Chapter 10. Intensification does not require modification: Tropical Swidden and the Maya

Abstract

What is involved in finding fields? Agricultural intensification and its archaeological correlates are not always obvious. Archaeologists frequently equate capital-based investment and arable farming as the sole path to intensified production. The presence of terraces to slow water flows across land, canals to bring water to drier lands, and raised and drained fields to reduce water, are methods to bring marginal lands into productive use. Labor-based economies, especially those of the Americas before European conquest, present an entirely distinct pathway toward intensification based on tending the landscape. Tropical societies in general, and the Maya in particular, demonstrate a comprehensive knowledge of the natural world, cultivating biological capital as a product of their culture with skill, hand tools, scheduling, and fire. Asynchronous and embedded fields transform into forests in a poly-cultivation practice, emphasizing the diversity that prevails in tropical woodlands. As with most traditional land-use systems around the world, the Maya milpa cycle reduces temperature and evapotranspiration, conserves water, maintains biodiversity, builds soil fertility, inhibits erosion, and nurtures people. Labor investments per se do not leave direct evidence on the landscape, apart from the implicit density of settlement, yet the imprint of their management lies in the forest landscape itself.