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The disintegration of the Classic Maya civilization in the Yucatán Peninsula and Central America was a complex process that occurred over an approximately 200-year interval and involved a catastrophic depopulation of the region. Although it is well established that the civilization collapse coincided with widespread episodes of drought, their nature and severity remain enigmatic. We present a quantitative analysis that offers a coherent interpretation of four of the most detailed paleoclimate records of the event. We conclude that the droughts occurring during the disintegration of the Maya civilization represented up to a 40% reduction in annual precipitation, probably due to a reduction in summer season tropical storm frequency and intensity. 相似文献
3.
The tropical lowlands of southern Mexico and Central America are composed of a complex mosaic of landscapes that presented a variety of possibilities and challenges to the subsistence practices of the ancient Maya. The Yalahau Regional Human Ecology Project has been investigating ancient Maya agricultural practices and use of resources in a unique fresh-water wetland zone located in the northeast corner of the Yucatán Peninsula. While containing only a sparse population today, the Yalahau region once supported numerous Maya communities and civic-ceremonial centers, particularly during the Late Preclassic and Early Classic periods, between approximately 100 B.C. and A.D. 450. Our investigations have developed evidence that the ancient Maya manipulated and cultivated the wetland landscape of the region, used soil or algae from the wetlands to enrich upland garden plots, and cultivated trees within their communities. We suggest that the study of ancient Maya agricultural practices can contribute to sustainable development of the area today and in the future. 相似文献
4.
The Republic of Mexico has an ambitious and effective national water program. The Secretaria de Recursos Hidraulicos (SRH), whose director has cabinet rank in the federal government, is one of the most professionally distinguished government agencies of its kind in the Americas. Resources for the Future, Inc., has been assisting the World Bank with a water planning study which the Bank is undertaking jointly with the Mexican government. The study is intended to provide guidelines for the development of government policies and projects designed to bring about the most efficient use of Mexico's water resources. However, to date, their study has not been directed toward the growing problems of the northern Yucatáan Peninsula which are discussed here. LeGrand (13) suggested that man has inherited a harsh environment in carbonate terranes. In the case of the northern Yucatán Peninsula, the physical environment creates a set of hydrogeologic constraints to future economic and social development. Planning for intermediate and long-range land use on the peninsula must be related directly to the limited and fragile groundwater source. Continued contamination will make future aquifer management a difficult challenge for federal, state, and territorial agencies. We conclude that any strategy for long-range land use in the study area should include establishment of a regional aquifermonitoring network for long-term measurements of key hydrogeologic parameters, including precipitation, evapotranspiration, water table elevations, and water quality. Information from this network would flow into a central facility for storage, interpretation, and analysis. At present the SRH is collecting some of these data. Expansion of the existing program to provide sound information for regional planning will greatly benefit present as well as future generations. If such a program is implemented, it will represent a model for regional planning in other tropical and subtropical karstic terrains. 相似文献
5.
Millon R 《Science (New York, N.Y.)》1970,170(3962):1077-1082
The detailed archeological map of Teotihuacán, near Mexico City, demonstrates what the prehistoric city was like from its densely crowded center to its more sparsely settled peripheries. The city's population lived in crowded one-story apartment compounds, grouped into neighborhoods based at least partly on occupation. At its height the city had a minimum population of 75,000, a probable population of 125,000, and a possible population of more than 200,000. Those involved in craft production and associated activities may have numbered in the tens of thousands. The scope and intensity of urbanization at Teotihuacán is not paralleled in other contemporary New World centers. The growth potential of the obsidian and other industries, the rise of Teotihuacán as a market and trade center, and its attraction as a religious center may have combined in a self-generating process that led to the creation of Teotihuacán's unique urban society. 相似文献
6.
Charlton TH 《Science (New York, N.Y.)》1978,200(4347):1227-1236
Current cultural ecological models of the development of civilization in central Mexico emphasize the role of subsistence production techniques and organization. The recent use of established and productive archeological surface survey techniques along natural corridors of communication between favorable niches for cultural development within the Central Mexican symbiotic region resulted in the location of sites that indicate an early development of a decentralized resource exploitation, manufacturing, and exchange network. The association of the development of this system with Teotihuacán indicates the importance such nonsubsistence production and exchange had in the evolution of this first central Mexican civilization. The later expansion of Teotihuacán into more distant areas of Mesoamerica was based on this resource exploitation model. Later civilizations centered at Tula and Tenochtitlán also used such a model in their expansion. 相似文献
7.
