THE THREE SISTERS, THE MILPA GROWING SYSTEM AND THE GENIUS OF INDIGENOUS AGRICULTURE

The Three Sisters (By National Agriculture Archive)

THE THREE SISTERS—CORN, BEANS, SQUASH

Native peoples speak of this type of agriculture—corn, beans and squash— as the three sisters. In Robin Wall Kimmerer's popular classic, Braiding Sweetgrass, the author explains how these three vegetables got the label. These plants together, she says, feed the people, feed the land, and feed the imagination.

There are many stories about how the three sisters came into being and each of them acknowledges these plants as sisters. One take on the story tells of a long winter when people were dropping from hunger. Three women came to a villager's dwelling on a snowy night. One was a tall woman dressed in yellow with long flowing hair. The second wore green and the third was robed in orange.

They came to shelter by the fire. Even though food was scarce, the visiting strangers were fed generously, with their hosts sharing what little they had left. In gratitude for their generosity, the three revealed their true identities—corn, beans and squash—and gave themselves to the people in a bundle of seeds so that they would never go hungry again.

THE GENIUS OF INDIGENOUS AGRICULTURE

For millennia, from Mexico to Montana, women mound up the earth each spring and place the seeds of these plants into the ground, all in the same square foot of soil. It's called the genius of indigenous agriculture. In mid-May, after planting, the corn seed takes water quickly and is the first of the three to emerge from the ground. Drinking in soil and water, the bean seed swells and sends its roots deep down. It breaks the soil to join the corn, which by that time has already grown six inches tall.

Squash takes its time—it is the slow sister. It may be a long while before the first stems poke up, still caught in their seed coat until the leaves split and break free, says Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass.

These three vegetables are not only the core of the Maya milpa and Central American Indigenous peoples. Native American tribes such as the Iriquois and Cherokee acknowledge these vegetables also as the three sisters because they nurtured each other like family when planted together. 

Milpas may seem mysterious to outsiders but they are a traditional agro-forestry system formed by cultures that create a spacial dynamic to maintain local biodiversity in agriculture. This farming technique has been found to bring continuity and security to a culture's food supply, nutrition, and even the social fabric of a village. 

TIME OFF BETWEEN CROPS

In the milpa system, it is customary to have years of rest in between planting crops. This leads to soil fertility, reduces the destruction of weeds, and helps control harmful pests. Because of the time between plantings of a specific milpa, the Maya, though not nomadic, required a great deal of land mass to achieve the proper platform for the milpa to produce at its maximum. In pre-Hispanic times, land was plentiful and these communal ventures—with family members and/or neighbors joining in both with work and the fruits of their labors—much resembled the structure of the Maya ejido system.

And it was not restricted to planting vegetables. The milpa was diverse and could include orchards, livestock and craft activities, even timber harvesting wood for houses, medicinal plants, beekeeping and hunting. All this made for a complex and varied system that retained sustainability and the use of the land's resources.

THE MILPA CYCLE

A Man and His Son in Their Milpa

The milpa cycle involves two years of cultivation and eight years of fallow or secondary growth to allow for the natural regeneration of vegetation. As long as this rotation continues without shortening fallow periods, the system can be sustained indefinitely.

So unique is the milpa system that after three thousand years, the milpa has received worldwide recognition from the United Nations, as noted in a recent article in "Yucatán Magazine."

UNITED NATIONS RECOGNITION

The UN was impressed by the ancient system for its complexity as a productive model that includes the combined cultivation of beans, pumpkin, and mainly corn, the basis of regional food since ancient timeSquash takes its time—it is the slow sister. It may be a long while before the first stems poke up, still caught in their seed coat until the leaves split and break free, says Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass.

These three vegetables are not only the core of the Maya milpa and Central American Indigenous peoples. Native American tribes such as the Iriquois and Cherokee acknowledge these vegetables also as the three sisters because they nurtured each other like family when planted together. 

Milpas may seem mysterious to outsiders but they are a traditional agro-forestry system formed by cultures that create a spacial dynamic to maintain local biodiversity in agriculture. This farming technique has been found to bring continuity and security to a culture's food supply, nutrition, and even the social fabric of a village. 

TIME OFF BETWEEN CROPS

In the milpa system, it is customary to have years of rest in between planting crops. This leads to soil fertility, reduces the destruction of weeds, and helps control harmful pests. Because of the time between plantings of a specific milpa, the Maya, though not nomadic, required a great deal of land mass to achieve the proper platform for the milpa to produce at its maximum. In pre-Hispanic times, land was plentiful and these communal ventures—with family members and/or neighbors joining in both with work and the fruits of their labors—much resembled the structure of the Maya ejido system.

