Excavations on Agricultural Terraces: Results of the 2004 Field Season at Chan, Belize

Introduction

Researchers have been grappling with the problem of ancient Maya agriculture throughout the history of Maya studies. Chief among these problems was the seeming incongruity of an advanced and complex civilization thriving in a tropical rainforest environment. Accepted wisdom at the time stated that tropical regions were inhospitable to intensive agriculture, high populations, and, therefore, civilization, so the presence of the Maya presented a problem. Mayanists suggested that Maya cities were "empty ceremonial centers" (Thompson 1954), or that the advanced culture had come primarily from the Mexican Highlands (Sanders and Price 1968), and that agriculture was confined primarily to slash-and-burn. However, following the realization that the high populations in the Late Classic could not have survived with simple swidden farming (initially inspired by the Tikal settlement survey work which identified that the population in the Maya Lowlands was much greater than suspected [Haviland 1969]), seminal works have attempted to come to terms with what we mean by Maya Agriculture (Harrison and Turner 1978; Flannery 1982; Fedick 1996a).

Since the pioneering Tikal report, archaeologists have begun to systematically collect data on ancient Maya agricultural regimes and have shown that the ancient Maya used a variety of intensive agricultural strategies, including raised fields, wetland agriculture, and terraces (Adams 1982; Dunning and Beach 1994; Fedick 1994; Healy et al. 1983; Matheny 1978; Pohl 1990; Scarborough 1983; Siemens and Puleston 1972; Turner 1983; Turner and Harrison 1983). Initial research efforts aimed to define the nature of ancient intensive agricultural technologies and thus concentrated on surveying proposed agricultural fields (e.g. Siemens and Puleston 1972), or on testing agricultural constructions to determine general chronologies and construction methods (e.g. Turner 1983; Turner and Harrison 1983). More recently, as researchers have accepted the presence of intensive agricultural strategies, studies have explored the relationship of agriculture to political economy, settlement, gender, and other theoretical issues.

This project is studying the agricultural terraces at Chan, a small, farming village in the Belize River Valley area of western Belize. Based on settlement survey data (Wyatt and Kalosky 2003) and excavation data (Robin 1996; Robin et al. 2002), the Chan site was continuously occupied from the Middle Preclassic to the Early Postclassic periods (ca. 900 B.C.–1200 A.D.). Chan is a relatively small site throughout most of its settlement history with only 10-20% of its households occupied in all periods except for the latter part of the Late Classic (A.D. 670-780) when its occupation increases dramatically to 75-80% (Wyatt and Kalosky 2003). This increase corresponds to the political florescence of the nearby center of Xunantunich located 4 km to the northwest of Chan. The Chan site also has the highest density of terraces in the Belize River Valley (304/km²), making it an ideal site to study ancient Maya intensive agriculture.

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