Reviving the Art of the Ancient Maya Forest Gardens

UC Santa Barbara Archaeologist Dr. Anabel Ford Works to Restore Ancient Forestry in Belize

By Ryan P. Cruz Tue Jan 07, 2025 | 03:07pm

For nearly half a century, Dr. Anabel Ford — archaeologist, research scientist, and director of UC Santa Barbara’s MesoAmerican Research Center — has dedicated her working life to questioning conventional wisdom about Maya agricultural practices.

Through much of her research, Ford has challenged Western assumptions that Mesoamerican forests were inadequate for sustaining communities, and that Maya people had damaged the forests with overpopulation and “slash and burn” practices. After decades of studying the land, the people, and the ancient ways, Ford is looking to prove the viability of the long-abandoned “art of the Maya forest garden.”

On Monday, Ford took the stage at Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History’s Fleischmann Auditorium to give a lecture to a packed house, where she spoke about her experiences rebuilding a site in western Belize called El Pilar, which she hopes to establish as a real-life example of the ancient Maya “milpa forest gardens.”

Many of the misconceptions about Maya agro-forestry, Ford says, can be attributed to the “western” way of thinking, which assumes the Maya people overburdened the land. These assumptions, she explained, are simplified ways of measuring the worth of land based on modern agricultural ideals.

“There’s more to it than that,” Ford said.

Back when Ford first began studying the area that borders Belize and Guatemala, she said most researchers were looking for sites that were near waterways, based on the “Western view that rivers are where settlements should be.”

El Pilar, however, was in the uplands, at a site that by traditional standards would be considered “not cultivable” because the shallow soils weren’t arable and would be near impossible for a machine to plow.

But what she found was that long-existing Maya practices worked perfectly for the land. The same shallow soils could be planted by hand using sticks and by allowing the natural cycles of the plant life to provide resources over an extended period of time. “You just need to think a little differently; then you start to see it as ‘cultivable,’” Ford said.

Over the past few decades, Ford and her team have worked to register the site, investigate, excavate, speak with the locals, and conduct soil and vegetation studies across the 20 square kilometers. Using Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging), she was able to understand the forests and how they were meant to be tended.

Dr. Anabel Ford during one of her early research trips in 1978. | Credit: Courtesy El Pilar Project UCSB

The “Milpa Cycle,” she explained, began with the long misunderstood “slash and burn” of the land. These highly planned practices — much like prescribed burns of today — would be conducted by a “fire tender” who would burn sections of land to prepare a layer of nutrient rich soil for the first phase of the cycle.

Fresh perennials and fast growing plants would be planted in the burn area, and over the next 20 years, the Milpa would provide a wealth of food, products, and resources including wood for structures. The naturally lush forest gardens would be complemented by infield gardens and natural habitats for other species of animals like white-tailed deer, which would then provide further resources for the community.

These practices, she says, were likely forced underground when the Spanish colonized the area in the 16th century, making it illegal for Maya people to tend their community gardens and groves. Since then, hundreds of years of neglect has turned much of the area into a shadow of what it was, but even now, Ford says that there are nearly 500 species of food, plants, and crops that survived.

At El Pilar, Ford estimates that the 20 square miles could sustain a community of up to 4,000 people using the 20-year rotating Milpa forest garden cycle. This would provide everything the community would need, including materials to build homes and an animal habitat for hunting.

Rebuilding the forest gardens and keeping up the ancient practices, Ford says, is a way of “honoring” the Maya culture. This extends to how many ancient sites are cleared away for tourists, exposing structures to sun and decay instead of allowing them to exist under natural canopies as they would have centuries ago. “It’s a real problem,” she said. “They’re making ruins of monuments rather than monuments of ruins”

One of the master forest gardeners that has been instrumental to Ford’s understanding of Maya practices, Narcisso Torres, was recently awarded the Chancellors’ Medal by UCSB Chancellor Henry Yang. Torres and Ford’s work will also be featured in a documentary that is currently underway. (Click here to donate toward the documentary, The Last Forest Gardener).