Maya Man Working His Milpa (From Society of EthnoBiology)

The appointment of the "Maya Milpa as an Important System of the World Agricultural Heritage for their Food and Agriculture Organization" also recognizes the traditional milpa for its resilience to climate and modernity changes, long life, and contributions to the conservation of both the culture and biodiversity of the Yucatán Peninsula.  

THE MILPA'S IMPORTANCE

To sum up the importance and magnitude of milpas, author Kim Wall Kimmerer says it best: "Of all the wise teachers who have come into my life, none are more eloquent than these, who wordlessly in leaf and vine embody the knowledge of relationship. Alone, a bean is just vine, squash an oversized leaf. Only when standing together with corn does a whole emerge which transcends the individual. The gifts of each are more fully expressed when they are nurtured together than alone. In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship. This is how the world keeps going." Amen.

With this final nugget, may I wish you the very best of fall seasons—our harvest season—and a joyful Thanksgiving.  

If you enjoyed this post, check out  Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon. And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.

MAKING THE MOST OF MAGNIFICENT MÉRIDA—THE JEWEL IN YUCATÁN'S CROWN

Palacio Municipal Mérida (By Lilla Green)

As far as colonial cities go, it's hard to beat Mérida. Although many tourists gravitate to Cancun and the Riviera Maya, Mérida has been gaining in popularity. 

It's a massive city, over a million population and three hours from Cancun by paid highway. This city truly has it all: an impressive main plaza, a large promenade with stately mansions (Paseo de Montejo), horse-drawn carriages, museums, roving mariachi bands, Mexico's oldest cathedral dating to 1561, towering trees, lovely gardens, an impressive block-long municipal market with everything from vegetables, meat and spices, food stalls, live birds, hardware, clothing, machinery, and hammocks.

MÉRIDA EN DOMINGO

Lucas Galves Municipal Market

Sundays are special, known as Mérida en Domingo. All streets around the zocalo are blocked off for artisans and food vendors. A block from the main plaza at Parque Hidalgo near the historic Gran Hotel, chairs are set up for acts by singers, comics, clowns, and mimes to entertain locals and tourists. At this plaza, vendors sell jewelry, hammocks, embroidered purses, gauze clothing, wood and stone carvings, Mexican toys, and balloons.

Gran Hotel

Mérida's streets are narrow and crowded, teaming with life, at times making walking difficult. The city makes you feel alive because you are so often surrounded by others. The historic district is worth a walk (four blocks around the main plaza) as the architecture is in the Spanish colonial style, austere on the  outside but often painted in bright colors. If there is only one thing you will remember about the city, it's the architecture. It parallels much of the city's history.

HISTORIC HACIENDAS 

Hacienda Yaxcopoil, Yucatán Hacienda

The Spanish villas are a reminder of the Spanish era Paseo Montejo's mansions. The boulevard was set in motion at the turn of the 20th century when Parisians came to Mérida to manufacture Panama hats from henequen, the Yucatán's main crop. The area exploded with commerce and along with the mansions on the main promenade, three hundred haciendas were built in the outlying areas.  

Historic Mansion on Paseo de Montejo

YUCATÁN FOOD SPECIALTIES

Cochinita Pibil 

Food is plentiful and cheap and prices are a welcome rest from the high prices on the coast. The flavors are unique. The Yucatán prides itself on its food, so don't fail to try out local fare—from salbutes, tortes, and panuchos to pibil chicken and mole. Fresh fruit ice cream—mango, coconut, banana, mamey, guanabana—is a must at the hundred plus year old cream parlor on the main square, Dulceria y Sorbeteria Colon.

LODGING

Lodging runs the gamut from inexpensive hotels like the Trinidad Santiago (Calle 62 at 55) to high-end, like El Palacito Secreto, with everything in between. This city hosts a number of small, smart and charming hotels that can be had for reasonable prices, often in the historic district. This makes for easy walking to shops and restaurants. 

Hotel Trinidad Santiago

            

Hotel El Palacito Secreto

THE MAYA

Topmost in Merida is the presence of the modern day Maya. Merida has the highest indigenous population of any city in Mexico where descendants of the ancient Maya live and thrive in this massive metropolis that teams with life, history, and a combination of old and new.

Maya Children (By Naatil.org)

If you enjoyed this post, check out  Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon. And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.

A SUNKEN CITY IN BELIZE UNCOVERS THE MAYA'S SECRET TRADE ADVANTAGE—SALT

Known in the ancient world as astute astronomers, temple builders, and lords of the jungle, the Maya captured our imagination by their ability to read the night sky and to build magnificent stepped pyramids.

