Maya Agriculture and the Spaces of Possibility
A Historical Review and a Look Towards Contemporary Applications
Growing up I had a particular fascination with ancient Maya civilization—it was among the handful of rather obsessive interests of mine as a child, alongside the First World War, paleontology, botany, and railroads (incidentally, or not, all things in which I remain interested as I approach middle age, with a few more added over the years). I distinctly remember building in second grade a quite elaborate cardboard model of a Mayan temple, though I no longer remember which specific structure it was based upon, nor precisely I had been tasked to build it. As an adult, while I took a bit of sideline in Latin American history while doing master’s degree work what now seems like many years ago (a little under a decade a half in reality), I had not really thought much about Mesoamerican until this year, taking the subject back up somewhat serendipitously, deciding to spend some time studying one of the numerous contemporary Mayan languages still spoken in Guatemala (and, thanks to a large Maya immigrant community, here in Chattanooga and environs as well these days). One thing leads to another, and over the last few months I’ve read through about a dozen scholarly monographs and a number of journal articles on diverse matters of Maya history (one of the advantages of no longer being on a tenure-track quest is that I can pretty much pick my leisure reading at will!).
Perhaps the most exciting material I’ve come across has been new scholarship on Maya agriculture and related topics, works that are almost all quite recent, largely post-dating in fact my last sustained dive into Mesoamerican history. The story that recent scholarship tells is not one I had heard before—even if you are not especially familiar with the historiography of Maya civilization, odds are good that you too will have heard the story of Mayan ‘collapse,’ perhaps with a rather Malthusian lesson attached about the perils of overpopulation and excessive resource use. Frequently the chief culprit has been so-called swidden agriculture, or ‘slash and burn,’ in which- it was presumed- Maya peasants wore out successive tracts of forest through burning and intensive growing, eventually running out of forest to burn and hence cycling into decline and collapse. There is, as we shall see, some truth to this story, but as a description of the millennia of Maya agriculture it falls very short.
In what follows here, I’ve set out to summarize recent scholarship on Maya agriculture, afterwards spending some time discussing possible applications from the lessons and inspiration this history can provide us. I am writing here not so much as a ‘professional’ historian (which granted I am, just not of Mesoamerica, ancient or otherwise!) and more as someone deeply interested in agriculture, ecology, and political and social possibilities, so do keep that in mind- I am sure there will be things in my summation that an actual historian of Mesoamerica would find lacking!
Now, what constituted ‘Maya’ agriculture varied (and continues to vary) a great deal depending on time and especially place; we can only hope to glimpse the broad outlines here. Despite being fairly small geographically, the historical Mayan cultural zone spans some remarkable climatic extremes, from the absolutely rain-soaked to basically arid conditions, water availability further complicated by the intensely karstic nature of much of the Maya homeland. In many places rainfall might well be sufficient at some times of the year, but the karst terrain ensures that the water remains deep underground when it is not falling from the sky, accessible in cenotes and similar structures, but not as surface streams. Soil depth and fertility also varies considerably across the region, unsurprisingly, from deep volcanic soils to thin seams of dirt over limestone.
The Maya would make many different interventions depending on the particularities of place, as their polities multiplied and pushed into areas not obviously very habitable. But there are some shared features of all Maya agriculture before the conquest that help us to appreciate its remarkable nature. One, and shared with all other agricultural peoples in the Americas, Maya farmers could not rely on manuring arrangements like those of their Afro-Eurasian counterparts. Domesticated animals were limited to turkeys and dogs, and while the former may have provided some manuring capacity, they did not equal the large and manure-productive livestock of the Old World. Fertility renewal had to come from elsewhere. Two, Maya polities, from a pretty early point, were marked by urbanism (though what exactly that entails varied and might not accord much with what we imagine a city to look like), with monumental urban cores built by the ruling elite, supported in turn by often sprawling neighborhoods of ordinary people. These cities grew in time to surprisingly large size, probably becoming some of the largest urban concentrations on the planet at the time, likely only surpassed by those of medieval China.
