The Maya Forest Garden: Conservation Landscape for the Future 

Thursday, October 10th  10:30am-12:30pm

Session 1.06  ~  Hall of Ideas J

Chair: Anabel Ford (Exploring Solutions Past)

The Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) is a non-profit membership organization dedicated to promoting ecological restoration as a means of sustaining the diversity of life on Earth and re-establishing an ecologically healthy relationship between nature and culture. 

The Archaeology of Traditional Maya Farming

Anabel Ford and Keith Clarke (UCSB)

Traditional Maya farming, land use, and forest knowledge provide a basis for interpreting ancient settlement patterns and an appreciation of the time depth of these practices. Data on settlements of the Late Classic Period Maya reflect a continuum of past land use linked to the milpa-forest garden cycle. The densely settled areas of major and minor centers would have been intensive infield home gardens, other settled areas would be the extensive outfield milpa-forest gardens, and the unoccupied area the extractive zones. By exploring solutions past, a geographic predictive model of Maya settlement patterns reveals the efficacy of the milpa – forest garden cycle as a model of the ancient land use that co-created the Maya forest and forms a basis to restore the Maya forest garden for the future.