With LIDAR, you know where the swamps and the uplands are, you can start seeing where you could put emphasis and where you don’t have to. And then we could say how great it really is. LIDAR is terrific, but if we’re going to be sure we know something, we have to compare what we see on LIDAR with the boots on the ground. I’m interested in land use, in finding out what proportion of the house sites we’re capturing versus what the LIDAR can see. I feel like when I go out in the field, our go-to points are probably in the 80-percent range of accuracy, but we find things that you wouldn’t be able to see with LIDAR. We’ve discovered things and we have rejected things from LIDAR. I’m doing a project with a geospatial engineer this season I’ve surveyed 14 square kilometers and we have targeted what I call go-to points in that area to compare with the LIDAR mapping. If I were to do a topographic map with the scale of LIDAR, it would take me years. LIDAR is no magic wand, but it provides the entire topography. I had to convince them even that some of my samples were not mud, that it was really pottery, it had been fired. There was no evidence of abrasion, no indication of human manipulation, and the sorting and size were consistent with wind distribution. It looked like fresh ash embedded in the pottery, and tons of it. When I worked with volcanologists and did petrography on thin sections of the sherds, the volcanologists were just floored, because to them it looked like the sherds had captured a contemporary airfall of volcanic ash. The topic resurfaced in the 1980s with my work and the work of others. Ancient Maya ash-tempered pottery was first recognized in 1937, but ash temper was simply used as a chronological marker with no reflection on the source. The Maya lowlands is hundreds of kilometers away from fresh volcanic sources. I did not discover volcanic ash in Maya pottery, but I discovered what it meant to geologists. What have you uncovered about the source of volcanic ash in Maya pottery? This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Ford spoke about her developing understanding of this Maya site with American Scientist editor in chief Fenella Saunders. As a doctoral student, Ford received a Sigma Xi GIAR grant that she used to study the volcanic ash composition of Maya pottery. El Pilar is now designated as an archaeological reserve and a cultural monument, and Ford has helped to found the El Pilar forest garden network to preserve Indigenous knowledge of Maya land management. Indeed, in addition to the extant structures, Ford has focused on preserving the Maya’s carefully tailored forest ecology practices that supplied them with food and building materials. Ford is a proponent of what she calls “Archaeology Under the Canopy,” excavating the site while engaging local Indigenous people, many of whom are Maya descendants, for their knowledge of what materials would have been used to build houses, and what plants would thrive there. El Pilar was filled with plazas, temples, and palaces, which were built from 800 BC to 1000 AD. ![]() Learn more about our Sustainable Ranching Initiative.Anabel Ford first encountered the ancient Maya settlement of El Pilar, which straddles the border between Guatemala and Belize, in 1983, and she has been working at the site ever since. The Sustainable Ranching Initiative, started in 2011, works with landowners, corporations, industry-groups, NGOs, and government agencies to: protect lands from grassland conversion, improve management on working lands, and restore cropland or degraded lands back to native grassland. ![]() Thus, WWF’s conservation strategies work to address issues ranchers are facing that may impact grassland conservation. Even with the best intentions to maintain grassland productivity, tradeoffs and the financial bottom line are ever-present considerations. Ranchers in the NGP today face difficult choices in an increasingly complex environment, including changing crop technologies, financial pressures, diverse consumer dietary preferences, and uncertainty about future agricultural prices and markets. WWF works with ranchers and communities to identify and implement conservation strategies that maintain grasslands and improve rural livelihoods.
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