**2. Cycles from field to forest to field**

Popular notions envision Maya populations outstripping their environment. This assumption seems to originate from interpretations of accounts by early conquistadors that eschewed appreciation of the Maya forest as a garden. The Spanish conquistadors'success in provisioning their armies and finding shelter in established towns belies perceptions of an unpopulated landscape. Acknowledging the evident bounty available to the conquistadors during their brutal conquest sets the stage for examining the resources available to support Maya civilization.

The economic value of the trees favored throughout the milpa cycle by Maya households and communities is noteworthy. Not only the dominant plants are useful (**Table 1**); a minimum examination of the literature shows nearly 160 named trees are favored for their utility. Each of these favored trees bear important qualities and fulfill significant purposes while generating habitats and maintaining biodiversity [7, 25–35].

Misunderstood and maligned as "shifting cultivation," the milpa cycle is a complex web of landscape management inputs embedded in the forest itself (**Figure 4**). Resources were managed as a horizontal matrix with vertical

#### **Figure 3.**

*The Dynamic Relationship of Forest and Field, Changing Over a Year, Decade, Generation, and Centuries. Credit: Kippy Nigh.*

variations, forming a complex mosaic created by heterogeneous spatial dimensions of the milpa forest garden cycle based on the opening of a milpa field that averages 1 hectare. At any one time, no more than one-fifth of the cultivated spaces, around 20%, are fields [12, 21]. The remaining lands, a minimum of 80%, are somewhere in the process of transforming from field to forest, and eventually cycling back to fields, in an organized and directed sequence of succession from annual crops to perennials.

*Favored Trees of the Maya Milpa Forest Garden Cycle DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106271*


#### **Table 1.**

*The top twenty dominant plants of the maya forest.*

This complex of interrelated plots is the Maya forest garden [36]. Tree fruits and animals inhabiting diverse habitats are an integral part of the Maya forest garden system. Drawing from ethnohistoric and contemporary accounts, the interspersed fields of the dynamic cycle is repetitive across space and time, consistent with traditional swidden sequences from around the world [37–39]. Building value though experimentation over generations, this regenerative cycle was as well-known to the Maya of the past as it is to their descendants today [40]. Our documentation of favored trees is a representation of the remarkable cultural impact of the Maya on this biodiversity hotspot [41, 42] and is an example of how interactions between humans and their environment can be constructive.
