Sherman Horn III

More to come very soon!

Thanks for your comment and support, Pedro. This Experiment was designed to fund a part of the larger El Pilar Project, which Anabel Ford has been directing for over 20 years. Dr. Ford has been very interested in ancient Maya agriculture and has incorporated sustainability investigations into her larger research plans. She has been working directly with contemporary Maya forest gardeners, who grow and use a variety of forest plants and trees along with traditional staple crops (such as corn), to understand ancient Maya subsistence and agricultural economy. We will continue to incorporate this work into our future investigations and will address those issues more directly in upcoming lab notes. Thank you for raising this concern, and please don't hesitate to contact us if you have further questions about our work. Cheers!

Large structures at El Pilar are faced with limestone masonry blocks that were probably quarried from the ridge-lands around the center. Smaller structures, like the houses and other buildings that most people used, were made of perishable materials that haven't survived. Luckily for us, many smaller buildings were set on stone-faced platforms to raise them above the ground, and we find their remains as mounds of debris with stone alignments at their bases. We don't have good evidence for dedicated groups of architects or architectural artists as yet, but the scale and quality of construction suggests a specialized knowledge of how to build big, impressive monuments. Where, and in whom, architectural and construction knowledge was stored by the ancient Maya remains and interesting question. No evidence of war or invasion yet, although this is notoriously difficult to discover even at sites with unquestionably defensive fortifications. It's possible that excavations around the Citadel would turn up some clues, but we're not even sure that it was used for community defense at this point. As far as how El Pilar fit in with the broader "Maya Collapse," I can't tell yet. The center appears to have been abandoned, like many others in the Southern Maya Lowlands, probably sometime after AD 900 at the end of the Classic period. But there are some big issues with saying that kind of thing, because there hasn't been a lot of work done on what might be there from later times. I doubt that the area was depopulated as some people suggest, and we have some evidence of later architecture, but on a much smaller scale. At the very least, the political institutions did fail, and the tradition of divine kings was replaced by some other form of organization.

Looting is a huge problem in the Maya area, and there are several different ways potential looters can discover structures. Modern-day people have been living around El Pilar for some time, and it's possible that some people happened across the monumental structures while hunting in the forest or simply exploring. They could also have been noticed by chicleros, who harvested the sap of the chicozapote tree for making gum (think Chiclets), loggers, or others who made their living extracting resources from the forest. That's not to say that any of those groups are responsible for the looting - word spreads quickly about such discoveries - but to note that there were ample opportunities for people to explore, and illegally loot, the site before it was protected.

Great questions! The large dotted lines are modern roads that run through the Reserve. You can see that the one running through the monumental core corresponds to the north-south white line in the map in our previous Lab Note. Your next two questions are more difficult to answer. Estimating ancient Maya populations is tricky - anyone who tells you differently has not thought deeply about the problem or is trying to pull the wool over your eyes! That's because they are estimates that are based on samples, although they are often presented as if a census of the ancient population were taken. Anabel Ford has been working in the area for around 30 years, and she has developed a number of population estimates that account for things like landforms, soil types, the probability that all households dated to a certain period weren't actually occupied at the same time (especially when a period lasts for 300 years!), and the possibility that all these "residential" mounds weren't the primary residences of families. We don't have a revised estimate based on our LiDAR data yet - we're still field-checking those results - but an earlier estimate of over 20,000 people may be accurate. Dr. Ford has also estimated that between 176,000 - 182,000 people lived in the surrounding 1,288 square kilometers of the upper Belize Valley. More accurate population models and estimates is one of our primary goals for doing this research! As for distinct classes: well, yes, there do seem to be class divisions between people we might consider nobles and commoners, but it's a bit more nuanced than that. There probably were different "levels" of status within each of these groups, and we really don't know how rigid the boundary was between the two. We don't know who, if anyone, was able to own land, and we don't fully understand the relationships of production and consumption among the inhabitants of ancient Maya cities. These are questions many of us are working to address, but any definitive answers will depend on the accumulation of a lot more research from many different sites.