The ever-changing ancient Maya landscape depended on the relationship between fields and forest. The natural resources of the Maya forest, seen as a hotspot of biodiversity, necessarily provisioned the ancient Maya economy. For ancient Mesoamericans, all aspects of the landscape, in particular their cultivation, depended on rainfall and their technologies-based human power, supported with tools of stone and fire, though the remarkable accomplishments of the Maya were achieved in the absence of plow or cow.
Clearly, demand for cropped fields inherently reduces land for forests and cleared land increases erosion and reduces fertility. It was Malthus, who wrote more than 200 years ago, who stated the choice is cast as a dichotomy between cultivated fields and forest. And to Western eyes, cultivable has been equated with arable, and arable means plowable. Traditional land use in all of the Americas, and for that matter most small holders around the world, is reliant on the labor of the individual, family, and community.
However, the ancient Maya civilization was based on an agriculture system engaged with the natural environment. Labor, knowledge, skill, and scheduling was used to direct the exuberant tropical growth towards human needs. The open field was the foundation for the useful forest and without a useful forest there could be no constructive field. The Maya civilization thus developed and expanded across the millennia based on reliable land management practices to provision food and shelter, accommodating climate changes with flexible and resilient strategies.
From the conventional, traditional perspective, Maya land use has remained largely maligned as ‘slash and burn and shifting agriculture’, recognizing only the food crops and seeing the remaining lands as “resting.” In this view, the uncropped land is wasted rather than seen as an investment in a regeneration dynamic to produce perennial fruits, important medicines, habitat for animals, and the essential construction materials for houses.
Enter here the milpa.
The field crop called the ‘milpa’ is part of a complex landscape embedded in the forest itself, consistent with traditional swidden sequences around the world. Fire, and burning, is an important component of the practice that relies on strategic fire management skills, and those that master it are known as Yum Ik’ob or Masters of Wind—opening field spaces with fire, enriching the soil with ash, and systematically reducing the fuel load on the landscape with the asynchronous cycle of field, to forest, to field. Managed as a horizontal matrix with vertical variations of a heterogeneous mosaic of milpa forest garden cycles, it is an orchestrated sequence of succession from annuals to perennials founded on local and traditional ecological knowledge practices. Value is gathered over generations, centuries, and millennia, building a regenerative cycle that is a sophisticated low-tech undertaking that is resilient under variable climactic and ecological conditions. The milpa forest garden emerged under conditions of climate chaos and underwrote the millennia of growth and development of the ancient Maya. It is a valuable lesson for us today.
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The Maya Forest Garden, created through the Milpa cycle. Courtesy BRASS/El Pilar
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Maya Forest Resources
Forest products were derived from the landscape by Maya management to conserve water, moderate temperature, build soil fertility, and check erosion. This was to insure access to goods and provide services from their immediate environs to meet the basic needs for food, fodder, and fuel to ensure general well-being. Investments on the landscape included a diversity of local field crops, forest products for perennial fruits, construction, and utensils, and protein from forest wildlife. These were available because local inhabitants had developed forests and gardens. Household items of all sorts were grown in home gardens and fields, extracted from regenerating second growth and mature forests, and nurtured in the mosaic landscape that surrounded homes and communities.
Food of every part of nearly 500 plants garnered from the domesticated landscape have been identified in use in fields and forest by contemporary Maya (Fedick 2020) and a good proportion of these plants perform well with lack of water (Fedick and Santiago 2021). Remedies derived from forest plants cover most ailments encountered in the household. The contribution of palms, dominant in neotropical forests such as the Maya forest (Muscarella et al. 2020), is significant. Equally important are construction materials derived from other trees (Cook 2016; Lentz and Hockaday 2009; Hellmuth 1977). The forest of materials provide reliable habitats to support animals, contributing dietary protein (Emery 2007; Emery and Thornton 2008). Skilled beekeepers, or K’axil kab, in the Maya forest provide honey, wax, and royal jelly and supporte the pollination of the forest trees (Bianco et al. 2017; Jones 1977; Farriss 1992; Vietmeyer 1991: 363-370; Zralka et al. 2014, 2018). Lack of flower pollen will inhibit production of honey and apart from the beauty, ornamentals are an important investment in the home gardens, contributing flowers (Gasco 2008) significant to beekeeping.
Reliable and dependable provisioning of everyday needs requires sophisticated skill and knowledge based on a dynamic and intensive agricultural and forestry system, engaged with the natural processes that minimize risk over time and maximize the value of invested labor and skill across space. Proficiently designed to moderate rainfall variations in times of drought with water conservation strategies. Additionally, in times of deluge with erosion checking practices, the milpa forest garden reinforces or supplements soil fertility with each phase of the high-performance cycle (Wilke 1987). As a subsistence system of significant complexity, all aspects of the landscape from the open field gap through gradients of secondary growth to the mature canopy forest, serve practical purposes. The clearing of the milpa yields the opportunity to select the regenerating forest, a co-creative landscape management design of investments in the forest as a garden.
