1. Introduction
Motivated by speculation about the causes of societal collapse,
archaeologists and paleoecologists have investigated the landscape
management strategies of the pre-Columbian Maya extensively. As
far back as the early twentieth century, some scholars conjectured
that the forest cover of the southern lowland Maya region was
devastated by its human inhabitants concurrently with the development
of their chiefdoms into fledgling states. These scholars
reasoned that complex polities require large surpluses to support
both food producers and non-producers such as royals, courtiers,
and craft specialists. They believed that tropical forest ecosystems
inhibited the success of large population centers, assuming that
adequate food surpluses could not be produced in an environment
with soil fertility issues and high annual rainfall that ensured
erosion on slopes unprotected by forest cover. Proposed as an
inevitable outcome of rising populations around the great Maya
cities, large-scale deforestation would initiate land degradation and
ultimately result in the failure of polities. This deforestation has
been promoted by many in academia and the popular press as an
important factor in the political fragmentation of the southern
lowland cities between A.D. 780 and 980. Nevertheless, recent