Ancient Households of the Americas: Conceptualizing What Households Do

10. Late Classic Period Terrace Agriculture in the Lowland Maya Area

| 299 IntroductIon The subject of this chapter is the organization of Late Classic period (ca. AD 550–800) ancient lowland Maya terrace agricultural activity. Agricultural terraces are embankments, typically constructed of stone but at times made of wood or augmented by living plants, placed perpendicular to hill slopes or drainages for the purpose of conserving or catching soil and catching or channeling runoff. Terraces are beneficial to agriculture because they create areas of wetter and deeper soils that are more conducive to plant growth (Beach et al. 2002:379; Donkin 1979:2; Kunen 2001:326; Treacy and Denevan 1994:95; Turner 1983). Terraces also allow greater cropping frequency than would otherwise be possible in hilly terrain and are thus typically associated with the process of agricultural intensification (Chase and Chase 1998; Dunning and Beach 1994; Healy et al. 1983; Johnston 2003; Kunen 2001; Murtha 2002; Neff 2008; Turner 1983). The ancient Maya civilization was located in what today is eastern and southeastern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras (Figure 10.1). The Maya area is typically divided into highland and lowland zones with the highlands T e n Late classic Period terrace Agriculture in the Lowland Maya Area Modeling the Organization of Terrace Agricultural Activity L. Theodore Neff 300 | L. Theodore Neff consisting of the mountainous areas of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras to the south and the rest of the terrain forming the lowlands to the north. Maya civilization began with the occurrence of early agricultural villages around 1500 BC and was decimated with the Spanish conquest in the early part Figure 10.1. Eastern Mesoamerica showing the study area location Late Classic Period Terrace Agriculture in the Lowland Maya Area | 301 of the sixteenth century. During the period running from ca. AD 550 to 800, known as the Classic period, Maya civilization was at its height in terms of population , sociopolitical complexity, and agricultural intensification. Relic terraces are common features in the lowland Maya area (Dunning and Beach 1994; Kunen 2001; Turner 1974, 1983), as well as the rest of the Americas (Donkin 1979), and have been recognized as such since the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, as early as 1936, as part of the Michigan-Carnegie Botanical Expedition to British Honduras (Belize), Cyrus Lundell observed numerous agricultural terraces on the Vaca Plateau in the far west-central part of the country . “On one hillside I counted no less than 51 terraces, and this was not an exceptional condition” (Lundell 1940:9). Lundell’s observations confirmed those of Ower (1927) and Thompson (1931), who had visited the same area a decade or so earlier, and all three concluded that the terraces were remains of the ancient lowland Maya civilization. Lundell (1940:11) made the following remarks about what these features indicated about the agricultural system employed by the ancient Maya: That a shifting type of agriculture, such as the milpa system, would be employed in a terraced area is unbelievable. The building of stone retaining walls and the filling-in with soil call for an investment in labor which would not be expended for a form of agriculture where the land would be abandoned for eight to twelve years after one or two crops. Terracing indicates continued occupation of land and at least a form of semipermanent agriculture. In the five-plus decades since the publication of Lundell’s remarks, ongoing settlement-pattern research has confirmed his observation regarding the Vaca Plateau area of Belize, as well as for numerous other parts of the lowland Maya area. Numerous agricultural terraces have been documented as dispersed among Late Classic period (ca. AD 550–800) structures (Chase and Chase 1998; Dunning and Beach 1994; Fedick 1994; Healy et al. 1983; Kunen 2001; Murtha 2002; Neff 2008; Turner 1974, 1979, 1983). Agricultural terraces make up roughly half or more of the surface-visible settlement traces in many areas (see Ashmore et al. 1994; Neff 2008; Neff et al. 1995) and constitute a substantial component of the built environment, along with residential and civic-ceremonial architecture. Because of the large number of agricultural terraces associated with households in many parts of the lowland Maya area, agricultural activity associated with them must be an important component of household production. Beginning with the pioneering work of von Thünen in 1826 and continuing to the present, research on preindustrial, small-scale agrarian landscapes indicates that distance to fields is...