Pre-Columbian food production in the Maya Lowlands was long characterized as reliant on extensive, slash-and-burn agriculture as the sole cultivation system possible in the region, given environmental limitations, with maize as the dominant crop. While aspects of this “swidden thesis” of Maya agriculture have been chipped away in recent years, there has been an underappreciation of the many forms of long-term capital investments in agriculture made by ancient Maya people. Here, we review the last three decades of research that has overturned the swidden thesis, focusing on long-term strategies. We demonstrate long-lasting agricultural investments by Maya people, in social capital including multigenerational land tenure, in cultivated capital including long-lived trees, and in landesque capital including soil amendments and landscape engineering projects, such as terracing and wetland modification.

考虑到环境限制，前哥伦布时代玛雅低地的粮食生产长期以来一直依赖于粗放的刀耕火种农业，这是该地区唯一可能的耕作系统，而玉米是主要作物。尽管近年来玛雅农业的这一“转变论”的各个方面已被削弱，但古代玛雅人对农业进行的多种形式的长期资本投资却没有得到充分重视。在这里，我们回顾了过去三十年推翻了这一观点的研究，重点关注长期战略。我们展示了玛雅人对社会资本（包括多代土地保有制）、耕种资本（包括长寿树木）以及景观资本（包括土壤改良和景观工程项目（例如梯田和湿地改造））的长期农业投资。