Often left out of the Maya's intricate narrative is their competence at having developed extensive trade networks that linked present day Guatemala, Honduras, and the Yucatán to the Caribbean coast.

TRADERS EXTRAORDINAIRE

Using large seagoing canoes, Maya traders plied the Caribbean coast from Mexico to Panama, bringing obsidian, jade, feathers, pelts, and numerous other goods from the interior and highlands of their vast empire to far flung regions. But little has been mentioned until lately of their most highly valued commodity—salt. 

                               

Bolon Yookte' K'Uh, Maya God of Trade

The Yucatán Peninsula has salt fields in Rio Lagartos, made famous by the annual migration of the flamingos that return to feast on the pink brine shrimp that give them color. The flats are large bodies of water where natural condensation has removed the water from the mineral so that salt can be harvested.

Rio Lagartos Salt Flats 

SALT BRINE

But salt from salt fields was not the only type of salt the Maya traded. During the peak of the Classic Era, from 300 to 900 AD, coastal Maya also produced salt by boiling brine in pots over fires. The end result was shaped into salt cakes, then paddled by canoe to coastal cities to be traded extensively at markets throughout MesoAmerica.

Heather McKillop On Site

Salt is essential for life and as ancient civilizations evolved from hunters and gatherers into agrarian societies, it was not immediately clear how this mineral was acquired until Heather McKillop, an archeologist at Louisiana State University along with her co-author anthropologist Kazuo Aoyama from Japan's Ibaraki University, an expert on stone tools, produced evidence in research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

THIRTY YEAR STUDY

McKillop has been studying salt production sites in Belize's Maya lowlands for 30 years. After discovering a number of submerged Maya cities through underwater excavations, research revealed how the Maya manufactured salt. The discovery comes from a now submerged archeological site known as Ta'ab Nuk Na. It was inhabited from 600 to 800 AD in an area Belizians call Paynes Creek.

Ta'ab Nuk Na is the largest known Maya saltworks in the country and the most revelatory. Her team has uncovered the remains of 110 salt-producing kitchens in the region, each one capable of producing enough salt for 7,000 people per day.

Sharing her co-author and stone expert Kazuo Aoyama's input, McKillop said in Science Daily, "I thought the findings would be that they cut a lot of wood, but in fact, the majority of the stone tools were used for cutting meat and fish. That really changed our views."

Team Excavating Ta'ab Nuk Na (Photo Heather McKillop)

SALT AND THE MAYA ECONOMY

She and Aoyama realized, McKillop continued, that not only were the Maya producing a lot of salt, they were also using salt to produce necessary food commodities for export. This meant the salt-producing Maya played an important role in the greater Maya civilization, which at its height, was believed to have encompassed millions of people throughout MesoAmerica.

"Our research is clear that the coastal Maya were an integral part of the Maya economy because they produced and traded a basic commodity, salt. Since everybody needed salt, the coastal Maya really contributed to daily life," said McKillop.

PRESERVED BY MANGROVES

Although water erodes century-old wooden structures, the Belize site is embedded in anaerobic mangrove peat which contains very low oxygen and staves off micro-organisms that would typically break down similar structures.

Mangroves in Belize (Restorationproject.com)

The survey revealed the presence of ancient salt works, called kitchens, for brine broiling. The salty sea water would be placed in ceramic vessels and heated on a fire. The water would evaporate off, leaving behind just the salt. This valuable mineral was stored in the vessels and traded. New analyses of stone tools found at the Paynes Creek Salt Works site—as it is being called—reveal that not only were the Maya making salt in large quantities but were also salting fish and meat to meet dietary needs while producing a commodity that could be stored and traded. 

SALT KITCHEN WORKERS

Not much is known about the salt workers and their lives. Though they may have been seasonal or daily workers, finding a residence at Ta'ab Nuk Na leads researches to believe this was also their home. But lack of verifiable information leaves a gap in drawing the complete picture of salt sale production and distribution.

Moving Wood Post in Water (Photo by Heather McKillop)

Excavations revealed the remains of several buildings dating to the 6th century—ten pole and hatch huts were discovered. Marking individual artifacts on the sea floor allowed the team to see their distribution and reconstruct the activities in the different buildings, McKillop said. 

MULTI-FACETED 

Not only did the Maya "work from home" by producing salt in their backyards, they also performed household activities such as fishing, preparing and cooking food, woodworking, and spinning cotton. Researchers say the household would have produced salt for itself before trading the surplus with other communities. 

