Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Household and Community Arrangement in a Traditional Society

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

Four out of five Americans now live in cities. As urban populations continue to grow, cities face new challenges to feed their residents in healthy and sustainable ways. One recent solution to this issue has been urban agriculture, which simultaneously "greens" blighted urban areas while making healthy produce accessible to city-dwellers. Though urban farms and gardens have sprung up in dozens of American cities, its ultimate success depends on its long-term implementation over multiple generations. The field of archaeology is well positioned to contribute to this effort because archaeologists can document the successful strategies used by ancient sustainable communities. Some civilizations fed themselves with urban agriculture for centuries, and modern society is beginning to recognize that it can learn a lot about long-term sustainability from those ancient societies. One such civilization, the Maya of Mexico and Central America, is the subject of University of Michigan archaeologist Chelsea Fisher's research into the origins of "intra-settlement or "community" agriculture. Many Maya cities are dispersed or "non-nucleated" with low density of structures: they maintained open spaces in their settlements; evidence suggests that some of these spaces were used for intensive urban agriculture. Though archaeologists recognize that many huge Maya cities of later time periods (ca. 250-900 CE) fed themselves with urban agriculture, it is not fully understood (1) how those sustainable strategies developed in the first place, or (2) how those strategies actually worked at the level of individual households and communities. Until those questions are answered, the potential for what modern society can learn from the ancient Maya example remains underdeveloped. Fisher's strategy for investigating the origins of Maya urban agriculture is to strip it down to the basics: to study a small community, Tzacauil, that was settled right at the time that the Maya were first learning how to be farmers. Tzacauil, located in the Mexican state of Yucatán, has unique conditions that allow for full archaeological exploration of early (ca. 250 BCE - 250 CE) Maya houses and land-use modifications in the surrounding landscape. Fisher will conduct excavations at nine house groups at Tzacauil in conjunction with rigorous investigation of agricultural features and land-use patterns (e.g., terraces, berms, reservoirs) in the areas between and around houses. Using the archaeological data collected at Tzacauil, Fisher will analyze how multiple generations of Tzacauil families interacted with each other and with their increasingly agricultural landscape. By comparing households' interactions alongside their investments in the landscape, Fisher will explore the development of Tzacauil as an agricultural community. This research is important both for the field of Maya archaeology and for issues of modern community sustainability. Fisher's research at Tzacauil clarifies the early origins of settlement and agriculture in the Maya area, while also providing fine-grained information about how individual households managed the logistics of community agriculture. These insights stand to increase archaeology's ability to contribute long-term data that are potentially instructive for cities interested in promoting community-based sustainability and urban agriculture today.