So how did the Maya respond to these challenges? We can think of ‘typical’ Maya agriculture as existing in multiple zones, akin to the zones advocated in permaculture principles, starting with the home and its outbuildings and moving outward. Let’s start though at outermost zone, that of the wild lands without human settlements, which could be dense jungle, thick brush, swamp, marsh, montane forest, and so forth. These were areas of little to no direct intervention, but were used for hunting, gathering, and for ritual, religious purposes; wild game was in many cases an important protein source, given the low rate of domestication in the Americas. Coming in closer to settlements were the milpa fields, the site of staple production (though not only staples, as it turns out, these were like the other zones polyculture plantings). Here something akin to swidden agriculture was practiced, but in a much less destructive manner than once imagined. Periodically forest would be partially felled, the debris burned, and corn and other crops planted in, with successive waves of plantings and encouraged wild volunteers for years afterwards (I should note that while I am using the past tense milpa practices have survived into the present, even if much displaced by industrial methods). Trees would often be left due to some particular utility, and the cleared blocks were always contained within matured forest. Over time, the milpa field would return to full forest, the cycle eventually resuming again years down the road.1
Between the milpa fields ‘proper’ (or in lieu of them entirely) and the close-in home garden different Maya settlements might have more intensive but relatively large plantings for a wide range of polyculture crops, from annual staples to long-lived fruit and nut bearing trees. In some places stone terraces were used; in others wetland areas were apportioned off and farmed intensively; in the severe karst areas stone mulches and natural depressions were utilized for intensive and often perennial agriculture. In such fields as well as in home gardens inputs most likely came from household waste, from green mulches, from perennial inclusions, and sometimes from organic material sourced from nearby wetlands. Because of their proximity and frequent use of built infrastructure, this zone needed human-supplied or managed inputs, instead of the shifting nature of milpa fields. Regional and chronological variation seems to have determined the nature and extent of outfield milpa and infield intensive fields, and my sense is that in given places techniques changed over time.
There is indeed good evidence of adaptation over time in how these closer zones of more intensive, recurring agriculture were managed, both in terms of inputs and in terms of built infrastructure. Initially in urban Maya history we do in fact see evidence (mostly due to lacustrine cores) indeed of land degradation and unsustainable practices:
Erosion began and progressed rapidly during the Preclassic period as pioneering settlement expanded across the lowlands and population levels rose. The Early Classic Maya farmers likely recognized the threat of land degradation and began building terraces, in some instances taking advantage of deep, erosion-deposited soils on footslopes and at the margins of scrub-bajo wetlands. During the population peak of the Late Classic, terracing became common, though not ubiquitous, throughout much of the lowlands. During the Late Classic, erosion continued, but often at a slower, controlled rate that can be interpreted, at least in some cases, as more successful, forward-looking slope management than simple response to environmental degradation.2
The system of Maya agriculture under review here did not spring into being all at once, but was assuredly the product of many years of collective experimentation and instances of over-exploitation, as farmers moved towards more sustainable and more diverse methods of production, reducing not just soil erosion in the process but also reliance on one single form of agriculture or crop arrangement. Terraces, raised beds, wetland demarcation, berms, reservoirs and irrigation systems, and so forth- more than can be reviewed here- were all devised at different points and times, shifting with the needs of place, local climate, and population pressure.
If the outer areas saw considerable variation in intensity and infrastructure, the core of Maya agriculture virtually everywhere was the household and its various plots which made up the home garden. Home gardens were marked by both annual herbaceous plantings as well as plots more akin to a forest garden or food forest, with multiple layers of plants and trees producing all manner of fruits and vegetables and other things; elements of this practice have survived, albeit at reduced scales and importance, in modern Mesoamerica. Alongside the plants outbuildings and other zones of use would have been interspersed, all designated primarily for household use. Household plots were sometimes marked off by stone walls, sometimes by hedges, sometimes by nothing more than breaks in plantings or footpaths; they could vary a great deal in plants grown, balance of perennials to annuals, and so forth. While staples would have primarily been grown further out, intensive close-in plots were a major source of household sustenance and income.