Salt was a scarce commodity inland, where Maya cities were experiencing growth. Most of those areas were supplied from salt works that were located along the coast. In total, the sites at Ta'ab Nuk Na and elsewhere in the lagoon could have produced 60 tons of salt over the course of the four-month dry season, based on the production of a modern salt works in Guatemala. Along with being an invaluable tool for preserving food, salt was also used as currency in the Maya economy.

COTTAGE INDUSTRY

"You might expect this high demand to require a huge organized industry but it appears the civilization's huge salt output was mainly built upon this kind of cottage industry," McKillop said in the Science Daily article.

McKillop's study is a three-square mile area surrounded by mangrove forest that had been buried beneath a saltwater lagoon due to sea level rise.

"Sea level rise completely submerged these sites underwater," she said. 

WATERY FATE

It's not yet clear exactly when the Belize cities met their underwater fate. But McKillop's research is ongoing and she's positive she and her team will get to the bottom of the salt question and through technology, identify dates that the sea might have taken over. And maybe now that archeologists are aware of underwater cities that were vital parts of the Maya empire, more underwater excavations will occur. Stay tuned.

Paynes Creek National Park (By CosyCorner.com)

If you enjoyed this post, check out Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon. And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.

HOW A CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGIST HELPED UNLOCK THE SECRETS OF THE MAYA CALENDAR

 

Barbara Tedlock with Maya Woman in Guatemala

BARBARA TEDLOCK

Cultural anthropologist Barbara Tedlock has spent a lifetime exploring the spaces between the lines in numerous ethnic cultures. Equipped with a masters degree in Ethnomusicology along with a masters and PhD in Anthropology, she and her husband Dennis Tedlock, best known for his translation of The Popul Vuh: Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life, traveled the world to engage in a new kind of cross-cultural understanding to learn how cultures think, dream, heal, honor their ancestors, and live.

Though publication is an important aspect for anthropologists, diving into the field may well be their life blood. Tedlock is also a key figure in anthropological dream research. Though she has authored many books, this post will center on Time and the Highland Maya, exploring how the Maya view time.

TIME AND THE HIGHLAND MAYA

The Tedlocks' fieldwork began in June 1975 for three months, then ten months in 1976, and lastly another three months in 1979. They conducted formal, structured ethnographic surveys as well as informal, unstructured interviews. They read from ethno-historical documents with consultants and viewed previously reported "facts" through observation and eventually through their own apprenticeships. Studies were conducted in five K'iche' communities, with the majority of time being spent in Momostenango, Guatemala. They interviewed weavers, merchants, farmers, town officials and various religious specialists ranging from members of a Catholic Action group to dozens of priest-shamans.

Barbara discussed a 1722 historical document with a Momostecan elder, a Maya calendar that was written in the K'iche' language. Tapes were made during both formal and informal interviews. In the middle stages of Barbara's work in Momostenango, she and Dennis undertook formal training as calendar diviners and were initiated in August, 1976. This allowed them to perform calendrical divinations for K'iche' Maya who solicited their services.

San Andres de Xecul in Momostenango (Photo TraveloGuatemala) 

MAYA CALENDAR

Quoting Barbara Tedlock, "The ancient Maya were great horologists, or students of time. They measured the lunar cycle and solar year; lunar and solar eclipses; and the risings of Venus and Mars with accuracy. In many cases their measurements were more accurate than those of the Europeans who conquered them.

"But unlike the Europeans," she continued, "the Maya were interested not only in the quantities of time but also in its qualities, especially its meaning for human affairs."

Though the Tedlocks were quick to understand Maya astronomy practices, efforts to inhabit their symbolic world became more nuanced and demanding.

Chichen Itza By Night (By Astrojem.net)

As explained by Barbara, the very foundation of their calendar—composed of myriad overlays of cycles of differing lengths and portents—rested on a cycle of 260 named and numbered days. The names of this cycle had no obvious correlation with astronomical events and the names of its days and their divinatory interpretations were largely lacking in astronomical references.

HIGHLAND VS. LOWLAND INTERPRETATIONS

According to Barbara Tedlock, among the Lowland Maya of the Yucatán, the ancient ways of interpreting time are known from inscriptions on thousands of stone monuments (stela) and from the few ancient books that survived the fires of Spanish missionaries and a handful of early colonial documents. But the contemporary indigenous people of the Yucatán region have long since forgotten how to keep time in the manner of their ancestors, she observed.

