This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A new study on ancient food production in tropical Belize, co-led by the University of New Mexico and published in Communications Earth & Environment, provides evidence that people in the Maya-speaking region were dedicated farmers thousands of years before the first large villages emerged. Most notably, the team identified two major shifts in farming practices during the research.
"The most significant discovery is that we were able to document that people were farming what was almost certainly maize by 6,000 years ago along the edges of wetlands where soil moisture is abundant, and that over time they changed practices to mitigate risks to their crops as populations grew and the environment changed," said Keith Prufer, a UNM professor of anthropology and director of UNM's Human Ecology and Radiocarbon Lab in the Center for Stable Isotopes. The study was co-led by Prufer and Megan Walsh, a professor in Central Washington University's Department of Geography. In addition to Prufer and Walsh, nine other researchers and authors contributed, many of whom are current or former UNM students, including Jose Mes.
Mes is a local Mopan Maya-speaking farmer from Santa Cruz village, in the Maya Golden Landscape, where most people practice traditional farming methods called polyculture. Different crops, including maize, beans and squash, are grown in the same fields, and the land is allowed to recover, or lie fallow, for several years before it is cultivated again. In this region, polyculture farming is a sustainable land use that has been practiced for thousands of years.
Mes was invaluable to the study, providing a local voice and perspective by sharing farming strategies, discussing risks and explaining how farmers evaluate each climate condition and situation to achieve the best crop outcomes. Naturally, farming carries risks, and the team has examined how early communities mitigated them, from climate shifts to growing dietary needs. Their research has focused largely on the relationships between people and their environment, specifically the locations where people farmed maize, which is a C4 plant, meaning it follows a photosynthetic process that conserves moisture and allows it to be detected in carbon isotopes in tropical soils even after thousands of years.
Prufer and his team have spent decades researching early farming shifts using interdisciplinary methods from archaeology, isotope ecology and paleoecology, combined with conversations with farmers to learn how traditional ecological knowledge can be used to identify and mitigate risks associated with food production. "This research study began in the early 2000s," Prufer said. "The team has been working in southern Belize in the Maya Golden Landscape, which is a region made up of 35 traditional Maya communities." During this time, the team worked with local farmers like Mes and gathered samples from wetlands and uplands near the ancient city of Uxbenká.
Back in the United States, Prufer and his colleagues conducted chemical and microscopic analyses to identify and map changes in food production methods. They compared their data to early climate records to assess how changes in past rainfall patterns might have affected decisions farmers made in response to climate change. Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. d research that matter—daily or weekly.
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