Prehispanic water management in the Maya Lowlands emphasized collection and storage rather than the canalization and diversion accentuated in highland Mexico. Reexamination of site maps of the ancient Maya city of Tikal, Guatemala, has revealed an important, overlooked factor in Maya centralization and urban settlement organization. In a geographical zone affected by an extended dry season and away from permanent water sources, large, well-planned reservoirs provided resource control as well as political leverage. 相似文献
8.
Fossiliferous Cambrian, Ordovician, Mississippian, and Pennsylvanian rocks, never before found in southern Mexico, have been discovered in the Nochixtlán region. Superjacent unfossiliferous sedimentary rocks may be Permian in age. Early Paleozoic and late Paleozoic intervals of marine sedimentation were bounded by intervals of positive tectonism and erosion. 相似文献
9.
Malmstrom VH 《Science (New York, N.Y.)》1973,181(4103):939-941
The sacred 260-day Mesoamerican calendar probably originated near a latitude of 15 degrees N, where there is a 260-day interval between transits of the zenithal sun. Archeological and faunal evidence favors an origin in the Pacific lowlands rather than in the highlands near Copán, Honduras, although Copán, which is located at the 15th parallel of latitude, later became the principal Mayan astronomical center. 相似文献
10.
Swisher CC Grajales-Nishimura JM Montanari A Margolis SV Claeys P Alvarez W Renne P Cedillo-Pardoa E Maurrasse FJ Curtis GH Smit J McWilliams MO 《Science (New York, N.Y.)》1992,257(5072):954-958
(40)Ar/(39)Ar dating of drill core samples of a glassy melt rock recovered from beneath a massive impact breccia contained within the 180-kilometer subsurface Chicxulub crater in Yucatán, Mexico, has yielded well-behaved incremental heating spectra with a mean plateau age of 64.98 +/- 0.05 million years ago (Ma). The glassy melt rock of andesitic composition was obtained from core 9 (1390 to 1393 meters) in the Chicxulub 1 well. The age of the melt rock is virtually indistinguishable from (40)Ar/(39)Ar ages obtained on tektite glass from Beloc, Haiti, and Arroyo el Mimbral, northeastern Mexico, of 65.01 +/- 0.08 Ma (mean plateau age for Beloc) and 65.07 +/- 0.10 Ma (mean total fusion age for both sites). The (40)Ar/(39)Ar ages, in conjunction with geochemical and petrological similarities, strengthen the recent suggestion that the Chicxulub structure is the source for the Haitian and Mexican tektites and is a viable candidate for the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary impact site. 相似文献
11.
Coastal uplift and mortality of intertidal organisms caused by the september 1985 Mexico earthquakes
Coastal uplift associated with the great Mexican earthquake of 19 September 1985 and its principal aftershock produced widespread mortality of intertidal organisms along the coast of the states of Michoacán and Guerrero, Mexico. Measurements of the vertical extent of mortality at ten sites provided estimates of the magnitude of the vertical component of deformation along the coast. Within the affected area, uplift ranged from about 12 centimeters to about 1 meter, and no subsidence was observed. The observations are consistent with models of the tectonic deformation that results from buried slip on a shallow-dipping underthrust fault. 相似文献
12.
David L. Carr 《Agriculture and Human Values》2004,21(2-3):171-179
This paper examines potential differences in land use between Q'eqchí Maya and Ladino (Spanish speakers of mixed ancestry) farmers in a remote agricultural frontier in northern Petén, Guatemala. The research site, the Sierra de Lacandón National Park (SLNP), is a core conservation zone of Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR). In recent years, much has been written about the dramatic process of colonization and deforestation in Petén, Guatemala's largest and northernmost department. Since the early 1980s a rapid rural transformation has occurred where once remote forested regions have been colonized by small farmers, and lands have been converted to maize fields and cattle pastures. Consequently, less than half of the original forest cover in the department remains. Although approximately half of Petén's rural settlers have been Q'eqchí Maya, their land use, and its subsequent impact on Petenero forests, has been little studied. Results suggest that despite heterogeneous land use systems in migrant origin areas, given similar physical and socio-economic conditions following settlement in this remote frontier, Q'eqchí and Ladino farmer land use is remarkably similar. Only a modest land use difference appears to exist between the two groups: Q'eqchí Maya appear to have more extensive swidden maize rotations while Ladinos dedicate more land to pasture. 相似文献
13.
