Dietary, Environmental, and Societal Implications of Ancient Maya Animal Use in the Petexbatun: A Zooarchaeological Perspective on the Collapse … Institute of Mesoamerican Archaeology Series)

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Description

The Classic Maya “collapse” has been attributed to environmental destruction, declining dietary health, and social changes such as increased warfare or changing economies. This study explores these models the use of ancient animal remains recovered from the Petexbatun archaeological sites.

The species found in the Petexbatun faunal collections are compared as proxy evidence for the ancient habitats and landscapes that would have existed across the sites. They reveal that the ancient landscape of the Petexbatun region used to be not significantly deforested or in a different way destroyed on the end of the Classic period. Bone chemistry of archaeological deer bones confirms that there used to be no significant expanse of agricultural fields on the expense of forested lands over the occupation of the region. The animal remains are next used to test a related model for the Maya collapse: dietary failure. Comparisons of the remains of food species from residential deposits indicate that the Petexbatun Maya were in no danger of famine or protein deficiency–hey neither overhunted their animal resources nor destroyed their habitats to the extent that dietary species were no longer to be had.

An intriguing deposit of worked animal bone from the capital city of Dos Pilas offers a clue to the puzzle. Here, following the abandonment of the website online by the ruling elite, a circle of relatives group manufactured quantities of utilitarian bone artifacts, most probably for trade with other scattered communities in the region. This finding suggests the importance of re-evaluating socioeconomic causality for this transitional period in the Petexbatun and in different places in the southern Maya lowlands.

VIMA Series #5

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