However with the Highland Maya, she wrote, and especially those from the western highlands where the Tedlocks chose to land, the situation is reversed. The monuments there are bare of inscriptions, according to Tedlock, and not one of the ancient books escaped the flames. But it is among the Highland Maya rather than their Lowland cousins that time continues to this day to be calculated and given meaning according to ancient methods. Scores of indigenous Guatemalan communities speaking Mayan languages keep the 260-day cycle and, in many cases, the ancient solar cycle as well.

Guatemalan Western Highlands

TOLZK'IN CALENDAR

For this reason, Barbara Tedlock chose this particular region in western Guatemala's high

lands to study and do her work. And it is here where she was confirmed as a day keeper. "The Tzolk'in calendar," said Tedlock, "was primarily used for making predictions and communicating with the gods or ancestors. 

"The Maya believe a god rules each day and depending on that god's traits, it could be good or bad for certain activities. The calendar is easy to remember and that's why it has been passed down and used to this day. It fits into the culture of the people.

The 260-Day Calendar Arranged by Number
From Time and the Highland Maya, by Tedlock

"It fits into their agriculture, their spinning, their weaving. It's something people use and it doesn't conflict with our calendar," she explained. "People look at the characteristics, the god, of every day, If it's a day that relates to money, then it's time to pay bills."

RECRUITMENT

Being indoctrinated as a day keeper for a non-indigenous person is almost unthinkable. But the Tedlocks came to it through a great backstory which I'll share. They were indoctrinated under the formal apprenticeship of a diviner in Momostenango in the 70s. This is no small undertaking and day keepers are recruited in shamanistic fashion, with "divine election" through birth, dreams, and/or illness.

They'd been spending a lot of time in various Highlands pueblos, touring churches, asking questions, and a day keeper divined that they were annoying people at shrines. He told them they had entered shrines without being ritually clean. A little scared by his remarks, they left the Highlands for the city where Barbara became seriously ill. Her illness eventually passed. They returned to Momostenango, renewed contact with the day keeper, and were then allowed to enter their apprenticeships.

DIVINE ELECTION

For Barbara Tedlock, "divine election" came about through illness. The unusual opportunity to learn divination was provided to them by a gifted, socially prominent priest-shaman who had noticed their intense interest in the topic and observed Barbara's cooperation in answering questions he asked during the calendrical divinations he performed for her during the illness. His high status and reputation allowed him to risk potential public and private criticism for accepting foreigners as students. Both Barbara and Dennis were trained and initiated together because it was divined that their joint indiscretions had caused her illness, also and because their teacher had a series of dreams that recommended "united" service" for them.

Barbara's role in learning of divinatory service involved a role not formally discussed in the sociological or anthropological literature on the topic of fieldwork, namely, participant-as-observed. Shortly after beginning formal training, Barbara realized that her teacher's personal commitment to their training was extremely serious. If they failed as students, he failed, and their social disgrace would become his.

VILLAGE LIFE

With that being said, they settled into village life in Guatemala, became initiated as day keepers, learned the rituals, and made fewer treks north. As time went on, their contemporaries in the US said they had "gone native," not unlike the consensus among Margaret Mead and her husband's fellow anthropologists during their work in Papua New Guinea and the South Seas.

As for their roles as anthropologists, the Tedlocks returned to them in full as soon as the liminal period was over, on the day of their initiation. Barbara Tedlock's account of the ritual life of an Indigenous community in Guatemala offered a rare glimpse at the importance of ancient religious symbols in the daily world of a twentieth-century Indigenous people. Her participation in the calendric rituals that permeated every aspect of life in Momostenango gave her a unique perspective on the fascination with time that has long characterized the Maya culture.

Tedlock is the author of a number of books including The Woman in a Shaman's Body; Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations; The Beautiful and the Dangerous: Encounters with the Zuni Indians. Her books explore cross-cultural understanding and communication of dreams, ethno-medicines, and aesthetics.

Guatemala

If you enjoyed this post, check out Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon/ And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.

NANCY DREW AUTHOR HAD DEEP ATTRACTION TO MEXICO AND THE MAYA WORLD

Who of us girls as young teens did not love Nancy Drew? The sleuth known for her voracious appetite for getting into trouble, being at the center of crime scenes and mysteries? Who taught us how to signal SOS with a tube of lipstick, break out a window using spike heels, and remember to always keep an overnight bag in the car, just in case?

CAROLYN KEENE? UMM, NO

For years I thought Carolyn Keene was Nancy's author but later discovered Keene was a pen name for Mildred Wirt Benson. The prolific Benson would write 135 of the first Nancy Drew detective tales that came to shape Nancy's "steely bravery," according to an article by Jennifer Fisher in "Zócalo." Benson's image of Nancy would create "the tenacious, bold and independent heroine we have come to know."