Solar forcing of drought frequency in the Maya lowlands 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
We analyzed lake-sediment cores from the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, to reconstruct the climate history of the region over the past 2600 years. Time series analysis of sediment proxies, which are sensitive to the changing ratio of evaporation to precipitation (oxygen isotopes and gypsum precipitation), reveal a recurrent pattern of drought with a dominant periodicity of 208 years. This cycle is similar to the documented 206-year period in records of cosmogenic nuclide production (carbon-14 and beryllium-10) that is thought to reflect variations in solar activity. We conclude that a significant component of century-scale variability in Yucatan droughts is explained by solar forcing. Furthermore, some of the maxima in the 208-year drought cycle correspond with discontinuities in Maya cultural evolution, suggesting that the Maya were affected by these bicentennial oscillations in precipitation. 相似文献
14.
Willey GR 《Science (New York, N.Y.)》1982,215(4530):260-267
Maya beginnings go back at least 4000 years in southern Mexico and Central America. The Maya of the tropical lowlands were one of several linguistically distinct groups who occupied pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Their complex social order and civilization, which arose from early village farming, encompassed remarkable achievements in architecture, the arts, and hieroglyphic writing. Their Classic civilization (A.D. 250 to 1000) was a tightly integrated system in which subsistence, technology, settlement, the arts, and ideology closely intermeshed. Their decline and the subsequent Postclassic Period (A.D. 1000 to .1520), the continuing subjects of debate among Mayanists, are perhaps best understood in the light of more widespread Mesoamerican trends and changes. 相似文献
15.
Hirth K 《Science (New York, N.Y.)》1984,225(4662):579-586
The appearance of regional city-states in pre-Hispanic Central Mexico corresponds with the disruption of socioeconomic relationships throughout Teotihuacán's political domain after 650 A.D. Surface reconnaissance and mapping at Xochicalco provided information on the growth and organization of one of these urban centers. The data indicate that Xochicalco was a well-planned urban center and capital of a regional city-state that extended its domain throughout western Morelos by military conquest. 相似文献
16.
Texcocan-Aztec peoples in the Valley of Mexico used both picture symbols and lines and dots for numerical notation. Decipherment and analysis of mid-16th-century native pictorial land documents from the Texcocan region indicate that the line-and-dot system incorporated a symbol for zero and used position to ascribe values. Positional line-and-dot notation was used to record areas of agricultural fields, and analysis of the documentary data suggests that areas were calculated arithmetically. These findings demonstrate that neither positional notation nor the zero were unique to the Maya area, and they imply an equally sophisticated mathematical development among the Aztecs. 相似文献
17.
Economically important trees such as ramón have been shown to have a high density in the civic-ceremonial core zone of ancient Maya ruins. The distribution of such trees is probably the result of their requirements for growth and reproduction, which are optimal on the ruins, and not because they are the descendants of trees planted by the Maya aristocracy. 相似文献
18.
Rafael de Grenade Gary Paul Nabhan Micheline Cariño Olvera 《Agriculture and Human Values》2016,33(2):455-474
Oases have served as sacred landscapes and sources of ritual plants in arid regions of the Old and New Worlds. We evaluate the Jesuit mission oases of the Baja California peninsula (Mexico) for their role in agrobiodiversity persistence, and extend theories of sacred landscapes and biodiversity conservation to agricultural species and practices. Jesuit missionaries on the peninsula (1697–1768) introduced a suite of crops species and agricultural and water management systems that persist in the oases and have become an integral part of the cultural and religious identity of the peninsula. The sacred landscapes of the oases are defined by elements of the Jesuit mission systems, such as water capture systems and irrigation canals, stone field borders and terraces, field gardens or huertas, groves of olive trees and date palms, and multi-tiered agroecosystems. Sacred practices—including pilgrimages, religious rites, and Catholic-based community celebrations—depend on the integrated “landscapes” of the oases and on the ritual use of wild and cultivated oasis plant species. We propose that some, though not all, of the peninsula oases may be considered as sacred landscapes responsible for maintaining heritage crop species, biodiversity, and traditional farming and foodways practices. 相似文献
19.
Pendergast DM 《Science (New York, N.Y.)》1982,217(4559):533-535
Discovery of mercury in an ancient Maya offering at Lamanai, Belize, has stimulated examination of possible sources of the material in the Maya area. Two zones of cinnabar and native mercury deposits can be defined in the Maya highlands, and the presence of the native metal suggests that the ancient Maya collected rather than extracted the mercury from ore. 相似文献
20.
Trace element analysis of obsidian artifacts from Moho Cay, Belize, reveals that the obsidian derives primarily from the El Chayal outcrop in highland Guatemala and not from the Ixtepeque source. This is contrary to the widely accepted obsidian trade route model for Classic Maya civilization and suggests that Classic Maya obsidian trade was a more complex economic phenomenon than has been recognized. 相似文献