Research in Southern Belize has produced a 1000-year record of coupled human and environmental relationships at the ancient Maya city Uxbenká. Located at the southeastern margin of the Maya Lowlands, this region has excellent agricultural land and some of the highest rainfall in the Maya region. Uxbenká was the founding political center in southern Belize after 100 BCE. After 850 years, Uxbenká experienced a long geopolitical disintegration ending in depopulation as part of broad regional collapse. We use kernel density and summed probability distributions of 167 high-precision AMS14C dates to reconstruct relative changes in population and investments in the built environment throughout the growth and decline of the polity. Those data are compared to an annually resolved speleothem paleoclimate record from Yok Balum cave, located less than 3 km from Uxbenká’s civic ceremonial core. With no Classic Period wetland fields or evidence for large-scale landscape investments in agricultural intensification, food production would have been rainfall dependent as was water availability for household use. Using a 30 m SRTM DEM, we compute flow accumulation and the upvalley extents of river networks while varying the input precipitation to reflect hypothesized changes in paleorainfall over time. Our data suggest that Uxbenká experienced rapid growth following a severe drought at 200 CE, as well as cycles of growth and contraction until just after 750 CE. We find that geopolitical disintegration in southern Belize was already underway when a severe drought began at 830 CE. That six-decade drought likely contributed to the abandonment of Uxbenká and limited geopolitical reorganization.
The Paleoindian Chronology of Tzib Te Yux Rockshelter in the Rio Blanco Valley of Southern Belize.
With very little known about preceramic occupations in Belize we present the chronology of a small rockshelter in southern Belize that has clear evidence of human activity extending back to the late Pleistocene. The shelter is located along the Rio Blanco valley less than 2 km from the site of Uxbenká. Data collected from four seasons of excavation indicate that the first humans began exploiting local resources, including freshwater snails (jute) by 10,500 BC and were drawn to the rockshelter by its location near fresh water and stone tool resources. Jute
processing was a major part of the use of the shelter and continued likely through the Classic Period. Unfortunately, the upper levels of the archaic and Classic Maya period are mixed or were removed, possibly for the carbonate jute shells, likely during the occupation of Uxbenká.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1632061
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10067808
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Research reports in Belizean archaeology
- Volume:
- 14
- ISSN:
- 2079-1038
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 321-326
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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