Anabel Ford

Tropical forests are regularly dismissed as fragile landscapes, inadequate for sustaining large populations without damaging resource impacts. Yet long-surviving Indigenous land use practices, involving sophisticated understandings of natural regeneration, forest ecology, and the rewards of managing land cover, demonstrate remarkable abilities in the tropical latitudes. People in the tropics of Mesoamerica exhibit the art of enduring practices based on honed skills, trial and error, creative strategies, and local methods that supported all the daily needs of food and shelter. It is the ancient Maya architecture and the Maya Forest itself that are the rich evidence that is the example of the Maya milpa-forest-garden. This is a case worthy discussion of the living art embedded in traditional ecological knowledge that provided the foundation of the ancient Maya civilization and resulted in a biodiverse cropscape that persists today.

Speaker Biography

Anabel Ford - Director, MesoAmerican Research Center, University of California, Santa Barbara

Anabel Ford has distinguished herself as a Mesoamerican archaeologist focused on settlement and environmental issues of the lowland Maya of Guatemala and Belize.  Here landmark investigations challenge the perceptions of rural and urban divides, demonstrating that preferred locations for Maya settlements equally occupied well-drained uplands near or far from civic centers.  Living in the Maya Forest and relying on the resources that were native to that place, Ford began to gain an appreciation for the local knowledge of and economic value inherent in what first looked like a jungle but really was a relic of forest gardens.  Her current focus at El Pilar, a new tour destination in the Maya world, integrates her growing academic knowledge of the ancient occupations and her investment in the citizen scientists living in the region today.  Since 1994, Anabel Ford has spearheaded a unique development that focuses on one cultural and natural resource of Belize and Guatemala.  The development at El Pilar is an inclusive management model with government protection, local leadership, and community participation, along with academic research input. Anabel Ford brings her extensive field experience and broadly inquisitive mind to address what has popularly been known as the mysterious Maya. 

Recommended Readings

Ford, A. (2024). The Enduring Forest Gardens of the Ancient Maya. American Scientist, 112(5), 286. 

Ford, A. (2024a). Chapter 10. Intensification Does Not Require Modification: Tropical Swidden and the Maya. Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, 35(1), 106–119.

Ford, A. (2022). Scrutinizing the paleoecological record of the Maya Forest. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 10. 

Whitaker, J. A., Armstrong, C. G., & Odonne, G. (2023). Climatic and Ecological Change in the Americas.