
































Milpa, Forest, Garden: Maya Agro-ecosystems 

Review by Alessandro Questa

The Maya Forest Garden: Eight Millennia of Sustainable Cultivation of the Tropical Woodlands 

by Anabel Ford & Ronald Nigh

Left Coast Press, 2015

The Maya Forest Garden is an impressive book on environmental and human history in the Maya area.

I dare say it also constitutes a much-awaited response to the contagious yet uninformed apocalyptic

notion of a “Maya collapse.” Indeed, the contradictory perception that glorifies ancient Maya culture as

it ignores or even deems modern Maya practices as “primitive” is bewildering. This analysis can be

paired to relevant historical ecology studies in other parts  of the world (Flannery 2002, Gammage

2011), which show how non-Western societies have had a much deeper and long-lasting success in

managing their landscape than, well, us. 

In the case at hand, this success is marked by the continued and skillful practice around the

Maya milpa system, an expanded Mesoamerican knowledge-practice, defined as a diverse agroforestry

polyculture  based  on  maize  and  managed  in  long  cycles  that  integrate  agricultural  and  domestic

practices to forest growth. Such practice, preserved by local gardeners, stands as the key strategy for

long lasting sustainability in the region. The milpa system, according to the authors, more than just

disturbing local ecosystems, has worked with tropical forests becoming integral to their sustainability

today. Relying on a multifarious array of sources, from pollen fossil analysis, lake core samples and

early Spanish chronicles to ethnographic and archaeological research data, Ford and Nigh — a couple

of renowned seasoned scholars on the Maya — propose to look at the currently mega diverse tropical

forests  of  Belize,  Guatemala and Mexico as  a  human managed environment  via  cultural  practices

around  food  production,  specifically  controlled  fire  and  felling  of  vegetation  paired  to  polycrop

agriculture. 



By doing  a  survey  of  the  last  8,000  years  of  human  inhabitation  in  the  area,  the  authors

challenge recent assumptions about a Maya civilizational collapse due to deforestation, overpopulation

and  environmental  abuse.  They  instead  pose  that  Eurocentric  assumptions  have  prevented  a  real

understanding on Maya knowledge and traditional farming practices as determinant to the conservation

and expansion of tropical forests. Western ideas about production (arable land, intensive agriculture)

together  with  urbanization,  centralization,  population  increase  and  social  stratification  as  tacitly

desirable  features  that  mark  somehow a  “successful”  civilization  have  judged Maya farming — a

careful territorial management between owner spirits, milpa gardens, forestry and controlled fire — as

simply a brutish “slash-and-burn”method. Furthermore,  these Eurocentric ideas backed by an agro-

industrial economy have solidified as an “ecological imperialism,” turning detrimental in the region by

forcing human concentration, and relying for food production on over exploitation of land and labor,

and the expansion of pastures and plows lands. 

The book starts by offering a historical and ecological background of the region over the last

8,000 years, briefly discussing the relations between population, land, resources, and political factions

in Maya chronology. In short, against the deforestation and collapse theses, the authors point out the

evident presence of a diverse and abundant ecosystem, with numerous trees and plants species directly

beneficial to humans. They argue that what we imagine as a sudden “collapse” is rather a long process

characterized  by  the  abandonment  of  certain  practices  such  as  dense  population,  monumental

architecture, and warfare in favor of others such as the emergence of a “galactic” form of urbanism,

based on decentralized smaller farming units. 

This serves as a backdrop for understanding how milpa gardens operate as a high-performance

agro-ecosystem that relate diverse household resources (horticulture, hunting, bee keeping) with forest

growth and human-spirit relations in Petén, Yucatan and Lacandon forest areas. Milpa gardens are not

only connected to different local beliefs (a spiritual landscape and a trans-species moral order), but are

also highly flexible and can be intensified or varied in many ways according to the population’s needs.

The  Maya  forest  is  the  result  of  dynamic  and  resilient  historical  ecology  making  a  diversified

landscape. Maya farmers, the authors claim, must not be seen any longer as a destructive presence in an

imagined pristine forest but as spiritual caretakers and co-creators of said forest. 

In  the  following chapter,  the  authors  present  paleo-environmental  data,  mainly  from pollen

fossil, precipitation and lake core soils, to destabilize the idea of historical environmental destruction

by human population. In the last 8,000 years, the region has indeed drastically changed from arid to

humid and temperate with long periods of irregular precipitation. Such changes however marked the

development of the milpa with controlled fire as a combined form of restoration agriculture, permitting



for much carbon to be reintroduced in the local soils allowing forest regeneration. Forest and milpa

gardens are thus integral. 

In chapter 4, Ford and Nigh describe the life of Maya people during the Late Classic period

(around 1,500 years  ago),  in  the archaeological  site  of  El  Pilar,  at  the border between Belize and

Guatemala.  The authors estimate,  based on archaeological evidence,  a high residential  density and

population (180,000 people, between 137-142 persons per square kilometer) showing different levels of

intensification and size in the surrounding milpa gardens. 

In chapter 5, the authors offer a comprehensive list of trees and plants dominant in the local

forest and beneficial to humans. If milpa is integral to forest conservation, then the forest is key to both

milpa and human reproduction. The authors offer a characterization of inhabited upland dry lands in

contrast with uninhabited lowlands and wetlands to calculate an approximate parity between human

population, milpa and forestlands. They conclude that even if in the thickly inhabited upper dry lands

would have had a heavy impact on some trees in the surrounding forests, in the vast lowlands and

wetlands with peripheral human population, the impact was kept light. 

In chapter 6, the authors pose the problem of conservation as a Eurocentric practice and the

dangers for the actual continuity of Maya forests as long as a globalized economy based on intensive

production and biodiversity reservoirs keep Maya people, and their profound knowledge, out of the

picture. It becomes necessary to explore further the co-creative relations between Maya people and the

forest in order to visualize possible routes for their continuation under the pressure of agro-industrial,

mining, lodging, and oil interests. 

In  short,  the  book  is  a  timely  multidisciplinary  exploration  of  not  only  the  rich  historical

ecology of the Maya forest garden, but also of Maya culture, history and knowledge – and the risk of

loosing all of it. The value of explorations like the one offered by this study need to be — for the future

of any form of sustainable humanity and in my modest opinion—continued. 

References Cited

Flannery, Tim 

2002.  The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples. New York:

Grove Press. 

Gammage, Bill 

2011. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Melbourne: Allen & Unwin.



Alessandro Questa is a cultural anthropologist in the making at the University of Virginia. He works

with  Otomi  and  Nahua  people  in  Mexico,  writing  on  issues  such  as  spiritual  kinship,  ritual

territoriality,  masks,  and shamanism.  He is  currently  writing his  dissertation on Nahua dances as

models to engage a threatened environment in the highlands of Puebla, Mexico.

© 2015 Alessandro Questa


