons or years to facilitate change detection. In this paper, we compare three LiDAR datasets collected from 2018 to 2023, using both occupied and unoccupied airborne systems. The landscape surrounding the archaeological site of El Infiernito, Chiapas, Mexico near the Classic period (AD 250–800) dynastic capital of Piedras Negras, Guatemala was selected to compare these LiDAR datasets in the context of prior, extensive ground-based fieldwork. These data were used to interpret the built environment, land use, hydrology, landscapes of movement, and other infrastructure constructed and modified by several communities beginning in the Late Preclassic period (400 BC–AD 250) to the present. When used alongside systematic survey and ground verification, the combination of several LiDAR platforms to collect data across different seasons at El Infiernito enhanced the understanding of the spatial distribution of archaeological sites and features across the karst landscape.
... El Pilar dispels the myth of river attractions with its ridgeland location, but this does not undermine the importance of water for the Maya (Ford 1996). The Maya developed sophisticated methods for harvesting water and managing its flow, as revealed by reservoirs systematically associated with monumental architecture and complex drainage systems across the region (Ford 1986;Scarborough 1998). Flooding would have been a El Pilar, Fig. 1 Central Maya Lowlands with El Pilar indicated problem for settlements near small or large waterways, however, which is attested in the predictive model of Maya settlement developed from BRASS survey data ( Fig. 2): residential units were rarely closer than 500 m from any drainage ). ...
... But more intensive agricultural technologies and urbanisation had a greater impact, not least in introducing higher risks of collapse (Cowgill 2015;Diamond 2011;Scarborough 1998), but also in changing people's perspectives about the non-human world. The use of more sophisticated irrigation schemes, the enclosure of land into farms, and the domestication of plant and animal species initiated a pattern of change that suggested a critical shift in human-non-human relations. ...
... It is likely a degraded reservoir or a heavily modified natural depression. Such modified or wholly artificial reservoirs are well-documented in the Maya region, particularly in the vicinity of dense settlement (French et al. 2019;Marken and Cooper 2018;Scarborough 1998;Scarborough and Gallopin 1991;Wahl et al. 2007). ...
This article revisits a long-neglected site in Northern Belize, the Classic Maya settlement of El Pozito, located in the Orange Walk District. Investigations led by Mary Neivens and Dennis Puleston explored the site between 1974 and 1976, documenting its architecture and recovering a substantial quantity of artifacts. Afterward, events conspired to bring these investigations to a close, leaving the site in a half-century scholarly limbo. The research here seeks to rectify this. Combining extant field notes with sporadic publications and recently conducted ceramic analysis, the authors reconstructed El Pozito's sequence of construction, occupation, and usage over 20 centuries. This new research revealed a settlement of surprising complexity, combining aspects of urban functionality amid a landscape of rural complexity. This article argues that the best way to understand such complexity is through the conceptual lens of a “town.” Neither a city nor a dispersed rural settlement, El Pozito functioned as a critical node that connected local, agrarian Maya with each other as well as the whole of the Classic Maya world. In this way, the research here seeks to rehabilitate this site, rescue it from its scholarly limbo, and restore its place in understanding the complex pre-Columbian landscapes of Northern Belize.
Increasing numbers of studies are investigating the phenomenon of social resistance, particularly instances of stability or prosperity in the face of climatic–environmental stresses over a long period. This emerging research field of climate resilience explores the capability of socio-ecological systems to cope with stresses, maintain functions, and evolve into more desirable systems within stressful climatic and environmental conditions. This synthetic review examines historical and archaeological studies on climate resilience especially concentrating on human societies in the past 5000 years. It highlights that human societies have had a degree of general resilience to climate and environmental stresses over various spatial and temporal scales, which is reflected through the evidence of population growth, agriculture development, settlement expansion and continuing social-economic development in hazard-prone conditions. Many of the cases considered here demonstrate that climate resilience manifests as a profile of resilience loop and scale relationships in different social systems. Multiple and diverse measures have been identified as being helpful in enhancing the resilience level of various social systems, e.g. improvement of infrastructure, knowledge and technology development, and the strengthening of social organization and cooperation. This review emphasizes the necessity and priority of deepening our understanding of long-term resilience dynamics, and it calls for holistic studies in the field of climate resiliology, particularly targeting to effective and efficient resilience measures as well as their transference across time and space.
Although the use of mercury in the form of cinnabar (HgS) by the ancient Maya has been widely documented, there are few datasets available to understand potential exposure to mercury from ancient Maya reservoirs. This study analyzed the chemical composition of stratigraphically excavated dried sediments from 3 ancient water reservoirs located in different zones and social contexts at the site of Ucanal, Guatemala, to determine how potential contamination of water reservoirs varied through space and time. High levels of mercury, relative to natural concentrations in soils, were identified throughout the complete temporal sequence and were omnipresent in all three water reservoirs, indicating that mercury contamination may have affected both elite and non-elite sectors of the population. Average total mercury concentrations in the reservoirs’ sediments were above 1 g/g, the toxic effect threshold above which freshwater ecosystem sediments are deemed to be heavily polluted. A sharp increase in mercury was recorded for the Terminal Classic period, when the city reached its apogee, with average concentrations of 3.08 g/g for Aguada 2, 11.88 g/g for Aguada 3 and 3.17 g/g for Piscina 2. Non-reservoir soil samples also show mercury contamination throughout the city core, a situation which would have led to the accumulation of mercury in water reservoirs through its mobilization within the various drainage areas.
As centuries-long residents of the southern Maya lowlands, the Lacandon Maya of Chiapas, Mexico have developed and preserved ecologically sound strategies for sustained-yield food production in the tropical forest biome. Their traditional system of agriculture and food extraction emphasizes successful exploitation of the rain forest environment in a manner compatible with forest regeneration and preservation. The authors describe the Lacandon systems of agricultural production, wildlife management, and forest maintenance, then explore the potential these strategies hold for investigation of ancient Maya food production systems and the development of modern resource utilization schemes in the humid tropics.
The first major season of field operations at this major Lowland Maya site, located on the eastern edge of the Classic Maya core area, has revealed a great deal of information about the layout of the site and also demonstrated that its history was a long one.