ABSTRACT
Everything utilized by the ancient Maya of lowland Mesoamerica was derived from the resources available and enhanced in their lived landscape: agricultural fields, useful perennials, and habitats of the closed canopy forest. For pre-conquest Americans, including the Maya, cultivation was largely rainfall dependent, and land management was undertaken with human power and manipulated with stone tools and fire. The Maya cultivated the entire landscape and relied on the dynamic relationship between fields and forest. To Western European eyes, cultivable land is equated with arable land, but arable is synonymous with plowable land. The depth of knowledge and activities associated with Maya ecosystem enhancement is based on an intimate engagement with nature and the environment using labor, knowledge, and skill directing vibrant growth towards human priorities. The growth and expansion of the ancient Maya civilization in the tropical Mesoamerican lowlands across the millennia was based on a long-term land management system: the milpa-forest-garden. Using historical and historical–ecological data, this chapter outlines the imposed narrative of the Western ecological imperialist to reexamine the nature of land use in the tropics in general and the Maya forest in particular to reassess the disparaged technology and culture that is based on what the Western vision sees as shifting agriculture but is actually a co-creative landscape.
