The next scheduled meeting will be held on Saturday April 12, 2025 at 1:30 pm. The speaker will be Dr. Timothy Beach, UT Austin. His talk will be entitled “Neotropical Indigenous Wetland Farming: a Mostly Maya Perspective.”
For 50 years scholars have studied wetland farming in the Neotropics from Mexico to Bolivia. This presentation first uses several current and active projects to explore the range of these systems across the American Tropics. Second the presentation focuses on the Maya region to present the elements of wetland agroecosystems and explore the controversies that rose out of different interpretations from disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. Third, the paper considers the chronology of wetland systems from the Archaic to the Historic by focusing on active projects in Northern Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico. The paper considers evidence for formation based on data from intensive and extensive fieldwork, Lidar and other forms of remote sensing, and copious lab work. It also interprets these data based on archaeology and geology, soil and water management, cropping, fish farming, occupations, its role in subsistence, and its role in trade.
Dr. Timothy Beach is an internationally recognized leader in geoarchaeology, wetlands, agroecosystems, soils, and geomorphology, through hundreds of peer-reviewed publications and numerous invited lectures from Beijing to the Vatican. His research—deriving from his soils lab at UT Austin and field sites around the world including Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, Turkey, Italy, Peru, Iceland, and the US Corn Belt—has substantially elevated our understanding of wetlands, geomorphology, human interactions with soils, and global change, especially relating to the Maya world. Beach is recognized with major awards from several disciplines and universities, including the G.K. Gilbert Award and Ellen Mosely-Thompson Paper of the Year Awards from the American Association of Geographers (AAG), the Kirk Bryan Award from the Geological Society of America (GSA), the Carl O. Sauer Distinguished Scholarship Award from the Conference of Latin American Geography, and the Fryxell Award from the Society for American Archaeology (SAA). Beach also received fellowships from The Guggenheim and Dumbarton Oaks and is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, The Geological Society of America (GSA), and the American Association of Geographers (AAG). Since 2014 Beach has been the C.B. Smith Centennial Chair in U.S.-Mexico Relations and directed the Soils and Geoarchaeology Labs at UT Austin. Prior to UT Austin, he held the Cinco Hermanos Chair at Georgetown University, where he won the University’s Distinguished Research Award and the School of Foreign Service Professor of the Year Teaching Award.
The meeting will be online via Zoom. To join the meeting, click here. The Meeting ID is 380 468 5493.