The ancient city of Tikal, one of the largest lowland Maya centers in existence, is situated in Central America about 300 kilometers north of Guatemala City. Tikal was built on a broad limestone terrace in a rainforest. Here the Maya settled 3,000 years ago. Because the Maya calendar can be precisely correlated with our own, it is known that their civilization flourished until 1,100 years ago.
At its height, Tikal covered about 120 square kilometers (km2), and its center or nucleus was the Great Plaza, a
Large, paved area surrounded by about 300 major structures and thousands of houses (Figure 11.3).
Starting from a small, dispersed population,
Tikal swelled to at least
45,000 people. By 1,550 years ago, its population density had reached 600 to 700 people per square kilometer, which was three times that of the surrounding region.
Tikal and the surrounding region were intensively explored under the joint auspices of the University of Pennsylvania Museum and the Guatemalan government from 1956 through the 1960s. At the time, it was the most ambitious archaeological project undertaken in the western hemisphere.
In the first few years of the Tikal Project, archaeologists investigated only major temple and palace structures found in the vicinity of the Great Plaza, at the site’s epicenter. But in 1959, aiming to gain a balanced view of Tikal’s development and composition, they turned their attention to the hundreds of small mounds that surround larger buildings and were thought to be the remains of dwellings. In a sense, this represented a shift in the practice of archaeology toward studying the complexities of everyday life. Imagine how difficult it would be to get a realistic view of life in a major city such as Washington, DC, or Beijing by looking only at their monumental public buildings. Similarly, a realistic view of Tikal cannot be reconstructed without examining the full range of ruins in the area.
The excavation of small structures, most of which were probably houses, permitted the estimation of Tikal’s population size and density. This information allowed archaeologists to test the conventional assumption that the Maya inhabitants’ subsistence practices were inadequate to sustain large population concentrations.
Extensive excavation also provided a sound basis for a reconstruction of the everyday life and social organization of the Maya, a people who had been known almost entirely through the study of ceremonial remains. For example, differences in architecture, house construction, and associated artifacts and burials suggest differences in social class. Features of house distribution might reflect the existence of extended families or other types of kin groups. The excavation of both large and small structures revealed the social structure of the total population of Tikal.198 199
2 Cowgill, G. L. (1997). State and society at Teotihuacan, Mexico. Annual Review of Anthropology 26, 129-161.
Figure 11.3 Tikal spreads far beyond the Great Plaza and the monumental buildings that have been excavated and are mapped here. Archaeologists used surveying techniques, test pits, and other strategies to fully define the city's boundaries and to understand the full spectrum of lifeways that took place there. The red outline in the center of the map delineates the royal court, royal burial ground, and central marketplace. In addition to what is pictured here, Tikal extends several kilometers outward in every direction. Those familiar with the original Star Wars movie will be interested to know that the aerial views of the rebel camp were filmed at Tikal, where monumental structures depicted in this map rise high above the forest canopy.
Surveying and Excavating the Site
Mapping crews surveyed 16 square kilometers of forested land surrounding the Great Plaza, providing a preliminary map to guide the small-structure excavation process.199 Aerial photography could not be used for this mapping, because the tree canopy in this area is often 30 meters (about 100 feet) above the ground, obscuring all but the tallest temples. Many of the small ruins are practically invisible even to observers on the ground. Four years of mapping revealed that ancient Tikal was far larger than the original 16 km2 surveyed. More time and money allowed continued surveying of the area to fully define the city’s boundaries and calculate its overall size.200
The initial excavation of six structures, two plazas, and a platform revealed new structures not visible before excavation, the architectural complexity of the structures, and an enormous quantity of artifacts that had to be washed and catalogued. Some structures were partially excavated, and some remained uninvestigated. Following this initial work, the archaeological team excavated over a hundred additional small structures in different parts of the site in order to ensure investigation of a representative sample. The team also sank numerous test pits in various other small-structure groups to supplement the information gained from more extensive excavations.
4 Haviland, W. A., et al. (1985). Excavations in small residential groups of Tikal: Groups 4F-1 and 4F-2. Philadelphia: University Museum.
