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In this paper, I discuss what is known of the Late Archaic occupation in northern Belize. The second millennium BC is the “Early Formative” for most of Mesoamerica but the subsistence and residential adaptation of the Maya lowlands residents up until ~1100 BC consisted of mixed foraging-horticulturalists with no ceramic containers or permanent villages. This means that an “Archaic” strategy persisted in the Maya area for almost a thousand years longer than elsewhere in Mesoamerica. I review evidence from the site of San Estevan where first ceramic-using (i.e., Swasey phase) villagers are documented with little evidence of their predecessors. Next, I review evidence of Archaic-period occupation on the west shore of Progresso Lagoon where maize, squash and chili peppers were cultivated by mobile foragers. Finally, I present plans to thoroughly document and date the second and third millennium BC occupation of Progresso Lagoon and explore how the global climatic change impacted the adaptation of forager-horticulturalists.
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Late Archaic large-scale fisheries in the wetlands of the pre-Columbian Maya Lowlands
Multiproxy data collected from the largest inland wetland in Belize, Central America, demonstrate the presence of large-scale pre-Columbian fish-trapping facilities built by Late Archaic hunter-gatherer-fishers, which continued to be used by their Maya descendants during Formative times (approximately 2000 BCE to 200 CE). This is the earliest large-scale Archaic fish-trapping facility recorded in ancient Mesoamerica. We suggest that such landscape-scale intensification may have been a response to long-term climate disturbance recorded between 2200 and 1900 BCE. Agricultural intensification after 2000 BCE has been credited for supporting the rise of pre-Columbian civilizations in Formative Mesoamerica, but we suggest that some groups relied more heavily on the mass harvesting of aquatic resources. We argue that such early intensification of aquatic food production offered a high value subsistence strategy that was instrumental in the emergence of Formative period sedentarism and the development of complexity among pre-Columbian civilizations like the Maya.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2120534
- PAR ID:
- 10654150
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Association for the Advancement of Science
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Science Advances
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 47
- ISSN:
- 2375-2548
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adq1444