One of the best preserved complexes of home gardens is the village of Joya de Cerén, located in what is now El Salvador, in the highland part of the Mayan world. The village had the good fortune of being built over rich volcanic soil; it also had the bad fortune- for the villagers at the time anyway- of being near said volcano, and was ultimately buried under an ash fall, forcing the villagers to relocate, but happening quickly enough that future archeologists were gifted an exquisitely preserved record of an ordinary Maya village and its daily life. Notably, each household did not demarcate its land from that of its neighbors, even as plots, outbuildings, and work spaces clustered around particular houses. There seems to have been a great deal of visibility and interaction in the village, which suggests that household autonomy was not the primary goal in this arrangement:
If we view the household gardens as a form of wealth at Cerén, each household’s potential was readily visible, and each villager would have had a basic knowledge of everyone’s relative wealth in terms of plant goods.
This becomes more significant when we consider that each household likely had a surplus of certain plant products. For example, Household 4 had a courtyard garden consisting of rows of agave plants, whose fiber was transformed into rope and clothing material. It was probably well known among the inhabitants that this domestic unit provided the main fiber resources for the village. Such important aspects of their livelihoods were not kept secret, with the knowledge of each households’ belongings visible yet controlled with the use of storehouses.
Each household at Cerén produced surplus goods that could be exchanged within the community and perhaps at nearby marketplaces. The kitchen gardens demonstrate that each household also produced their own basic commodities for the household’s consumption, thus creating a dual role for the kitchen gardens as both subsistence and market production.3
Well studied examples from elsewhere suggest similar things: while each household no doubt produced a great deal of its food (and fibre and fuel and medicine), these were still interconnected communities, bound by a host of (largely non-state) relations, mutually dependent on one another both for the day-to-day as well as for large interventions requiring collective labor. For contemporary political debates, I might note, the Maya- like many other ‘traditional’ peoples- provide an excellent rejoinder to those who would reduce social and political life to either purely individualist/household based or purely collectivist. Like the polyculture of their crops, Maya economy and politics depended on diverse sets of relationships.
Maya agricultural production in all its zonation and variability often existed within a dispersed sort of urban structure, with some Maya cities growing quite large even by modern standards, yet seeming at once rural seeming while also decidedly urban and even monumental. As you might by now gather, these cites did not necessarily look like what we might expect space-wise:
The study of Precolumbian lowland Maya tropical urbanism has revealed patterns of dispersed urban landscapes which are characterised by a high retention of urban open space within the intensively developed built environment.4
These agricultural methods, political structure and practices, and urban arrangements of space were all ultimately connected (along with much else, not all of which is now recoverable such as the various religious and ideologies overtones physical infrastructure and practices might have had for different ranks of Maya societies). While a certain spatial structure or logic is often visible in these polities- a dense ‘ceremonial’ core with the famous temple monuments and ball courts and all the rest, with causeways radiating outwards towards neighborhoods and outlying towns- beyond that broad sense things get rather more complicated. Mayan polities tended towards a degree of decentralization and organic development that has proven challenging for modern observers to fully grasp, so used are we to certain spatial arrangements that denote ‘order’ and ‘planning.’ Christian Isendahl addresses this dilemma:
One challenging aspect of investigating planning principles in pre-Hispanic urban layouts is that they are very difficult to infer unless there is some kind of immediately recognisable geometrical pattern. Layout plans in urban archaeology are most often associated with orthogonal shapes of architecture, and it remains standard to think of residential settlement sectors that are not laid out in gridded patterns as “a haphazard arrangement of house lots.” However, the idea that planning depends on rectilinear shapes is problematic. Instead, following Smith’s (2007) approach to understanding planning as based on kinds of standardisation and the coordination of space, the persistent repetition of a dispersed low-density settlement pattern, repeated throughout the region for millennia, suggests an intentional convention applied to urban form that might well be thought of as ‘planned organic growth’.5
Whereas the Roman state (or Mexica elsewhere in Mesoamerica) and successor states (in some places, not all—the medieval Islamicate world is a notable exception) elevated the grid for laying out urban space (and shaping much else besides), Maya villages, towns, and cities emerged in a much more organic fashion, shaping themselves to the land and to a range of political forumations: each neighborhood tended towards de facto self-rule, with little by way of central administration. Taxes and tribute were paid, to be sure, though it is clear from the long track of Mayan history that the non-elite would tolerate the machinations of the central polities only to a point; ‘collapse’ in the Mayan context seems as often as not what we might call a withdraw of consent on the part of the farming and producing masses. The versatility of Maya farming no doubt facilitated the ‘breakdown’ of political order without necessarily causing true social collapse or population loss. At the same time, there seems to have been a recognition on the part of the rulers that a thriving peasantry of freeholders was in everyone’s best interest.
