ABSTRACT
After a century of scientific thinking on the Maya lowlands environment, what we still do not know is daunting. That said, our knowledge about the environmental adaptations made by the Maya and the attendant environmental impacts associated with Maya civilization has grown and matured exponentially. Our lack of knowledge today, however, results from the vastness of this topic: We are only on the start of an exponential growth curve that started to rise in the 1960s. We can also view our changes in thinking in terms of paradigm shifts or changing orthodoxies (Turner 1993). Until the mid-to late 1960s, a view prevailed that ancient Maya civilization represented an anomaly in world history: a complex civilization supported by rotating, long-fallow (swidden) agriculture in a relatively homogeneous, environmentally limiting tropical forest setting. This view also saw ancient Maya population densities as necessarily low and dispersed, and Maya cities as largely vacant ceremonial centers. This early paradigm was clearly a product of the intellectual and cultural milieu of its day, as well as the sitecenter-focused nature of archaeology before the 1960s (Hammond 1978; Turner 1978a; Schele and Miller 1986).