Mildred Wirt Benson aka Carolyn Keene

The real author of our favorite girl detective was an Iowa homegrown born in 1905, daughter of a country doctor, and the first student—male or female—to earn a masters degree in journalism from University of Iowa (later home to Iowa Writers Workshop). For 50 years Benson worked in journalism while penning famous mysteries, covering the courthouse beat, crime and corruption at "The Toledo Blade" and "The Toledo Times."

HEADING TO NYC

As a child, Benson was an avid reader of children's classics. Her first short story, "The Courtesy," appeared in "St. Nicholas," a children's magazine, and won her second place in a monthly contest. Finding Iowa too dull for a woman with an agenda, she ventured to NYC and landed a job with an icon in publishing, Edward Stratemeyer. In 1934, "Fortune Magazine" said of Stratemeyer, "As oil and gas has its Rockefeller, literature has its Stratemeyer."

Stratemeyer published The Bobbsey Twins and The Hardy Boys and famously hired ghost writers for a flat monthly fee. Benson's pen name remained a mystery until the 1970s when researchers discovered Benson was the Oz behind the curtain. During the Great Depression and WWII, parents were candid with their children, according to Fisher's article, and didn't hide life's gravities. Enter Nancy Drew, a new kind of heroine for a new age of young girls. Stratemeyer penned a three-page outline for Benson and depicted Nancy as an "up-to-date American girl at her best—bright, clever, resourceful, and full of energy."

TREATED AS AN EQUAL

In 1973 Benson wrote an essay about her famous heroine, stating Nancy was treated as an equal by her father and by many in law enforcement and she never gave up when the going got tough. Her spirit struck a chord. Nancy Drew personified "the dream image which exists within most teenagers," Benson said. According to Fisher's article, this 1930s teen remained culturally relevant for more than 80 years, even as young women's roles changed dramatically. Mothers and grandmothers passed the books down to their daughters. "Women still tell me how they identified with Nancy Drew and that Nancy Drew gave them confidence to be whatever they wanted to be," Benson said in an interview in 1999.

In 1928 she married an AP telegraph operator, Asa Wirt. In 1936, he was transferred to Chicago, and that same year, her daughter Margaret Joan Wirt was born. Neither change of location nor motherhood would deter her, however, from her writing, but things petered out with Stratemeyer as he tried out various other story lines. In 1940 Asa had a stroke. AP transferred him to Toledo, Ohio. He had another stroke in 1943 and permanently left his AP job. These were hard years for her family especially as WWII was raging. But for Mildred, this gave her an opportunity. "The Toledo Times" took on female reporters for the first time, under the stipulation that they knew once the war was over, their work days would be numbered. In 1947 Asa died from complications with another stroke. 

Her mother came to live with her and her daughter while Mildred reported for the newspaper. In 1950 she married Edward Benson, an editor at "The Toledo Times." These years were happy ones and they traveled to Puerto Rico and Central America where Mildred gained a fascination with the Maya ruins. In 1959, enroute to Puerto Rico, Benson died unexpectedly. 

The next years again were hard as she worked the beat at her newspaper gig. Another juvenile publisher asked if she would consider writing young adult books, but she felt the world had changed too much, and she decided to focus on her reporting, now at "The Toledo Blade."  

MAYA CONNECTION

As she always loved to travel and loved the Maya pyramids, she began to charter bush pilots to visit less accessible archeological digs. She canoed down the Usumacinta River to Yaxchilan on a three-day trip with local guides. "I used to hang my hammock in Maya temples, and once, when no other shelter was available, I hung it in a corn crib. Those were my adventurous days." 

Canoeing Down Usumacinta River

She traipsed through crocodile-infested rivers and hacked her way through jungles with a machete. She trained as a pilot in the 1960s and took solo trips to Guatemala. Benson was becoming her own best role model for the very Nancy Drew we all came to love. 

In a particularly harrowing Nancy Drew-like experience, she was even locked inside a room in Guatemala by locals who thought she knew too much about criminal activity in their town. Channeling Nancy, she overpowered one of her captors and escaped. "Like any good sleuth," reporter Fisher went on to explain, "she later returned to Guatemala to learn more about what had happened to her."

Mildred Wirt Benson in Skywriter

THE SMITHSONIAN

In the 1990s, twenty years after dedicated Nancy Drew lovers had discovered Keene's real name and ID'd Mildred Wirt Benson as Drew's creator, Benson donated a series of papers she'd written about her heroine, along with her trusty Underwood typewriter used for creating Nancy, to the Smithsonian where it sits to this day. And finally, the mystery author got public credit by her native Iowa in 1993 when the University of Iowa had a Nancy Drew Conference. That same year, she was named Person of the Week by ABC's Peter Jennings.

