In recent years, a growing body of research has focused on the importance of water management for ancient Maya societies, and more generally on the cultural and economic significance of water as a resource. But how did this change across the centuries as cycles of drought and sea level rise, together with the growing Maya footprint on the landscape, presented new challenges? As the resolution of climatic records improves, the authors can begin to show in detail how Maya water management responded and adapted to such shifts. This included the manipulation of aguadas and the development of wetland field systems, in the process transforming large areas of the Maya landscape.

Market economies are notoriously difficult to identify in the archeological record. This is particularly true in the subtropical Maya lowlands of Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize because most utilitarian items and consumables were made of highly perishable materials. We explore the hypothesis that ancient marketplaces can be identified through analysis of chemical residues in soils from open and easily accessible spaces in and about ancient Maya cities. We compared soil chemical signatures from a credible ancient marketplace location in the specialized trade center of Chunchucmil, Yucatan, Mexico to those from a modern marketplace at Antigua, Guatemala. We found extraordinarily high concentrations of phosphorus and zinc in the soil of Chunchucmil's proposed marketplace and the same high concentrations correlate well with food preparation and vegetable sales areas at the modern marketplace. These methods hold promise in resolving the vexing question of how large ancient Maya urban populations were sustained.

The Pakbeh Regional Economy Program is studying the vexing questions of economic life among the ancient Maya in northwestern Yucatan, Mexico. The region constitutes an ideal laboratory in which to investigate these questions, as it has very limited agricultural potential and fewer options for intensification than are found in the southern and central lowlands, yet many times more people lived here during the Classic period than can eke out a living today, and it has abundant evidence of market trade. Because crop yields in outfields are very low, and known intensification techniques are possibly incapable of sufficient yield enhancement, we anticipated that it would be an easy task to demonstrate that this population was dependent on imports of food and other necessities of life from beyond the region and therefore had a complex exchange economy. Twelve years later, we report on how wrong we were. We are still struggling with an evaluation of agricultural insufficiency. We explore the many and varied lines of evidence we have pursued and the confounding factors inherent in them, including problems with reconstructing ancient population size, equating contemporary and historical crop yields and farming practices, as well as ancient with modern environmental conditions, and hypothesizing potential forms of agricultural intensification, including intensive fertilization and other yield enhancement techniques, and reliance on alternative crops. The best that we can say at this juncture is that using contemporary production and consumption standards, the most conservative population estimates, and the most liberal estimates of available land in the surrounding region, we can conclude only that regional agricultural self-sufficiency remains unlikely but not proved. What initially seemed like an archaeological “no-brainer” has required us to delve into the realm of archaeological epistemology that we would like to share with our colleagues.

Forty-three years later these words still ring true, but are too seldom followed (Fedick 1996). For several years, we have been engaged in a multidisciplinary programme of research in northwestern Belize and neighbouring areas of Guatemala, eliciting a comprehensive, integrated picture of changing ancient Maya landscapes (Scarborough & Dunning 1996; Valdez et al. 1997). Our goals include a reconstructive correlation of environmental and cultural history, including the relationship between changes in water and land management and political economic organization. This work is still in progress and our understanding is far from complete (Dunning & Scarborough 1997).

Investigations at Punta Canbalam on the Gulf Coast of Campeche reveal it is probably the largest of several important but underreported trading sites on the pan-Mesoamerican maritime trade route. The coastline has been unstable for the last thousand years, subjecting the site to sea level changes and repeated episodes of beach erosion and redeposition. The relatively dense scatter of temporally mixed, highly weathered sherds and other artifacts on an exceedingly narrow, modern beach indicates that it is all secondarily deposited and that its original location was offshore. An interdisciplinary team is beginning to recognize clues in its environmental and cultural contexts as to where this peripatetic site was originally located and the extent to which it depended upon exchanges of salt, petty commodities from inland, and canoe-borne exotics from afar. This predominantly Terminal Classic and Early Postclassic site likely served as a port of entry for obsidian, jade, fine-paste ceramics, and other goods for the nearby inland city of Chunchucmil. It also probably supplied the interior with marine and estuarine food and ornamental and ritual products in exchange for inland agricultural products and other items.