Abstract
The environmental impact of the ancient Maya, and subsequent ecological recovery following the Terminal Classic decline, have been the key foci of research into socio-ecological interactions in the Yucatán peninsula. These foci, however, belie the complex pattern of resource exploitation and agriculture associated with post-Classic Maya societies and European colonisation. We present a high-resolution, 1200-year record of pollen and charcoal data from a 52-cm short core extracted from New River Lagoon, near to the European settlement of Indian Church, northern Belize. This study complements and extends a previous 3500-year reconstruction of past environmental change, located 1-km north of the new record and adjacent to the ancient Maya site of Lamanai. This current study shows a mixed crop production and palm agroforestry management strategy of the ancient Maya, which corroborates previous evidence at Lamanai. Comparison of the two records suggests that core agricultural and agroforestry activities shifted southwards, away from the centre of Lamanai, beginning at the post-Classic period. The new record also demonstrates that significant changes in land-use were not associated with drought at the Terminal Classic (ca. CE 1000) or the European Encounter (ca. CE 1500), but instead resulted from social and cultural change in the post-Classic period (CE 1200) and new economies associated with the British timber trade (CE 1680). The changes in land-use documented in two adjacent records from the New River Lagoon underline the need to reconstruct human–environment interactions using multiple, spatially, and temporally diverse records.
Highlights
Investigating changing socio-ecological interactions through time is necessary to contextualise modern anthropogenically driven ecosystem change within a known range of disturbance and recovery [1,2,3,4]
We have described how past land use patterns shifted in space and time through a period of significant cultural and political change in Belize using complementary records of changing vegetation and fire use, extracted from sediment cores located ca.1 km apart
The spatial differences in past land use show that whilst sediment records taken adjacent to temple areas, which remain the focus of many palaeoenvironmental studies, are excellent indicators of past land use among the Classic
Summary
Investigating changing socio-ecological interactions through time is necessary to contextualise modern anthropogenically driven ecosystem change within a known range of disturbance and recovery [1,2,3,4]. Past anthropogenically driven ecosystem change, in particular, the manipulation of vegetation composition or soil properties, has been shown to leave a legacy in modern ecosystem functioning and composition [5,6,7]. It is necessary for conservation and Quaternary 2020, 3, 30; doi:10.3390/quat3040030 www.mdpi.com/journal/quaternary. The much discussed ‘collapse’ of this civilisation at the end of the Classic
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