A new study on ancient food production in tropical Belize, co-led by the University of New Mexico and published in Communications Earth & Environment, provides evidence that people in the Maya-speaking region were dedicated farmers thousands of years before the first large villages emerged.
Most notably, the team identified two major shifts in farming practices during the research.
“The most significant discovery is that we were able to document that people were farming what was almost certainly maize by 6,000 years ago along the edges of wetlands where soil moisture is abundant, and that over time they changed practices to mitigate risks to their crops as populations grew and the environment changed,” said Keith Prufer, a UNM professor of anthropology and director of UNM’s Human Ecology and Radiocarbon Lab in the Center for Stable Isotopes…