Maya Culture
To understand the ancient Mayan people who lived in the area that is today southern
Mexico and Central America and the ecological difficulties they faced, one must first consider
their environment, which we think of as “jungle" or ’tropical rainforest." This view is inaccurate,
and the reason proves to be important. Properly speaking, tropical rainforests grow in
high-rainfall equatorial areas that remain wet or humid all year round. But the Maya homeland
lies more than sixteen hundred kilometers from the equator, at latitudes 17 to 22 degrees north,
in a habitat termed a “seasonal tropical forest." That is, while there does tend to be a rainy
season from May to October, there is also a dry season from January through April. If one
focuses on the wet months, one calls the Maya homeland a "seasonal tropical forest"; if one
focuses on the dry months, one could instead describe it as a "seasonal desert.”
From north to south in the Yucatan Peninsula, where the Maya lived, rainfall ranges from
18 to 100 inches (457 to 2,540 millimeters) per year, and the soils become thicker, so that the
southern peninsula was agriculturally more productive and supported denser populations. But
rainfall in the Maya homeland is unpredictably variable between years; some recent years have
had three or four times more rain than other years. As a result, modern farmers attempting to
grow corn in the ancient Maya homelands have faced frequent crop failures, especially in the
north. The ancient Maya were presumably more experienced and did better, but nevertheless考试用书
they too must have faced risks of crop failures from droughts and hurricanes.
Although southem Maya areas received more rainfall than northern areas, problems of
water were paradoxically more severe in the wet south. While that made things hard for
ancient Maya living in the south, it has also made things hard for modem archaeologists who
have difficulty understanding why ancient droughts caused bigger problems in the wet south
than in the dry north. The likely explanation is that an area of underground freshwater
underlies the Yucatan Peninsula, but surface elevation increases from north to south, so that as
one moves south the land surface lies increasingly higher above the water table. In the
northern peninsula the elevation is sufficiently low that the ancient Maya were able to reach the
water table at deep sinkholes called cenotes, or at deep caves. In low-elevation north coastal
areas without sinkholes, the Maya would have been able to get down to the water table by
digging wells up to 75 feet (22 meters) deep. But much of the south lies too high above the
water table for cenotes or wells to reach down to it. Making matters worse, most of the Yucatan
Peninsula consists of karst, a porous sponge-like limestone terrain where rain runs straight into
the ground and where little or no surface water remains available.
How did those dense southern Maya populations deal with the resulting water problem? It
initially surprises us that many of their cities were not built next to the rivers but instead on high
terrain in rolling uplands. The explanation is that the Maya excavated depressions, or modified
natural depressions, and then plugged up leaks in the karst by plastering the bottoms of the
depressions in order to create reservoirs, which collected rain from large plastered catchment
basins and stored it for use in the dry season.For example, reservoirs at the Maya city of Tikal 13
held enough water to meet the drinking water needs of about 10,000 people for a period of 18
months. At the city of Coba the Maya built dikes around a lake in order to raise its level and
make their water supply more reliable. But the inhabitants of Tikal and other cities dependent
on reservoirs for drinking water would still have been in deep trouble if 18 months passed
without rain in a prolonged drought. A shorter drought in which they exhausted their stored
food supplies might already have gotten them in deep trouble, because growing crops required
rain rather than reservoirs.
小编推荐：
全国2012年GRE考试网上报名入口
全国2012年新GRE考试时间安排表
