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Pre-Columbian food production in the Maya Lowlands was long characterized as reliant on extensive, slash-and-burn agriculture as the sole cultivation system possible in the region, given environmental limitations, with maize as the dominant crop. While aspects of this "swidden thesis" of Maya agriculture have been chipped away in recent years, there has been an underappreciation of the many forms of long-term capital investments in agriculture made by ancient Maya people. Here, we review the last three decades of research that has overturned the swidden thesis, focusing on long-term strategies. We demonstrate long-lasting agricultural investments by Maya people, in social capital including multigenerational land tenure, in cultivated capital including long-lived trees, and in landesque capital including soil amendments and landscape engineering projects, such as terracing and wetland modification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We focus on pre-Columbian agricultural regimes in the Maya Lowlands, using new datasets of archaeological wood charcoal, seeds, phytoliths, and starch grains; biological properties of plants; and contemporary Indigenous practices. We address inherited models of agriculture in the lowlands: the limitations of the environment (finding more affordances than anticipated by earlier models); the homogeneity of agricultural strategies (finding more heterogeneity of strategies across the lowlands than a single rigid template); the centrality of maize in agriculture (finding more reliance on root crops and tree crops than historically documented); the focus on the milpa system as food base (finding more agroforestry, homegardening, horticulture, and wild resource management than previously documented); the dominance of swidden strategies in agricultural practices (finding more diverse practices than accounted for in most models); and the foregrounding of maize crop failure in collapse models (finding more evidence of resilience and sustainable agricultural practices than predicted). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fuelling ancient Maya cities and industries has been identified for some time now as a critical concern for the pre-Columbian Maya, especially since there is evidence of dramatic deforestation throughout the Maya Lowlands during the Preclassic and Classic periods. This article aims to trace the domestic fuel economy at the lowland site of Naachtun, Guatemala, over 8 centuries (150–950 ce) in order to discover its role in the development of society. A significant anthracological (charcoal) dataset from household contexts is examined through multivariate analyses and sequencing. A detailed statement of taxon identification is provided. The results demonstrate that there were two systems of firewood use over time. The first consisted of the sustainable use of fragmented, diverse woodlands. The second, beginning around 750 ce, changed to a heavier reliance on multi-purpose, fruit-bearing trees and pine wood. We hypothesize that forest resource management was initially linked to an extensive, subsistence-based farming system in which mature forests and fallow land were constantly renewed, ensuring their sustainability. The change towards the use of woodlands enriched with useful plants (perhaps forest gardens or fruit tree plantations) was probably an adaptation strategy at the time of the Naachtun population peak. It suggests that fuel was now subject to a city allocation system that relied on new supply sources, some of which were potentially remote. Our results also indicate a substantially drier forest cover during at least the Early Classic period in the Naachtun region, corroborating regional palaeoclimate data. This demonstrates the reliability and usefulness of charcoal studies for palaeoecological reconstructions in the high biodiversity tropical forests of the Maya Lowlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]