Gender, farming, and long-term change: Maya historical and archaeological perspectives

A reassessment of ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological evidence documents variation in Maya agricultural technologies across time and space and change in the social relations of farming alongside other social, political, and economic changes over 1,000 years of Maya history. This contradicts a timeless narrative of man-the-farmer that can be derived from contemporary Yucatec Maya sources. An examination of engendered experiences in the Late Classic farming settlement of Chan Nòohol in Belize demonstrates that the use of multiple lines of evidence to embody the archaeological record can help archaeologists to move beyond the tyrannical imposition of contemporary voices on a voiceless past.