CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new book takes readers on a guided tour of Maya history as narrated by an anthropologist who has spent more than 35 years salvaging and exploring the remains of ancient Maya cities, farms and sacred spaces. “Maya Wisdom and the Survival of Our Planet,” by Lisa J. Lucero, is also a call for a radical transformation of contemporary society from its careless and wasteful ways to a more sustainable social order modeled on the Maya’s worldview.
Lucero, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, explains that the term “Maya” describes the people, their settlements and archaeology, while “Mayan” is a term reserved for the languages they spoke. She also is quick to note that the Maya are not a bygone culture but a people who — thanks to their adaptability and knowledge — have persevered for millennia in parts of southern Mexico and Central America.
“Over 7 million Maya live today in Central America and beyond,” Lucero writes.
Her argument that the Maya lived sustainably is supported by compelling data arduously collected by anthropologists, archaeologists and social and environmental scientists.
“The ancestral Maya did not cause the extinction of any flora or fauna before the arrival of the Spanish,” she writes. The Maya farmed for more than 4,000 years without overtaxing the landscape. They built cities that supported tens of thousands of people while also providing self-cleaning reservoirs, public parks and diverse urban farms and gardens that sustained them.
She describes how the provision of potable water in the monthslong dry season gave the kings at the top of the urban hierarchy their influence and power. The kings led ceremonies to appease the rain god, Chakh, and, as long as Chakh came through with rain, the kings enjoyed uncontested power. Those kingships ended when an extended period of frequent droughts dried up the water supply and made the cities unlivable. The Maya dispersed, leaving their cities, their kings and all that urban infrastructure behind by 900 A.D.
Lucero’s insights rely largely on her own work and reading and on the wisdom of her Maya colleagues who guide her in the sometimes-forbidding landscape of central Belize, where her studies are focused. The book feels very autobiographical, with details of her adventures and contacts with the Maya providing a deeper, more heartfelt picture of Maya history and the economic forces that undermine their lifestyles and threaten to destroy their cultural heritage.
For example, there are the Mennonite farmers who settled in the region in the 1950s and only purchased land dotted with Maya structures because they knew the Maya settled in areas with the richest soil. Rather than preserving these ancient structures, most of the farmers plow right over them, erasing generations of history, layer by layer. Lucero has spent many seasons uncovering and documenting what she can in these fields before the Maya structures and their contents are destroyed.
Lucero also describes the ancestral Maya’s environmentally sustainable practices, many of which have been carried forward into the present. For example, her team meticulously documented and mapped the home garden of Lucero’s colleague, excavation foreman Cleofo Choc, a Mopan Maya.
The Choc home garden includes a mix of wild plants and native and nonnative domesticates—and chickens and pigs wandering about. At least 65 different species of plants, trees, and flowers are shown on the map. They encompass a broad range of uses—for consumption (e.g., fruits, vegetables, palm hearts, nuts, spices, garnishes, and herbs), medicinal uses (for pain, “to improve the blood”), construction (timber and vines for rope), household use (insect repellent, baskets, and leaves to wrap food), ornament (flowers), and poison (to stun fish). Their milpa (field) is less diverse these days: maize, beans, cassava, and okra. Cleofo used to plant maize, beans, chaya, papaya, cassava, potatoes, coco, and sometimes rice and pineapple. Such gardens and fields are a major reason the Maya have such a long history, because they mimic a diverse forest.
In nine chapters, the book describes Maya history and their worldview. It vividly details the ceremonial underpinnings of their beliefs and reverence for all elements of the natural world. It also offers practical information about how the Maya accomplished their great feats of capturing, holding, cleaning and preserving their water supplies, an essential element of their long-term success.
In the tenth chapter, Lucero provides a prescription for present-day societies to adopt many of the environmentally sustainable techniques and attitudes that allowed the Maya to persist for millennia, even in the face of dramatic political and environmental change.
