In the Maya Lowlands of Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala two main types of wetlands have
played important roles in human history: bajos or intermittently wet environments of the …

This article represents a systematic effort to answer the question, What are archaeology's
most important scientific challenges? Starting with a crowd-sourced query directed broadly …

Abstract “Hills rose around us on every side, and, for that country, the scene was
picturesque, but all waste and silent. The stillness of the grave rested upon the ruins, and the …

Episodes of population loss and cultural change, including the famous Classic Collapse,
punctuated the long course of Maya civilization. In many cases, these downturns in the …

The concept of the “rural” may, for the ancient Maya, need “recentering,” an
acknowledgement that “rurality” as a lifeway insufficiently describes the integrated …

In The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, contributors reject the popularized link
between societal collapse and drought in Maya civilization, arguing that a series of periodic …

For nearly a century, scholars have used astronomical evidence to explain the Lowland
Maya architectural type known as “E-Groups” as solar observatories and, by extension, as …

Three major Maya centers recently discovered in the northern part of the uninhabited
Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in eastern Campeche, Mexico, provided the first …

Many early Maya cities developed along the edges of large structural or karst depressions
(bajos). This topographic position aided growing populations to more effectively capture and …

Complexity is both a buzzword and a paradigm in the biophysical sciences and,
increasingly, the social sciences. We define “social complexity” as the nonlinear escalation …