Horizontal and Vertical Landscape Dynamics
The most substantial feature of the Maya forest is the karst limestone platform that underlies the Maya area at the regional scale, impacting spatial distribution of all resources. Local variations in limestones are expressed in drainage features and distribution of water. Porous limestone absorbs rain, and rainfall averages vary from 500 mm in the northwest Yucatan Peninsula to 4,000 mm in the far south; the central area around Tikal and El Pilar receives 1500-2000 mm a year.
Over the peninsula, seasons are divided based on precipitation. Often simply seen as wet and dry, there are actually two rainy periods recognized by farmers and one dry season. The first is a warm, wet period called Chaak Ik, the thunder wind associated with hurricanes that start in June. This is followed by the Ikal Ixpelon, the cool wet period associated with the Nortes linked to the winter months in the north starting in November. The shortest period is the dry period, Yaxk’in, initiating from March to April and noted as the time for preparing the milpa fields.
Water availability and soil quality are critical in tropical forest environments. Geological characteristics of limestone with fissures absorb surface water. Management of land cover is essential, and vegetation cover protects soil, contributing organic matter while inhibiting soil loss to create a matrix of diverse assets. Managed to reduce temperature, maintain biodiversity, conserve water, inhibit erosion, and build soil fertility, the small holder strategies that were recognized at the conquest were developed in response to vagaries of weather.
The Maya forest is recognized for its remarkable variety and an abundance of useful plants. Forest products from the layers of forest gardens yield a diversity of products from the tall canopy trees to the ground cover. Over a 20-year cycle with field openings in the forest, the field to forest cropscape unfolds layers of trees, palms, shrubs, grasses, vines, epiphytes, forbs, and grasses. The co-creative matrix develops as an interactive process between people and their landscape based on an inherent respect for nature. The vigorous growth has been intervened with constant selection attuned to the natural systems through trial and error aiming towards the long-term preferences for utility from immediate infields around homes to the scattered outfields. This emerges as concentric zones of assets around settlements based on management and tending.
The asynchronous cycling of fields to forests develops a landscape mosaic that, at any one time, presents diverse fields, amid building perennials, and mature closed canopy. There is interaction among the fields and forests where the variety of trees and shrubs recorded in the maize field are similar to those of the home gardens.
Favored trees are protected and cared for in the fields, and along with resprouting of saplings, hasten the regeneration process from regeneration to mature cycles. These dynamic land use practices enhance flexibility and adaptability under unpredictable and changing climatic conditions and the mosaic of land cover from field to forest lower fuel load, moderate temperature, and manage water for both drought and deluge. These ingrained and multidimensional low-tech practices allow flexibility and enable a nimble response to short-term and erratic shifts in weather regimes as well as more persistent long-term climatic trends.
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The Milpa cycle, from maize field to perennials and back to the forest. Courtesy BRASS/El Pilar
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Discussion
The accumulative result of selection for diversity and utility over millennia is the co-creative Maya making the forest as a garden. A consequent outcome makes the nature of the Maya forest a product of culture. The spatial composite of this biological capital is the key to understanding how the ancient Maya managed and used resources for the long term, minimizing risk to secure continuity and predictability in the face of the vicissitudes of weather and environment. The traditional ecological knowledge of the Maya has evolved to meet the daily, weekly, seasonal as well as ceremonial requisites that are part of everyday life. Topography, drainage, and soil qualities intersect with the landscape of uplands, transitional lowlands, and wetlands to figure into the mosaic of vital resources. The land-use system enriched habitats and properties, based on the integral and asynchronous cycles imposed by the milpa forest gardens that support the economy.
It is clear that the Maya took advantage of the vibrant qualities of the milpa cycle and the context of natural forest regeneration to provide diverse resources across space linked to land use and land cover that managed their environmental impacts. This is an iterative and interactive relationship where the pernicious impacts of human management with cutting and burning are part of the natural processes of adaptation. Over the 8,000 years of the Holocene development of the Maya forest, and the 4,000 years of Maya development, the connections of plants and people evolved a forest that responded to the impacts of humans as humans established their relationship with the biological capital of the forest.
It is remarkable that the product of the Maya civilization is the Maya forest and the biodiversity recognized in its forest is the consequence of steady and systematic attention to selection, stressing the important resources to sustain life. The resilience of the forest is a tribute to the traditional knowledge of the farmers of the Maya forest. Today they are ready to share their secrets to prosperity and conservation before it is too late.
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