The Lowland Maya Area: Three Millennia at the Human–Wildland Interface. Arturo Gómez-Pompa, Michael F. Allen, Scott L. Feddick, and Juan J. Jiménez-Osornio, eds. 2003. Food Products Press (an imprint of Haworth Press), Binghamton, NY. 659 pp. $79.95 (ISBN 1560229173 paper).
One ofthe most fascinating mysteries in the history of humankind is the long-term persistence of some societies. The Maya civilization is one of them. Over the past 3000 years, Maya peoples have inhabited some of the most biologically rich regions in the world (the Yucatán Peninsula, portions of the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras). This would suggest that Maya farmers have successfully managed natural resources of tropical ecosystems, and especially bio-diversity, to preserve both nature and culture over the long term. Although archaeological evidence indicates that the Maya populations collapsed several times (during the Terminal Classic collapse and at the European conquest), they never disappeared as a culture. For this reason, the Maya peoples and the regions in which they live have attracted the attention of countless scholars from many different disciplines over the years.
Thousands of articles and dozens of books have examined different aspects of ancient and present-day Maya. However, it is within the last 30 years that major advances have been made. To my mind, there are three books that can be considered seminal contributions to the cultural and ecological comprehension of Maya civilization, ancient and current.
The first, Pre-Hispanic Maya Agriculture (Harrison and Turner 1978), was the result of a symposium, held in September 1976 in Paris, that challenged the previously dominant idea that Maya civilization was sustained by extensive slash-and-burn systems of cultivation. In fact, this book significantly altered the image of the Maya as mere swidden farmers by demonstrating the existence of several intensive types of cultivation in the Maya region, such as terracing, raised fields, orchards, forest gardens, and other sophisticated modes of hydraulic agriculture.
A second book, Maya Subsistence (Flannery 1982), was published four years later. Dedicated to the Maya archaeologist Dennis E. Puleston, this volume presented 13 outstanding chapters on ancient records of hydraulic agriculture, water and soil conservation strategies, use of plants, management of animal species, and agroecological experiments.
A third significant contribution was published in the past decade (Feddick 1996). Twenty-one chapters, most of them written by archaeologists, were dedicated to reexamining the land-use patterns of ancient Maya. The title of the book, The Managed Mosaic: Ancient Maya Agriculture and Resource Use, reflects the intent to analyze the theme from a landscape perspective, emphasizing technoproductive adaptations to regional variability in the Maya territory.
The Lowland Maya Area, published in 2003, is a relevant new examination of the Maya puzzle. This book contains the contributions to the 21st Symposium on Plant Biology, held at the University of California at Riverside. Arturo Gómez-Pompa, the organizer of the symposium and senior editor of the book, is a well-known tropical ecologist who has been working on the Maya enigmas for decades.
The book is made up of 36 chapters written by 78 authors (30 of them Mexicans), with the novelty that—in contrast to the other books cited—no particular discipline is privileged. Instead, the authors examine a range of themes: biological inventories (algae, myxomycetes, ants, butterflies, mollusks, and mosses), ethnobotany and ethnomycology, plant domestication, soils, hydrogeology, climate, hurricanes, land-use patterns, cosmology, and social conflicts. Despite the editors' efforts to give a coherent sequence to the numerous contributions, the book suffers from some inconsistencies: some chapters are not in logical order, and two or three contributions are out of context. Beyond this, however, the book offers new and relevant evidence and discoveries, such as a detailed historical analysis of the effects of hurricanes on the Yucatán Peninsula (chapters 10 and 27), an examination of the potential use of periphyton (a complex community of algae of wetland soils) as an agricultural fertilizer (chapters 11, 21, and 22), and a comparison between ancient and contemporary Maya conceptions about agriculture and forests (chapter 26).
For originality, high quality, and relevance, I recommend five outstanding chapters. These are the historical analyses of three millennia of land use in southern Yucatán by Turner and colleagues (chapter 20), the contribution of Ogata concerning the domestication of the chocolate tree (chapter 23), Feddick's archaeological analysis of ancient resource use of a wetland (chapter 19), and both the introductory and concluding chapters.
In the introductory chapter, Gómez-Pompa revisits an idea postulated in a pioneering paper published almost three decades ago (Barrera-Vázquez et al. 1977), namely, that the ancient Maya created innovative modes of tropical ecosystem management, many of which are still embedded in the productive practices of Maya peasants today. Thus, the hypothesis that the ecological collapse of Maya civilization occurred because of overpopulation and the overuse of resources is critically questioned.
This basic idea is elaborated also in the last chapter. The mode of resource use by the Maya, both in the present and in the past, is a clear case of a mosaic pattern on a range of scales. This pattern reflects the human response to local variations in geology, topography, and hydrology, which influence soil development and the structure of biological communities and ecosystems. If archaeological evidence clearly points to exceptionally high population densities across the Maya lowlands, this is the result of wise management of tropical forests. The persistence of high biodiversity in an area that was completely occupied in the past suggests a mode of resource use that takes advantage of such biological richness without destroying it.
Most of our fascination with the Maya can be attributed to the fact that the study of this civilization creates great potential for diachronic analysis of the human–nature interface. Comprehending the long-term permanence of the Maya requires interdisciplinary approaches, models, and methods to understand the role played by original strategies of resource use and the ways that these strategies are organized, guided, and implemented both by cultural worldviews (cosmo-visions) and by social institutions.
In a forthcoming article, Narcisco Barrera-Bassols and I offer abundant evidence derived from a detailed analysis of studies carried out in the Yucatán Peninsula on the use of natural resources by the Yucatec Maya (Barrera-Bassols and Toledo 2005). We framed our analysis according to the principles and methods of ethnoecology (Toledo 2002), an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to understand the links among beliefs, knowledge, and practice. Our conclusions point to the multiple use of tropical ecosystems, and the sacred view of nature that organized it, as two key resilient mechanisms that explain the long-term presence of Yucatec Maya.
Multiple use, compared to specialized uses, signifies lower production per unit of land used, but higher production for the aggregate landscape and a dynamic, permanent system based on the benefits of a natural feature: diversity. Thus, a multiple-use strategy is the response of ancient and contemporary preindustrial societies to the high variety of landscapes, soils, relief, and biotic elements, and the dynamic process of ecological succession.
Because natural forces will always tend to restore systems to their mature stage, the maintenance cost will increase with greater intensity of management. Maya civilization, like many other preindustrial societies, benefits from the acceptance and manipulation of the process of forest recovery. In maintaining landscape mosaics, tropical producers take advantage of forest restoration processes such that they derive benefits from the land conversion process itself and from the various fallow stages (Toledo et al. 2003).
Two remarkable paragraphs in the concluding chapter underscore the themes of The Lowland Maya Area. In the first, Allen and colleagues note,“Under-standing how the Maya survived past perturbations, how they live today, and how they perceive the future make these studies important to the future of our world” (p. 624). Later, they conclude,“If anything is to be learned from the changing Maya world, it is that understanding space and time is absolutely critical to human persistence. There is no absolute k value to which we, or any culture, can strive; the k value is variable. Humans must allow for fluctuations in both wild-land and agricultural use of lands” (p. 631). I anticipate that future research will demonstrate the strong relations between the multiple-use strategies created as cultural reactions to the biological diversity of tropical landscapes, the concept of resilience, and the paths to a sustainable society (Holling 2001, Redman and Kinzig 2003). All of these are lessons coming from the Maya.
