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Sack Nancy R.Pdf EXPLAINING MAYA MONUMENTAL ARCHITECTURE A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN ANTHROPOLOGY MAY 2012 By Nancy Sack Thesis Committee: Terry Hunt, Chairperson Christian Peterson Jay Silverstein TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES .............................................................................................................................. iii LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................... iv CHAPTER 1. EXPLAINING CULTURAL ELABORATION ................................................. 1 CHAPTER 2. THE MAYA LANDSCAPE .................................................................................. 15 CHAPTER 3. MAYA CLIMATE AND AGRICULTURE ....................................................... 26 Climate .......................................................................................................................................... 26 Water management ...................................................................................................................... 36 Agriculture .................................................................................................................................... 38 Summary ....................................................................................................................................... 45 CHAPTER 4. MAYA POPULATION .......................................................................................... 47 Population size and density ........................................................................................................ 47 Bioarchaeological research ......................................................................................................... 54 Migration ................................................................................................................................ 55 Demographics ....................................................................................................................... 56 Diet ......................................................................................................................................... 58 Health ..................................................................................................................................... 60 Summary ....................................................................................................................................... 61 CHAPTER 5. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS .............................................................. 63 APPENDIX A. Dates of initial and final dated monuments by site .......................................... 73 APPENDIX B. Lake Chichancanab climate data ......................................................................... 77 APPENDIX C. Population growth in selected lowland Maya sites ........................................... 84 REFERENCES .................................................................................................................................. 85 ii LIST OF TABLES 1. Elements of the bet-hedging model ............................................................................................ 11 2. Ancient Maya cultural periods ...................................................................................................... 19 3. Number of sites building dated monuments ............................................................................. 23 4. Late Classic Maya population estimates ..................................................................................... 50 iii LIST OF FIGURES 1. Map of known Maya settlements ................................................................................................. 18 2. Number of sites concurrently building dated monuments ...................................................... 24 3. Cumulative number of sites with dated monuments ................................................................ 25 4. Percent sulfur in Lake Chichancanab core ................................................................................. 31 5. Percent calcium carbonate in Lake Chichancanab core ........................................................... 32 6. Percent δ18O in Lake Chichancanab core ................................................................................... 33 7. Population growth (continuous occupation) ............................................................................. 51 8. Population growth (cyclical occupation) .................................................................................... 52 iv CHAPTER 1. EXPLAINING CULTURAL ELABORATION The task of archaeologists is to infer the cultural processes at work in the (often distant) past, based on an examination of the artifactual, biological, and environmental evidence of human civilizations that remains today. Ancient monuments, like other cultural constructions, can reveal clues about the societies that created them, provided researchers ask suitable questions and devise appropriate strategies for discovering the answers. Initial archaeological surveys of monumental buildings are typically designed to answer “what” types of questions: investigators describe, measure, and map the structures they uncover. The next generation of research generally deals with “how” questions, for example, how were monuments built? How long did it take to construct them? How much labor was required? How did the buildings function? Eventually, archaeologists begin to explore the more difficult “why” questions. Why did ancient societies begin to construct monuments? Why did monumental construction persist, in some cases for hundreds of years? Finally, why did monument building decline and disappear? Archaeologists have historically considered immense public architecture to be a hallmark of ranked or stratified societies because its construction is assumed to reflect a ruler’s ability to recruit a large labor force. As a consequence, archeological research has often sought to account for the emergence of social complexity, rather than monumental architecture itself. Evolutionary archaeologists view monumental architecture “as an aspect of the archaeological record requiring explanation rather than simply as an indicator of a particular level of social organization” (Kornbacher and Madsen 1999:241). This paper examines the extent to which an evolutionary model of cultural elaboration known as bet hedging can 1 account for the development, distribution, and persistence of Maya monumental architecture. In the 1980s archaeologists began to explore life history theory, a part of evolutionary ecology, as an explanatory model for cultural change. According to life history theory, organisms can invest their energy in growth, maintenance, and reproduction, but energy allocated for one purpose cannot be used for another. Fertility is the most important component of an organism’s fitness (Kaplan and Lancaster 2003). Because the amount of energy devoted to growth and maintenance affects fertility, the strategy an organism employs can be understood as a tradeoff between current and future reproduction and between the quantity and quality of offspring (Hill & Kaplan 1999; Kaplan and Lancaster 2003). An organism can only contribute to the gene pool if its offspring and their offspring also reproduce. Should reproductive fitness decline to zero in any generation, an organism’s progeny will disappear from the population. Because population increase is multiplicative rather than additive, an energy budget that maximizes an organism’s long-term geometric- mean fitness, even at the expense of its short-term arithmetic-mean fitness, will have an evolutionary advantage (Seger and Brockmann 1987). The optimal allocation of an organism’s energy budget will always be constrained by genetic and environmental factors (Shennan 2002). Natural selection will favor the strategy that results in the highest average success rate in a particular environment. In stable environments with ample resources, an organism’s best strategy to pass on its genes to future generations is to maximize the number of offspring it produces. In certain situations, however, a more successful strategy is to sacrifice some short-term reproductive success as a hedge against future catastrophe. Lower-than-expected fertility will increase an organism’s 2 long-term fitness as long as three conditions are met: (1) periods of population growth are punctuated by recurrent population crashes caused by calamities such as widespread food shortages; (2) a strategy is available that improves the probability of survival during periods of food scarcity but it requires that resources be diverted from reproduction; and (3) the long-term benefit of the ability to survive a demographic crisis equals or exceeds the benefit of investing the same energy in producing more offspring during periods of growth (Boone and Kessler 1999). Researchers have determined that in temporally varying environments the trade-off is an evolutionary advantage: statistically, the cost of producing fewer offspring in good years is outweighed by the long-term benefit of increased survival in lean years. Seger and Brockmann (1987:185) refer to this type of trade-off as “bird in the hand” bet-hedging. The strategy will be evolutionarily stable only if the population of strategy followers is protected
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