[Scpg] Annabel Ford /UCSB Archaeologist Disputes Common Belief About Collapse of Maya Civilization

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

UCSB Archaeologist Disputes Common Belief About Collapse of Maya
Civilization 

December 9, 2009


<http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/image.aspx?pkey=2144&Position=1>
Click for downloadable image
Anabel Ford

credit: Rod Rolle

<http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/image.aspx?pkey=2144&Position=2>
Click for downloadable image
Maya forest gardeners

credit: BRASS/El Pilar Project




(Santa Barbara, Calif.) -- For decades, the Maya 
-- and their descendents -- have gotten a bad rap 
from archaeologists, anthropologists, and other 
scholars who cite the ancient civilization's 
agricultural practices for its eventual collapse. 
While they agree that other factors contributed 
to the fall of Maya society roughly 1,000 years 
ago, they claim the civilization's slash-and-burn 
approach to farming caused such widespread 
environmental devastation that the land simply 
could not sustain them.

However, research conducted by Anabel Ford, an 
archaeologist at UC Santa Barbara and director of 
the university's MesoAmerican Research Center, 
suggests the contrary may be true -- that the 
forest gardens cultivated by the Maya demonstrate 
their great appreciation for the environment. Her 
findings are published in the current issue of 
the Journal of Ethnobiology in an article titled 
"Origins of the Maya Forest Garden: Maya Resource 
Management."

A forest garden is an unplowed, tree-dominated 
plot that sustains biodiversity and animal 
habitat while producing plants for food, shelter, 
and medicine. Tailored to the local geography, 
the Maya cultivated the forest as a garden for 
thousands of years. Today, the Maya forest is 
dominated by these useful plants, nurtured by 
traditional farmers of the region who grow a wide 
array of food, medicine, and spices as well as 
materials for construction, tools, and utensils. 
Their forest gardens provide nourishment for 
their families, maintain soil fertility, secure 
water, and clean the air.

"We conclude that the vegetation changes that 
took place between 4,500 and 3,000 years ago were 
largely a consequence of unstable climatic 
conditions," said Ford, who co-authored the paper 
with Ronald Nigh, an ecological anthropologist at 
Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores 
en Antropología Social, a social science 
institute in San Cristobal, Mexico. "This 
climatic chaos forced the Maya to adapt from a 
society of mobile horticulturists to one of 
agriculture in a single location." The result was 
the Maya Forest Garden, a highly productive and 
sustainable form of resource management that was 
the foundation of the Maya civilization from 
3,000 to 1,000 years ago.

According to the paper, "shifts in the 
paleoecological record, previously interpreted as 
evidence of the Maya denuding the forest, can be 
reinterpreted as evidence of forest management in 
the form of the Maya Forest garden." Climate 
change played a significant role in landscape 
transformations, the paper continues, "and the 
Maya's adaptation to climatic changes was to 
intensify the forest management system developed 
during the preceding millennia, a system that is 
still in place today."

The ancient Maya, who farmed without draft 
animals or plows, and had access only to stone 
tools and fire, followed what Ford calls the 
"milpa cycle." It is an ancient land use system 
by which a closed canopy forest is transformed 
into an open field for annual crops, then a 
managed orchard garden, and then a closed canopy 
forest again. The cycle covers a time period of 
12 to 24 years. A misconception about the milpa 
cycle is that the fields lie fallow after several 
years of annual crop cultivation. "In reality, in 
the 'high-performance milpa,' fields are never 
abandoned, even when they are forested," Ford 
explains in the article. "The milpa cycle is a 
rotation of annuals with successive stages of 
forest perennials during which all phases receive 
careful human management.

"As a cultivated field," Ford continues in the 
article, "the milpa has its own ecology of herbs, 
tubers, and plants that deter pests of the main 
crops, enhance soil nutrients, and maintain 
moisture in the soil. Even before this phase of 
annual crops is over, the selection of trees and 
bushes for the woodland stages begins."

"It just doesn't make sense that the Maya 
wouldn't take care of the land," Ford said. "They 
had to maintain its quality or they wouldn't 
survive. We assume that the ancient Maya must 
have destroyed their environment because that's 
what people are doing there today. If we're doing 
it, they must have as well. But the fact is, they 
managed the landscape. They practiced what I call 
'select and grow.' They did not slash and burn 
themselves out of existence."

She added that the present-day Maya's knowledge 
of forest gardening is not formally documented in 
any comprehensive way. "We could save the Maya 
forest garden if we could learn from these 
farmers and their observance of nature," Ford 
said.

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