[Aztlan] Phosphorous and the Maya

[Jules Siegel]

David Hixson wrote:
> Dear Jules,
>
> Periphyton is actually very common in all near-coastal
> areas along the north and west coasts of the Yucatan
> peninsula, especially in the Yalahau and the wetlands
> west of Chunchucmil areas.  
>   
If I recall my conversation with Dr. Gómez-Pompas correctly, he believed 
that periphyton fertilizer could have been trade material. I haven't yet 
read the Brigham Young study, so I can't speculate on how that would 
affect site food independence.

Another possibility, that I have been thinking about is that estimates 
of pre-Conquest population may tend toward overstatement. This is 
typically explained away as a possible effect of the die-offs from 
disease and malnutrition that followed the earliest contacts. The people 
were there; then they weren't. I haven't really looked into this in any 
detail, but it's a thought worth exploring. Lower pre-Conquest 
population figures would make the isolationist hypothesis much more 
feasible.

I've been reading Inga Clendinnen's "Ambivalent Conquests," which 
describes how isolated Maya communities were, separated by thick jungle 
traversed by paths accessible only to rather small humans, not very 
convenient for large-scale food distribution. If that's true, human 
bearers would have been limited to items whose value was commensurate 
with their weight.

Another factor is the minimum yield per acre sufficient to support 
continuous human life. The Biosphere 2 experiment demonstrated how a 
half-acre could support eight people for two years, although they did 
suffer from non-fatal malnutrition. Jayne Poynter, one of the 
participants, comments in her book "The Human Experiment," that the most 
efficient tropical farms can support a maximum of three people per acre. 
She writes that the Biosphere could have comfortably supported seven 
people, and was only 6% less productive than NASA's space systems. The 
methods used in Biosphere 2 were surprisingly low-tech, but very 
demanding. The food is best described as having been edible, not exactly 
high cuisine.

Think about a culturally advanced people with intensive food production 
methods that depended on complex expert methods that became impossible 
to maintain when so many key people died in such a short period of time, 
taking their knowledge with them. Then DeLanda burns the writings.
> In fact, if you ever read
> a report that mentions "sac luum" (white soil) in
> coastal Yucatan, this is likely decayed periphyton. 
> Nearly 1/3 of my survey area for my dissertation
> contained the residues of periphyton decay.
And natural distribution is sufficient to account for this?