Mayan+Agriculture


 * = ** Maya Agriculture ** =

//Maya agriculture was the foundation of civilization. Populations in densely forested regions, such as //[|//El Petén//]//, "The cradle of the Maya civilization", in //[|//Guatemala//]//, often rely on slash-and-burn agriculture. At first glance, this might seem like the approach the Maya used was not be conducive to clearing large areas of land quickly. The term slash-and-burn agriculture, the people of that area clear the land to plant corn and other foods for their diet. The slash-burn technique is good for productivity for first year, however as time goes on the productivity decreased every year until the land is basically useless, and they are required to move on to the next area. So what happened to the land? Between the slash and burn and the maize cropping, the land lost all of its nutrients and infertile land within a three to five year time period. Now within sparsely populated region, slash-and-burn agriculture could work, but Mesoamerica around 800 A.D. was one of the most densely populated areas in the pre-industrial world. The simple Slash and burn wouldn’t have enabled a population to grow to that size. It seems the Maya took a different approach to farming: effective water management. //

//The rainforest experiences an annual dry season. The Maya were unable to tap into the groundwater supply because it was 500 feet below them, and with no technology to reach it, they had to become depended on rainwater In the Petén region, rainwater accumulates in swamplands, known as bajos, that cover about 40 percent of the landscape. Today, that rainwater evaporates before anyone can use it effectively. Reach seems to believe that the Maya used the canals to redirect and reuse the rainwater. This labor-intensive agriculture, which probably kept farmers working diligently all day, would have barely outpaced demand. //

//The Maya cultivated //[|//cacao//]// in forest gardens in which every tree had a function. Cacao is used for many reasons in the Mayan culture, but mainly it is used for religious reasons and medicinal uses. // // Corn has been a huge staple in the Mayan diet and since the archaic period a little kind of maize was being grown near the margins of the lake //[|//Petenxil//]//, 1,000 years before the first pottery-using farmers were known in the region. Although populations must have been relatively small at this time, their land use practices had a clear impact on the environment. //

//Maize cobs are found in the //[|//Pacific Lowlands//]// sites beginning about 1700 BC, but these are small and not very productive ears...carbon pathway analysis of human skeletal material has shown that maize was not very important in the diet of these Early Preclassic villagers...it is confirmed that they might have been relying on Yucca, manioc or cassava, and ancient root crop of the New World tropics, rather than maize, the evidence for this comes from Cerén in El Salvador. // ||  || []