Excavation at Tikal produced considerable information about the social organization, technology, and diversity in this ancient city, as well as the relationship between people in Tikal and other regions. For example, the site provided evidence of trade in nonperishable items. Granite, quartzite, hematite, pyrite, jade, slate, and obsidian all were imported, as either raw materials or finished products. Marine materials from Caribbean and Pacific coastal areas were found as well. Because Tikal is located on top of an abundant source of chert (a flintlike stone used to manufacture tools), this may have been exported in the form of raw material and finished objects. In addition, Tikal’s location between two river systems may have facilitated an overland trade route. Evidence of trade in perishable goods—such as textiles, feathers, salt, and cacao—indicated that there were full-time traders among the Tikal Maya.
Technologically, specialized woodworking, pottery, obsidian, and shell workshops have been found. The skillful stone carving displayed on stone monuments suggests that occupational specialists did this work. The same is true of the fine artwork exhibited on ceramic vessels. Ancient artists had to envision what their work would look like after their pale, relatively colorless ceramics had been fired.
To control the large population, Tikal must have had some form of bureaucratic organization. From Maya written records (glyphs), we know that the government was headed by a hereditary ruling dynasty with sufficient power to organize massive construction and maintenance. This included a system of defensive ditches and embankments on the northern and southern edges of the city. The longest of these ran for a distance of perhaps 19 to 28 kilometers. Although we do not have direct evidence, there are clues to the existence of textile workers, dental workers, makers of bark cloth “paper,” scribes, masons, astronomers, and other occupational specialists.
The religion of the Tikal Maya may have developed initially as a means to cope with the uncertainties of agriculture. Tikal soil is thin, and the only available water comes from rain that has been collected in reservoirs. Rain is abundant in season, but its onset tends to be unreliable. Conversely, the elevation of Tikal, high relative to surrounding terrain, may have caused it to be perceived as a “power place,” especially suited for making contact with supernatural forces and beings.
The Maya priests tried not only to win over and please the deities in times of drought but also to honor them in times of plenty. Priests—experts on the Maya calendar—determined the most favorable time to plant
Archaeologists have proposed that Tikal may have emerged as an important site due to its relative altitude in the region. Today it is still an important religious center for local Maya, who gather in front of the acropolis for a traditional ceremony.
Crops and were involved with other agricultural matters. This tended to keep people in or near the city so that they could receive guidance on their crops. The population in and around Tikal depended upon their priests to influence supernatural beings and forces on their behalf.
As the population increased, land for agriculture became scarce, forcing the Maya to find new methods of food production that could sustain the dense population concentrated at Tikal. They added the planting and tending of fruit trees and other crops that could be grown around their houses in soils enriched by human waste. (Unlike houses at Teotihuacan, those at Tikal were not built close to one another.) Along with increased reliance on household gardening, the Maya constructed artificially raised fields in areas that were flooded each rainy season. In these fields, crops could be intensively cultivated year after year, as long as they were carefully maintained. Measures were taken to maximize collection of water for the dry season—by converting low areas into reservoirs and constructing channels to carry runoff from plazas and other architecture into these reservoirs.
Carved monuments like this were commissioned by Tikal's rulers to commemorate important events in their regions. Portrayed on this one is a king who ruled about 1,220 years ago. Such skilled stone carving could only have been accomplished by a specialist. (For a translation of the inscription on the monument's left side, see Figure 11.7.)
As these changes were taking place, a class of artisans, craftspeople, and other occupational specialists emerged to serve the needs of an elite consisting of the priesthood and a ruling dynasty. The Maya built numerous temples, public buildings, and various kinds of houses appropriate to the distinct social classes of their society.
For several hundred years, Tikal was able to sustain its ever-growing population. When the pressure for food and land reached a critical point, population growth stopped. At the same time, warfare with other cities became increasingly destructive. These events are marked archaeologically by the abandonment of houses on prime land in rural areas, by the advent of nutritional problems visible in skeletons recovered from burials, and by the construction of the previously mentioned defensive ditches and embankments. In other words, a period of readjustment set in, which must have been directed by an already strong central authority. Activities then continued as before, but without further population growth for another 250 years or so.
