Water Management in the Southern Maya Lowlands

Examines the issue of accretionary development of cultural landscapes and the significance of reservoir-adapted water systems. It introduces the idea that the Maya, and perhaps many other semitropical civilizations, evolved in their environmental backdrop by way of a slow, additive modification of the landscape. This slow development permitted the initial flexibility necessary to accommodate the vagaries of climate, vegetation, and soils by the earliest colonizers, but it eventually culminated in a human-made environment capable of supporting extremely high population densities and a very complicated economic and political organization.