THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESOURCES OF THE RIO BRAVO CONSERVATION AREA, BELIZE

BY

Prepared for PfB 1988

ABSTRACT

_______The Programme for Belize is a consortium of Belizean and international organizations dedicated to the preservation of natural and cultural resources within Belize, Central America. The Coca-Cola Foods Corporation has donated 42,000 acres of tropical forest and wetlands to the Programme, and an additional 110,000 adjacent acres are being purchased. This property, called the Rio Bravo Conservation Area, is situated within the eastern periphery of the central Maya lowlands. The Programme for Belize recognizes archaeological resource management as an important aspect of conservation planning, and, as a first step, has sponsored a preliminary archaeological reconnaissance project, described herein. This project involved aerial and ground survey, and the mapping of a major center known as La Milpa. The results of the reconnaissance, as well as background research, indicate an abundance of archaeological resources including prehistoric Maya centers, habitation sites, and agricultural features. These resources are described with reference to more comprehensive surveys in other areas of the central Maya lowlands, and recommendations for future management and research are presented. It is suggested that knowledge of associations between prehistoric Maya settlement and land resources will be very useful in the prediction of site density distributions for management purposes.

INTRODUCTION

_______The tropical lowlands of Belize, now a sparsely settled region with an average of 6 persons per km2 (World Bank 1984), was the homeland of one of the most accomplished civilizations of the prehistoric world: the ancient Maya. The Maya initially settled in the lowlands more than 3,000 years ago and over the course of prehistory were able to support populations which may have been more than twenty time those of today (see Turner 1990). This ancient civilization was an agrarian one which was dependent upon the natural resources of the area as the basis for their subsistence economy. For the ancient Maya, knowledge of natural resources--and how to manage them to assure sustained subsistence production--was a vital component of their complex society.

_______The Rio Bravo Conservation Area, administered by the Programme for Belize, offers a unique challenge for archaeological resource management. This area is situated within the eastern periphery of the central Maya lowlands (Figure 1), and is characterized by a great deal of environmental diversity (Wright et al. 1959:195-211). The Programme for Belize recognizes archaeological resources management as an important aspect of conservation planning, and as a first step, has sponsored an archaeological reconnaissance project that was carried out in August of 1988, and reported herein. The Programme for Belize is a consortium of Belizean and international organizations dedicated to the preservation of natural and cultural resources within Belize. Coca-Cola Foods Corporation has donated 42,000 acres of tropical forests and wetlands to the Programme, and an additional 110,000 adjacent acres are being purchased. Belizean land owner Mr. Barry Bowen has volunteered to apply the conservation guidelines of the Programme for Belize to his 130,000 acres of land situated adjacent to, and south of, the Rio Bravo Conservation Area.

_______Long term archaeological and environmental research in the Rio Bravo Conservation Area promises a major data base that will allow refinement of our understanding of past land use and settlement organization, and will help structure future development of the area for natural history and archaeological tourism and appropriate agroforestry projects (see Garrett 1989). The conservation and management goals of the Programme for Belize are very much in accord with a human systems ecology approach to the study of prehistoric Maya resource management and political economy (Bennett 1976, 1985; Burton et al. 1986).

_______This preliminary archaeological study of the Rio Bravo Conservation Area is designed to provide a general basis for the management of cultural resources. After a general background on Maya prehistory, we describe the land resources of the Conservation Area and what they signify for ancient Maya settlement. We then describe the field work which focused on gathering preliminary information on archaeological site distribution. Following this is a discussion of the results of the field work. These results and the expectations based on them are compared with adjacent areas in an effort to develop an initial basis for understanding the nature and distribution of archaeological resources in the region. Finally, we present a series of basic recommendations for management of cultural resources in the Rio Bravo Conservation Area. An earlier draft report of our findings was provided to the Programme for Belize and the Belize Department of Archaeology (Ford and Fedick 1988), and a summary of that report has been presented to the archaeological community (Ford and Fedick 1989).