Evidence for highly variable land use but a stable climate in the southwest Maya lowlands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. The lowland Maya of Mesoamerica were affected by multiple environmental stresses throughout their history, and many experienced a major demographic and political decline, or collapse, during a period of inferred intense multidecadal drought, approximately 1200- and 1000-years BP. Given regional variation in the timing and character of the collapse (Demarest, 2004; Hodell et al., 2007; Webster et al., 2007; Kennett and Beach, 2014; Douglas et al., 2015), much remains to be discovered about the complex interactions between climate and society in the Maya lowlands. To this end, 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 of 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 in the Classic-period southwestern lowlands.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".