As this case study shows, excavations at Tikal demonstrated the splendor, the social organization, the belief system, and the agricultural practices of the ancient Maya civilization, among other things. This chapter’s Original Study illustrates a very different Maya site, just a day’s walk from Tikal.
Original Study
Action Archaeology and the Community at El Pilar by Anabel Ford
Resource management and conservation are palpable themes of the 21st century. Nowhere is this more keenly felt than in the tropics, seemingly our last terrestrial frontier. The Maya forest, one of the world's most biodiverse areas, is experiencing change at a rapid rate. Over the next two decades this area's population will double, threatening the integrity of the tropical ecosystems with contemporary development strategies that are at odds with the rich biodiversity of the region.
Curiously, in the past the Maya forest was home to a major civilization with at least three to nine times the current population of the region. The prosperity of the Classic Maya civilization has been touted for the remarkable quality of their unique hieroglyphic writing; the beauty of their art expressed in stone, ceramics, and plaster; and the precision of their mathematics and astronomy. What was the secret of Maya conservation and prosperity? How can archaeology shed light on the conservation possibilities for the future? These are the questions I address in my research at El Pilar.
I began my work as an archaeologist in the Maya forest in 1972. Eschewing the monumental civic centers that draw tourist and scholar alike, I was interested in the everyday life of the Maya through the study of their cultural ecology—the multifaceted relationships
Of humans and their environment. Certainly, the glamorous archaeological centers intrigued me; they were testaments to the wealth of the Maya civilization. Yet, it seemed to me that an understanding of the ancient Maya landscape would tell us more about the relationship of the Maya and their forest than yet another major temple. After all, the Maya were an agrarian civilization.
The ancient Maya agricultural system must be the key to their growth and accomplishments. With more than a century of exploration of the temple centers, we know that the civic centers were made for the ceremonial use of the ruling elite, that the temples would hold tombs of the royals and would include dedications of some of the most astounding artworks of the ancient world. Centers, too, would present stone stele erected in commemoration of regal accomplishments with hieroglyphic writing that is increasingly understood as codification of the Mayan language. These facts about the Maya point to successful development founded in their land use strategies that supported the increasing populations, underwrote the affluent elite glamor, and allowed for the construction of major civic centers over 2 millennia. The Maya farmers were at the bottom of this astounding expansion, and that is where I thought there could be a real discovery.
Since agriculture figures so importantly in preindustrial agrarian societies, such as the Maya, we would expect that the majority of the settlements would be farming ones. But how can we understand the farming techniques and strategies? Our appreciation of the traditional land use methods has been subverted with technology and a European ecological imperialism that inhibits a full understanding of other land use systems.
During the conquest of the Maya area, Spaniards felt there was nothing to eat in the forest; presented with a staggering cornucopia of fruits and vegetables that could fill pages, they asserted they were starving, as there was no grain or cattle. Today, we use European terms to describe agricultural lands around the world that are in many ways inappropriate to describe traditional systems. The words arable specifically means “plow-able” and is derived from the Egyptian word Ard, or “plow.” Arable is equated with cultivable by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and by doing so eliminates realms of land use and management that have a subtler impact on the environment. Fallow is loosely used to indicate abandoned fields, but really fallow means “unseeded plowed field.” For European eyes, plowing was equivalent to cultivating, but in the New World cultivating embraced a much broader meaning that included fields of crops, selective succession, diverse orchards, and managed forests. In fact, it meant the entire landscape mosaic.
It is important to remember that the Maya, like all Native Americans prior to the tumultuous conquest 500 years ago, lived in the Stone Age without metal tools and largely without domesticated animals. This was not a hindrance, as it would seem today, but a fact that focused land use and intensification in other realms. Farmers were called upon to use their local skill and knowledge to provide for daily needs. And, as with all Native Americans, this skill would involve the landscape and most particularly the plants.
Reports of yields of grain from the Mesoamerican maize fields, or milpas, suggest that they were more than two to three times as productive as the fertile fields of the Seine River near Paris of the 16th century, the time of the conquest. The Maya farmed in cooperation with the natural environment. Like the Japanese rice farmer Masanubu Fukuoka describes in his book One Straw Revolution, Maya farmers today use their knowledge of the insects to insure pollination, their understanding of animals to promote propagation, their appreciation of water to determine planting, and their observations of change and nuance to increase their yields. This is not at all like the current agricultural development models that rely on increasingly complex techniques to raise production, disregarding nature in the process.
