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July 17, 2012 | Largest ancient dam built by Maya in Central America uncovered |
Washington:
During recent excavations, sediment coring and mapping at the pre-Columbian
city of Tikal – a paramount urban center of the ancient Maya – a multi-university team led by
the University of Cincinnati have identified new landscaping and engineering feats, including the
largest ancient dam built by the Maya of Central America. That dam – constructed from cut
stone, rubble and earth – stretched more than 260 feet in length, stood about 33 feet high and
held about 20 million gallons of water
in a man-made reservoir. These findings on ancient Maya water and land-use systems
at Tikal, located in northern Guatemala, sheds new light on how the Maya conserved
and used their natural resources to support a populous, highly complex society
for over 1,500 years despite environmental challenges, including periodic drought.
Starting in 2009, the UC team was the first North American group permitted to
work at the Tikal site core in more than 40 years. According to Vernon Scarborough,
UC professor of anthropology, “The overall goal of the UC research is to better
understand how the ancient Maya supported a population at Tikal of perhaps 60,000
to 80,000 inhabitants and an estimated population of five million in the overall
Maya lowlands by AD 700.” He added, “That is a much higher number than is supported
by the current environment. So, they managed to sustain a populous, highly complex
society for well over 1,500 years in a tropical ecology. Their resource needs
were great, but they used only stone-age tools and technology to develop a sophisticated,
long-lasting management system in order to thrive.” Water collection and storage
were critical in the environment where rainfall is seasonal and extended droughts
not uncommon. And so, the Maya carefully integrated the built environment – expansive
plazas, roadways, buildings and canals – into a water-collection and management
system. At Tikal, they collected literally all the water that fell onto these
paved and/or plastered surfaces and sluiced it into man-made reservoirs. For instance,
the city’s plastered plaza and courtyard surfaces and canals were canted in order
to direct and retain rainwater runoff into these tanks. In fact, by the Classic
Period (AD 250-800), the dam (called the Palace Dam) identified by the UC-led
team was constructed to contain the waters that were now directed from the many
sealed plaster surfaces in the central precinct. It was this dam on which the
team focused its latest work, completed in 2010. This gravity dam presents the
largest hydraulic architectural feature known in the Maya area. In terms of greater
Mesoamerica, it is second in size only to the huge Purron Dam built in Mexico
’s Tehuacan Valley sometime between AD 250-400. “We also termed the Palace Dam
at Tikal the Causeway Dam, as the top of the structure served as a roadway linking
one part of the city to another. For a long time, it was considered primarily
a causeway, one that tourists coming to the site still use today. However, our
research now shows that it did double duty and was used as an important reservoir
dam as well as a causeway,” said Scarborough . Another discovery by the UC-led
team: To help purify water as it sluiced into the reservoir tanks via catchment
runoff and canals, the Maya employed deliberately positioned “sand boxes” that
served to filter the water as it entered into the reservoirs. “These filtration
beds consisted of quartz sand, which is not naturally found in the greater Tikal
area. The Maya of Tikal traveled at least 20 miles (about 30 kilometers) to obtain
the quartz sand to create their water filters. It was a fairly laborious transportation
effort. That speaks to the value they placed on water and water management,” said
Nicholas Dunning, UC professor of geography. According to archaeologist Kenneth
Tankersley, UC assistant professor of anthropology, “It’s likely that the overall
system of reservoirs and early water-diversion features, which were highly adaptable
and resilient over a long stretch, helped Tikal and some other centers survive
periodic droughts when many other settlement sites had to be abandoned due to
lack of rainfall.” These findings are scheduled to appear this week in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
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