4 - Subsistence and Complex Societies: The Case of the Maya

Abstract

This chapter focuses on subsistence and complex societies with reference to the case of the Maya. In the past decade, there has been a substantial revision of the way in which one views the adaptation of complex societies to the humid tropics. A major focus of this revision has been the Maya Lowlands, where anthropologists and scholars in the natural sciences have discovered increasingly abundant and bewildering evidence of sophisticated agricultural techniques. The Lowlands may have charted a distinctive but equally precocious cultural-ecological course. The humid tropical lowlands of Mesoamerica are characterized by an environment that is deleterious to the preservation of archaeological materials. The high humidity of both air and soil under the forest canopy encourages decay organisms that quickly destroy most organic remains. Such an environment has somewhat limited the range of study that can be done in the Lowlands. Until recently, a series of more or less independent major subdisciplines were pursued there by scholars, including studies in iconography, calendrics, writing, and architecture, but ecology was more or less ignored.