My focus on the patterns of the ancient Maya settlements has guided me along a path that I believe can provide important answers to questions of how the Maya achieved their success. The answers lie in finding where the everyday Maya lived, when they lived there, and what they did there. While popular notions would have you think that the Maya were a seething sea of humanity displacing the forest for their cities, I have discovered patterns on the landscape indicating that at their height in the Late Classic from 600 to 900 ce, the
Maya occupied less that two thirds of the landscape. More than 80 percent of the settlements were concentrated into less than 40 percent of the area, while another 40 percent of the region was largely unoccupied.
This diversity of land use intensity created a patchwork of stages of what traditional farmers see as a cycle from forest to field and from field to orchard and back to forest again. The result in the Maya forest garden was an economic landscape that supported the ancient Maya, fueled wealth in the colonial and independence eras with lumber, and underwrote capitalism with the natural gum chicle. Today more than 90 percent of the dominant trees of the forest are of economic value. The Maya constructed this valuable forest over the millennia.
Despite my interest in daily life in the forest, monumental buildings became a part of my work. While conducting a settlement survey in the forest, I uncovered and mapped El Pilar, a major ancient Maya urban center with enormous temples towering more than 22 meters high and plaza expanses greater than soccer fields. The whole center of civic buildings covers more than 50 hectares. El Pilar is the largest center in the Belize River area and is located only 50 km from Tikal. This center was bound to become a tourist destination, presenting an opportunity to explore new ways to tell the Maya story. My observation that the ancient Maya evolved a sustainable economy in the tropics of Mesoamerica led my approach to developing El Pilar.
Astride the contemporary border separating Belize from Guatemala,
El Pilar has been the focus of a bold conservation design for an international peace park on a long-troubled border.
The vision for El Pilar is founded on the preservation of cultural heritage in the context of the natural environment. With a collaborative and interdisciplinary team of local villagers, government administrators, and scientists, we have established the El Pilar Archaeological Reserve for Maya Flora and Fauna. Since 1993, the innovations of the El Pilar program have forged new ground in testing novel strategies for community participation in the conservation development of the El Pilar Archaeological Reserve.
This program touches major administrative themes of global importance: tourism, natural resources, foreign
CONTINUED
CONTINUED
Affairs, agriculture, rural development, and education. Yet the program's impact goes further. Working with traditional forest gardeners affects agriculture, rural enterprise, and capacity building. There are few areas untouched by the program's inclusive sweep, and more arenas can contribute to its evolution.
At El Pilar, I practice what I call "action archaeology,” a pioneering conservation model that draws on lessons learned from the recent and distant past to benefit contemporary populations. For example, the co-evolution of Maya society and the environment provide clues about sustainability in this region today. At El Pilar we have advanced programs that will simulate Maya forest gardens as an alternative to resource-diminishing plow-and-pasture farming methods. Working with the traditional farmers, school models are being established. These models will help to transfer knowledge to the younger generation and carry on important conservation strategies. The forest survives and demonstrates resilience to impacts brought on by human expansion. The ancient Maya lived with this forest for millennia, and the El Pilar program argues there are lessons to be learned from that past.
The El Pilar program recognizes the privilege it has enjoyed in forging an innovative community participatory process, in creating a unique management planning design, and in developing a new tourism destination. The success of local outreach at El Pilar can best be seen in the growth of the community organizations such as the El Pilar Forest Garden Network and Amigos de El Pilar (Friends of El Pilar). With groups based in both Belize and Guatemala working together, the El Pilar program can help build an inclusive relationship between the community and the reserve that is mutually beneficial. The development of this dynamic relationship lies at the heart of the El Pilar philosophy—resilient and with the potential to educate communities, reform local-level resource management, and inform conservation designs for the Maya forest.
Anabel Ford is the Director of the Mesoamerican Research Center, University of California-Santa Barbara, and President of the nonprofit Exploring Solutions Past: The Maya Forest Alliance. Http://www. marc. ucsb. edu/elpilar/
World History