Mildred Wirt Benson's Trusty Underwood

Asked later if she would ever give up writing, Benson said, "The undertaker will have to pry me away from my typewriter." That's pretty much what happened. At 96, in 2002, she was sitting at her trusty Underwood when she died. 

Unintentional Feminist (From CBC.ca) 

If you enjoyed this post, check out Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon/ And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.

PROLONGED DROUGHT CAUSED THE COLLAPSE OF THE ANCIENT MAYA EXPERTS SAY

Chichen Itza

Raging wild fires, one hundred year floods, and thousand year droughts. No, I'm not talking about the Maya—not yet—but about current weather patterns that are becoming all too common. A view into the past may well help prepare us for our environmental future.

In the past month I've read three new articles on studies that link the collapse of the ancient Maya to drought—from Nature Communications, Phys-Org, and Nature World News. To be sure, this is not new news. Archeologists across the globe have long debated the reason behind the Maya collapse and have come up with numerous theories. Radical environment change rises to the top of the list, always accompanied by extenuating circumstances linked to lack of water and how societies cope in times of food scarcity because of this. 

The Maya's rise to greatness was compromised by the most severe drought of the past seven thousand years. It devastated the Yucatán Peninsula and grand Classic Era Maya cities collapsed in four phases of abandonment—spaced about 50 years apart—around 760, 810, 860, and 910 A.D.  

NOT LONERS

The ancient Maya were not alone in civilization collapse due to radical environmental changes, but because that collapse occurred within the past thousand years, we may relate to it more. Before the collapse of the ancient Maya, countless great civilizations fell: the Minoan Greeks, the Hittites, Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylon, and ancient Rome for starters. The list goes on and on.

Minoan Greek Art

Early on, in 1946, the noted archeologist and Maya scholar Tatiana Proskouriakoff commented on a climate disaster that could have imperiled the Maya. She put it like this, "Though it is conceivable that the disappearance of the population may have been a gradual process, the catastrophically sudden extinction of the arts can be explained only in the terms of some widespread and unforeseen disaster that afflicted most Maya cities soon after a.d. 800."

The last known inscription on a carved Maya stella was listed as 910 A.D. in the Peten. In prosperous times, stella recorded major events detailing triumphs of kings and defeats of enemies. From 900 A.D. on there was either nothing to report or no backing for it. The kings could not maintain prosperity and when rain didn't come and crop harvests were not large enough to feed the population, disillusionment set in.

Recent testing of skeletal remains at various Maya sites shows evidence of disease and malnutrition right across the board—in nobles and peasants. Slash and burn agriculture caused land exhaustion and deprived the ground of nutrients. As the population grew, the peasants increased intensive farming techniques in an attempt to feed the masses. Their production system became over-burdened. Not enough food to go around.

LACK OF RAIN

And influential Maya archeologist, scholar, and author Michael D. Coe, in The Maya, Eighth Edition, Places and People, his last in the series, The Maya, writes researchers discovered a major drought that corresponded to the lapse between the early and late classic periods—a time in which no new stella (large limestone slabs placed in front of pyramid temples) were erected and in which earlier stella had been defaced. Defacing stella can be compared to spray painting graffiti on buildings today, showing a lack of respect for authority, I wrote in Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy.

Maya Carving at Palenque

In accordance with the environmental dilemma, I read an article on Mayapan, a prominent Post-Classic Maya city in the northwest Yucatán Peninsula, by Marilyn Masson. Posted in "Nature Communications," Masson, Principal Investigator for the Proyecto Economic de Mayapan, wrote that prolonged drought likely fueled civil conflict and its eventual collapse. So great was the city that it was considered the ancient capital of the Maya on the Yucatán Peninsula in the 13th century.

MAYAPAN

Mayapan (By En-Yucatán)

A latecomer to the pantheon of great Maya cities, Mayapan emerged as a regional capital on the Peninsula from the 13th to 15th centuries, after the demise of Chichen Itza. With a population of 20,000, it collapsed and was abandoned after a rival political faction, the Xiu, massacred the powerful Cocom family that ruled Mayapan. Historical records date the collapse between 1441 and 1461. But there's new evidence, thanks to Masson, professor and chair at University of Albany's Department of Anthropology, who co-authored the study which was assisted by a team of researchers. They studied historical documents for records of violence and examined human remains from the area and time period, looking for signs of traumatic injury.

