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Record W4412400721 · doi:10.5194/egusphere-2025-3237

Evidence for highly variable land use but a stable climate in the southwest Maya lowlands

2025· preprint· en· W4412400721 on OpenAlexafffund
Benjamin Keenan, Kevin J. Johnston, Andy Breckenridge, Peter Douglas

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typepreprint
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicEnvironmental and Cultural Studies in Latin America and Beyond
Canadian institutionsUniversité de MontréalMcGill University
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaMcGill University
KeywordsMayaGeographyVariable (mathematics)Land usePhysical geographyEnvironmental scienceForestryArchaeologyEcologyMathematics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract. The lowland Maya of Mesoamerica were affected by multiple environmental stresses throughout their history, and are experienced a major demographic and political decline, or collapse, during a period of inferred intense multidecadal drought, between approximately 1200- and 1000-years BP. The complex interactions between climate and society in the Maya lowlands are generally not well understood. We combine carbon and hydrogen isotopic analyses of leaf wax n-alkanes with quantification of faecal stanols and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from a lake sediment core from the southwest lowlands to assess whether 1) palaeoecological evidence of land use is related to population change; and 2) whether population and land use are linked to changing precipitation. Our data reveal a transition from generally more intense fire use and C4 plant agriculture during the Preclassic (3500–2000 BP) to dense populations and reduced fire use during the Classic (1600–1000 BP). This is consistent with other evidence for a more urbanised and specialised society in the Classic. We do not find evidence for drought in the hydrogen isotope leaf wax record (δDlw), implying that local drought was not a primary driver of observed variability in land use or population change.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.054
Threshold uncertainty score0.108

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.042
GPT teacher head0.273
Teacher spread0.231 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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