Impacts of the Ancient Maya on Soils and Soil Erosion in the Central Maya Lowlands
Catena 65 (2006) 166 – 178 www.elsevier.com/locate/catena Impacts of the ancient Maya on soils and soil erosion in the central Maya Lowlands T. Beach a,*, N. Dunning b, S. Luzzadder-Beach c, D.E. Cook d, J. Lohse e a STIA, SFS, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057, USA b Department of Geography, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati OH 45221-0131, USA c Earth Systems and GeoInformation Sciences, School of Computational Sciences, George Mason University, Fairfax VA 22030-4444, USA d SCMRE, Smithsonian Institution, 4210 Silver Hill Road, Suitland, MD 20746, USA e Texas Archeological Research Laboratory, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712-0714, USA Abstract Many studies across the central and southern Maya Lowlands of Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico have produced records of land degradation, mostly sedimentation and soil erosion, during the ancient Maya period from before 1000 BC to the Maya Collapse of c. AD 900. This paper provides new data from two sites (Blue Creek and Cancue´n), synthesizes more than a decade of the authors’ research in Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico, and synthesizes other findings from this region. These research projects analyzed more than 100 excavations in upland and depression sites, cored lakes and wetland sediments, and studied sediments in the field and laboratory using radiocarbon dating, a battery of soil chemistry tests, stratigraphic analysis, magnetic susceptibility, elemental analyses, and artifact identification. Our objective was to date when sedimentation and soil erosion occurred, identify stable surfaces, and correlate them with the state of knowledge about past land use. These findings indicate three general epochs of accelerated soil erosion and identified two major paleosols.
[Show full text]