The Maya had Little to Work With
The environment that the Ancient Maya inhabited is almost exactly the same as it is today. The area is a jungle, which would have given them very little to work with nutrient-wise. It has been shown that farming using the soils in this area for two years will deplete the soil of organic matter by seven percent, Nitrogen by six percent, two percent in plant-available phosphorous, twenty percent decrease in potassium, thirty percent decrease in sodium, four percent in magnesium and fifteen in calcium (Cowgill, 1962). This means that anyone wishing to use this soil would not be able to sustainably plant crops in the same soil for fear of depleting it of an amount of nutrients capable of sustaining crops. Because the nutrients in the soil are so inconsistent and unreliable, the Maya had to constantly be cautious with their use of this unstable soil.
How did they make it work?
The Ancient Maya conquered their soil problem with terracing, and a method known as Swidden, or Slash and Burn, Agriculture. This is a method that is immensely useful for dealing with the problematic soil that the Maya were forced to adapt to. Slash and burn agriculture entails cutting down an area of forest, and then burning the removed plants in order to use the ashes as fertilizer for the crops that will be planted. Many of the people that do this will farm for about two years or so, and then leave the field fallow for about 2 years, sometimes even more (Cowgill, 1962). This method of farming is fine for a loosely populated region that does not require a large amount of land for farms. However, this method, by nature, requires a lot of land because if planting is to be sustained, it must be carried out on another plot of land while the nutrients return to the soil. This would cause problems for a densely populated city because as the population increases, the amount of land being used for agriculture would increase exponentially. Since any large city requires a steady supply of food, the Ancient Maya having to rely upon this kind of agriculture would have created a serious vulnerability.
How well did this work?
Since the Ancient Maya had apparently already dealt with their problem of having easily depleted soil, why would agriculture have been a problem for them? Would this have been a strong factor within their "collapse"? It wouldn't have been a problem if not for the large population increase in the Classic Maya Period. Their cities became large, even in areas where there was little farm land to work with (Beach, 1998). They constructed large, complex fields that most likely would have required some form of coordination and leadership (Chase and Chase, 1998). The cites with a large amount of dependence on trade would be hugely affected by any kind of change in trade routes, and the large complex fields would be sensitive to shifts in leadership or climate. This vulnerability in agriculture would probably not have lead to a collapse by itself, but any shift in the balancing act that the Ancient Maya seem to have put themselves in would have caused a cascade of problems for the densely populated areas.
Works Cited
Beach, T. (1998). Soil constraints on Northwest Yucatán, Mexico: Pedoarchaeology and Maya subsistence at Chunchucmil. Geoarchaeology, 13(8), 759–791. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1520-6548(199812)13:8<759::AID-GEA1>3.0.CO;2-B
Chase, A. F., & Chase, D. Z. (1998). Scale and Intensity in Classic Period Maya Agriculture: Terracing and Settlement at the “Garden City” of Caracol, Belize. Culture & Agriculture, 20(2-3), 60–77. doi:10.1525/cag.1998.20.2-3.60
Cowgill, U. M. (1962). An Agricultural Study of the Southern Maya Lowlands. American Anthropologist, 64(2), 273–286. doi:10.1525/aa.1962.64.2.02a00030
Beach, T. (1998). Soil constraints on Northwest Yucatán, Mexico: Pedoarchaeology and Maya subsistence at Chunchucmil. Geoarchaeology, 13(8), 759–791. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1520-6548(199812)13:8<759::AID-GEA1>3.0.CO;2-B
Chase, A. F., & Chase, D. Z. (1998). Scale and Intensity in Classic Period Maya Agriculture: Terracing and Settlement at the “Garden City” of Caracol, Belize. Culture & Agriculture, 20(2-3), 60–77. doi:10.1525/cag.1998.20.2-3.60
Cowgill, U. M. (1962). An Agricultural Study of the Southern Maya Lowlands. American Anthropologist, 64(2), 273–286. doi:10.1525/aa.1962.64.2.02a00030