I don’t know that resilient polyculture cropping methods and complex home garden, infield, and milpa complexes will ever supplant in the public imagination of the Maya the enormous temple complexes, calendarical and mathematical complexity, or the invention of use of the only fully functional writing system in the Americas. Like it or not (and the older I get, the less I like it!), it is the particular, often monumental, products of the elite of a given society that become the most widely and enduringly memorialized (which was often at least in part the point of those things). Even when ordinary people are integrated into history, it is usually done in a rather dutiful sense: we have an ethical obligation to recover marginalized voices, that sort of thing. But in this case Maya agriculture is something that truly deserves celebration in its own right alongside monumental structures and intellectual projects, as being truly remarkable, all the more for the way in which it was generated largely ‘from below,’ and outlasted the political machinations and maneuvers of the Maya elite, who fancied themselves to be sustaining the productive cosmos with their sacrificial life blood, even as it was generations upon generations of knowledge and trial and living close to the land on the part of peasant families far and wide that really made Maya civilization so successful and enduring.
Indulge me now in this second half a bit in thinking out loud, in the vein of Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, about the practical lessons or inspirations we might draw from the history of Maya agriculture (and political order, spatial arrangement, and so forth). As I noted above, the Maya independently arrived at many of the same ideas that the twentieth century pioneers of permaculture discovered, from the need to carefully cycle precious nutrients in a ‘closed loop’ to the utility of zonation for households and other entities to the centrality of perennials. The pre-conquest Maya were ‘permaculturalists’ and ‘organic’ long, long before the modern articulation of those ideas, and, crucially, they made it work, not just in the absence of modern fertilizers and chemical regimes, but without access to things like horse and cattle manure or technologies like the plow (the latter of which would, and did, undermine the Maya agricultural synthesis). Equally significantly, they combined productive, intensive growing with urbanism, a significant amount of primary production taking place within neighborhoods, centered around individual families’ homes, but clearly partaking of a communal structure of support and exchange, both ‘gift’ and ‘market’ based.
How might these methods, and the political imaginations they express and are expressions of, be applied to our own world? In terms of infrastructure and available resources, many people in the United States and elsewhere are already living in spaces akin to those of Maya cities: low density and dispersed, often with ‘empty’ spaces available but underutilized (and quite often devoted to the growing of turf grass!). This is most obviously true of suburbs and exurbs, but it is also often true of cities, especially those that have faced population decline or inner core emptying out, leaving abundant empty lots and un-managed margins. At the same time, we cycle through massive amounts of organic resources, from wasted food to yard debris to human manure; most of this organic material is simply disposed of, ending up in landfills or their equivalents. While many cities and suburbs were originally laid out on grid-like arrangements, with hard infrastructure that is difficult to alter or remove, it is also the case that time and entropy will have modified things somewhat, and collective action can refashion or otherwise undermine tight grids in other ways.
Americans really do like having some breathing space, and this seems to be as much a product of the landscape we inhabit as anything else- a tendency towards dispersed, low-density settlement long predates European arrival, and not just in the Maya lands. Here in the Southern Appalachians, as elsewhere in the Southeast (and beyond), the distributed village was long the preferred model, in sharp contrast to the pueblos of the west. Much like the Mayan garden-city, a typical Cherokee or Choctaw or Caddo (as well as their pre-contact Mississippian culture ancestors’) village was made up of lots of homesteads, often spread out along a ridgeline, with gardens and fields in between, footpaths connecting households to communal structures and sites. Beyond the city or village were semi-communal fields (though as we’ve seen a ‘field’ could mean something quite different in the American context), and beyond that the wild lands, de facto commons which were often governed organically (and effectively- game populations seem to have remained quite stable from the early Holocene all the way to European contact and conquest). Now, the suburb or the lower-density urban neighborhood is not an exact analogue to such arrangements. But it has the potential to be something much closer to this highly productive and socially rich low-density arrangement; we can imagine (and I and others are actively working to realize!) urban neighborhoods and suburbs in which the spaces in between are rich productive spaces, providing food and fuel and fibre and connectivity among other humans and with non-human life as well.
