Abstract
The origins and cultural affiliations of the first sedentary agricultural and pottery-producing communities in the southern Maya lowlands remain hotly debated. Here, we describe the discovery of a new early farming settlement at the small site of Buenavista-Nuevo San José on Lake Peten Itza in northern Guatemala. Evidence for a pre-Mamom occupation (1000–700 BC) at this site was found in the deepest fill layers overlying bedrock, including pottery diagnostic of this time period and the remains of a post-in-bedrock dwelling. Because the evidence for this early settlement is from secondary contexts and because four radiocarbon dates cover a broad chronological range, the best evidence for the pre-Mamom occupation consists of the ceramics recovered in the excavations. The closest links of the pre-Mamom pottery at Buenavista-Nuevo San José are with the Eb complex at Tikal and the Cunil complex of Cahal Pech, Belize, suggesting strong interactions between these early groups. The discovery of pre-Mamom pottery at Buenavista also suggests that the early farmers were more widespread than previously suggested. Furthermore, the presence of Olmecoid symbols incised on the pre-Mamom pottery at Buenavista-Nuevo San José indicates that these early communities were immersed in broad pan-Mesoamerican spheres of interaction.
Highlights
The origins of the first fully sedentary Maya communities of the southern Maya lowlands have garnered recent attention, as well as much debate [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
The mystery is that, elsewhere in the southern Maya lowlands beyond Belize, we have found rare traces of the settlements that correspond to these Late Archaic horticulturalists [14]
By 3400–1500 BC, the southern Maya lowlands were sparsely populated by tribal societies, consisting of highly mobile horticulturalists-foragers or collectors [1, 7, 19, 27, 123]
Summary
The origins of the first fully sedentary Maya communities of the southern Maya lowlands have garnered recent attention, as well as much debate [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. At the moment, we have some evidence that these earliest lowlanders manipulated the bedrock to construct platforms [43], but such bedrock manipulations may be hard to identify in the small test pits that Maya archaeologists typically excavate down to bedrock Another critical obstacle to the discovery of Archaic sites is that, in many parts of the southern Maya lowlands, substantial environmental changes at the beginning of the Holocene would have obscured early deposits under meters of sediments or water [19, 27, 44]. In spite of these lacunae, substantial new research, both paleoecological and archaeological, suggests that the southern Maya lowlands were inhabited, albeit sparsely, by horticulturalist-foragers as early as the fourth millennium BC in some parts and as late as the second millennium BC in other parts These horticulturalist-foragers were highly mobile, did not make pottery, and lived in small ephemeral settlements which would be hard to identify archaeologically
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