Masson and her team found shallow mass graves and evidence of brutal massacre at monuments and structures across the city. "Some were laid out with knives in their pelvis and rib cages, others were chopped up and burned," she said. "Not only did they smash and burn the bodies but they also smashed and burned the effigies of their gods. It's a form of double desecration, basically." 

ADVANCED RADIOCARBON DATING TECHNOLOGY

Professor Douglas Bennett, University of California/Santa Barbara anthropolgy department, lead study on Masson's team, had new information to add. He dated the skeletons using accelerator mass spectrometry, an advanced radiocarbon dating technology, and found they dated 50 to 100 years earlier than the city's supposed mid-15th century downfall. 

Archeologists at Work

Plenty of ethno-historical records exist to support the city's violent downfall around 1458, said Masson. But the new evidence, thanks to Bennett's advanced radiocarbon dating tech, puts the evidence of massacre 100 years earlier. Combined with climate data that the Peninsula experienced prolonged drought around that time, the team began to suspect environmental factors may have played a major role in the desertion of the site along with the violent chaos that preceded that desertion.

RAIN AND MAIZE CROPS

The Maya depended heavily on rain-fed maize but lacked any way to store grain longer than a year due to the humid jungle climate. The impacts of rainfall levels on food production are believed to be linked to human migration, population decline, warfare, and shifts in political power, the study states.

"It's not that droughts cause social conflict but they create the conditions whereby violence can occur," Masson said.

WARS ENSUE

Location of Mayapan (By ResearchGate)

The study suggests the Xiu, who launched the fatal attacks on the Cocom of Mayapan, used the droughts and ensuing famines to foment unrest and rebellion that led to the mass deaths and the migration from Mayapan as early as the 1300s.

Said Masson, "I think the lesson is that hardship can become politicized in the worst kind of way. It creates opportunities for ruthlessness and can cause people to turn on one another violently."

It's hard to not compare our present news cycles with these past events.

Following this period of drought and unrest however, Mayapan bounced back briefly thanks to healthy rainfall levels around 1400.  "It was able to bend pretty well and bounce back before the droughts returned in the 1420s, but it was too soon," Masson said. "They didn't have time to recover and the tensions were still there. The city's government just couldn't survive another bout like that. But it almost did."

According to Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, it's amazing how many cultures do collapse and one of history's disturbing facts is that collapse is caused by the destruction of the natural resources on which these cultures depend. The Anasazi, Easter Islanders, the kingdom of Angkor Wat in Cambodia...and the Maya. Declines of societies, he wrote, swiftly follow their peaks.

ON THE TAIL OF CHICHEN ITZA

Chichen Itza 

Mayapan rose to power in the footsteps of the decline of mighty Chichen Itza and after the great city-states of the south such as Tikal and Calakmul had gone into steep decline. During the late Postclassic Era (1250-1450 A.D.) Mayapan was the cultural and political center of the waning Maya civilization and had great influence upon smaller city states surrounding it. The sprawling complex spreads over four square kilometers and houses four thousand buildings. The ruins include temples, palaces and ceremonial centers, with architectural influence in the style of Chichen Itza. 

Tikal in Guatemala (ByLivescience.com)

Focusing on the present, as food insecurity, social unrest, and drought-driven migration in parts of the modern world continue to be of great concern, Masson said there are lessons to be learned in how other previous empires handled environmental hardships.

FAMINE OF ONE RABBIT

Pre-Spanish conquest, the Aztecs survived the infamous Famine of One Rabbit fueled by a catastrophic drought in 1454. The emperor emptied out the food storehouses from the capital to feed the people and when that ran out, he encouraged them to flee. Many sold themselves into slavery on the Gulf Coast where conditions were better but eventually bought their way out and returned to the capital, and the empire emerged stronger than ever. This strategy enacted by the Aztec imperial regime, said Masson, is likely what allowed for their recovery.

Her conclusion was that inspite of drought, civil conflict, institutional failure, and military conflict, a resilient network of small Maya states persisted that were encountered by Europeans in the early 16th century. (Just in time to be met, ironically, by the Spanish invasion).

HISTORY REPEATS?

In the face of present day climate change, these complexities and challenges faced by great Mexico and Central American civilizations are important as todays's world evaluates the potential success or failure of modern state institutions designed to maintain order and peace in the face of future climate change. Although Mayapan is a tale of only one city, correlations to present day world problems make the study of Mayapan extremely relevant now.

Climate change and its effects are real.

Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy

                                             by Jeanine Kitchel on Amazon

If you enjoyed this post, check out Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon. And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.