Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant: Subsistence Organization In A Traditional Society

Suny At Albany, Albany NY

Investigators

Abstract

Doctoral candidate Caroline Antonelli (University at Albany-SUNY) will evaluate the sustainability of diverse agricultural systems employed by farmers in pre-modern urban settings focusing on the late prehistoric Mesoamerican site of Mayapan. Food supply challenges faced by residents of ancient cities were especially acute in fragile environmental contexts characterized by chronic instability. This study investigates the diverse and complex methods employed by past agriculturalists that helped to mitigate risks and contribute toward stable, enduring urban political economies in relatively extreme environmental settings. Diversity in agricultural practices was manifested by a gardening-to-farming continuum involving plots that graded from small, urban gardens to larger, distant cultivation zones just beyond the urban sprawl. This study will determine the duration and intensity of cultivation of specific types of crops, the productive potential of local soils, human impacts to the environment in the form of degradation or engineered improvements to soil, and the exploitation of contrastive natural microenvironments formed by differences in soil, elevation, and moisture. Archaeological science is uniquely positioned to reconstruct and analyze the impacts of long-term human-environmental relationships and to present useful applications of these findings to traditional farmers in marginal, impoverished zones of the world today, including the study area including this rural locality of the northwest Yucatan peninsula, Mexico. This region is one of the driest zones in southern Mexico and historical records attest to the regularity of droughts and hurricanes. The study area was long thought to be of dismal agrarian potential, despite the seeming contradiction that this zone was home to numerous large cities and extensive rural populations through time, including the present day. This investigation will be the first to systematically reconstruct the array of urban-to-rural agrarian strategies and landscape impacts across time and space from a geoarchaeological perspective in this part of southern Mexico. A key broader impact is represented by educational outreach to local farmer communities who will benefit from knowledge concerning intensive enrichment, variable local agrarian potential, and niche cultivation practices of the past. Data for this project will derive from interdisciplinary methods in archaeology and geology, including geochemical soil composition, the USDA system of geophysical soil classification, stable isotopic analysis, remote sensing-assisted environmental mapping (Landsat satellite and LiDAR imagery), and the use of spatial and statistical software. Mayapan was the largest city of the Maya world of its time (A.D. 1200-1450) and home to a population of 20,000 residents who dwelled in a densely-packed urban zone. This city was the capital of a vast regional state and trading domain that extended from the Gulf to the Caribbean coasts, but little is known regarding its staple food supply. The issue of agricultural sustainability, especially in the face of urban growth and environmental constraints, is a problem of great interest to researchers in the social sciences and to the modern world. This project will provide important new archaeological data on long-term strategies for resiliency in human-environmental systems.