Instead of grids which feed into and are controlled by yet larger grids, we can rework existing infrastructure towards the more organic and zonal layouts of Maya polities, creating many nodes of growing and making and distribution, in which nutrients and capital and people themselves circulate internally, not being siphoned off or discarded into some central repository far away. While applicability would vary from place to place, many cities and suburbs could even now develop external agricultural spaces and wild commons, and in some cases already have such (there are multiple wildlife management areas in our area, which are basically public hunting and gathering reserves). Such an order would not do away with other features of urban life, or with the larger forms of connectivity and cultural and social interchange with cities facilitate; indeed, part of the success of Maya agriculture no doubt lay in the shared sphere of interaction within which diverse polities participated.
The garden-city model is not an impossible one; it is not the only solution to our various problems and needs, but it is potent and, crucially, doable one. It is not a call to some mythical ‘harmony with nature,’ or passive reception of nature: the Maya were landscape engineers, and while many of their methods were more akin to permaculture, just as with permaculture they involved human-directed modification and management. At the same time, these methods permitted and indeed depended upon broad based biodiversity, both of species directly useful to humans as well as others which made up larger ecological assemblies. In an age of large-scale species and entire population declines, with our massive impermeable infrastructural monsters chocking and severing so much of the land, the ecological appeal of the Maya should be obvious.
Finally, the sheer resilience of Maya agriculture can serve us in good stead as inspiration and direction in the face of anthropogenic climate change: the Maya faced what were probably in large part self-inflicted problems in the late Pre-Classic, as unsustainable methods washed away precious soil, leading, probably, to the emergence of fully-formed methods and agricultural landscapes; local climatic change and variability were also recurring themes, with much of the Maya sphere naturally not especially hospitable for large-scale cultivation, at least not at first glance. Yet even on the harsher karst lands agriculture flourished, using rock mulches and natural depressions in the landscape, carefully selected plants and trees, and strategic modifications and inputs. This flexibility and adaptation meant that Maya population were able to grow over time and sustain what appear to have been quite good standards of living for the pre-modern world, all without any of the many technological interventions we can call upon today. Of course, we currently lack many of the social and cultural resources that ‘traditional’ peoples the world over have enjoyed: but part of the road to recovery is building new and different means of production and spatial layouts, generating more resilient and humane ways of relating to and interacting with one another. The Maya, along with many other peoples from across the great tapestry of human history, can provide us with resources for such work of re-imagining and rebuilding, even as we must in the present map out our own paths with what we find before us.
For more, see Anabel Ford and Ronald Nigh, The Maya Forest Garden : Eight Millennia of Sustainable Cultivation of the Tropical Woodlands (Walnut Creek, California : Left Coast Press, Inc.), 2015.
Scott L. Fedick, Shanti Morell‐Hart, Lydie Dussol, ‘Agriculture in the Ancient Maya Lowlands (Part 2): Landesque Capital and Long‐term Resource Management Strategies,’ in Journal of Archaeological Research, 22.
Venicia Slotten, David Lentz, and Payson Sheets, ‘Landscape management and polyculture in the ancient gardens and fields at Joya de Cerén, El Salvador,’ in Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 59 (2020), 5.
Daniel L. Evans, Benjamin N. Vis, Nicholas P. Dunning, Elizabeth Graham, and Christian Isendahl, ‘Buried solutions: How Maya urban life substantiates soil connectivity,’ in Geoderma 387 (2021), 3.
Christian Isendahl, ‘Agro-urban landscapes: the example of Maya lowland cities,’ in Antiquity, Volume 86, Issue 334 (December 2012), 1122.