In addition to investigating the relationships between humans and the vegetation communities of the Bladen valley, our team members are constantly engaging and collaborating with the wider Mayanist archaeological community. Joe Hirst is currently working with Sam Krause (Texas State University), Tim Beach, and Sheryl Luzadder-Beach (University of Texas at Austin) to reconstruct human-induced changes in vegetation and fire activity at Laguna Verde, a lake within the Blue Creek area of northern Belize. Blue Creek has an extensive history of human habitation and cultivation, with prior pollen work at Laguna Verde indicating that the local area was a site of wetland cultivation during the Archaic and Preclassic periods1,2. Joe is working on a different sediment core collected from the lake to produce a new record of human-induced environmental change in this incredible setting.
- Beach et al. 2009 “A review of human and natural changes in Maya Lowland wetlands over the Holocene” Quaternary Science Reviews ↩︎
- Morse 2009 “Pollen from Laguna Verde, Blue Creek, Belize: Implications for paleoecology, paleoethnobotany, agriculture, and human settlement” PhD Thesis, Texas A&M ↩︎