Smallholders in the Maya Lowlands: Homage to a Garden Variety Ethnographer K. Anne Pyburn 1 Ancient Maya subsistence practices and their relation to the rise and decline of Maya civilization have long been the subject of archaeological debate. Tra- ditionally Mayanists correlate subsistence strategy with political economy ‚ pos- iting that a change in one must correspond to a change in the other. Since smallholders ‚ as defined by Netting ‚ can exist within a variety of political and economic systems‚ their ubiquity in the Maya Lowlands may explain why household studies often fail to detect political or economic change at a macro level. The absence of smallholders‚ however ‚ may correlate with the depopula- tion of many Maya cities at the end of the ninth century. KEY WORDS: Maya; agriculture; collapse; civilization; smallholders. There is no shared culture of meanings among the many disparate groups of small- holders‚ but the quest for functionally meaningful and coherent systems that tran- scend the distinctions of societies and regions is also part of the anthropological calling. —Robert McC. Netting‚ 1993 INTRODUCTION In 1977‚ Robert Netting proposed a model for the Prehispanic inten- sification of agriculture in the Maya Lowlands that spurred a change in the way Mayanists viewed tropical agriculture . Before his article ‚ most mod- els of ancient Maya subsistence still began with the assumption that ancient Maya farmers practiced nothing but swidden (Hammond‚ 1978) ‚ which was by definition an extensive strategy. The problem for the swidden model was that‚ as archaeological evidence grew in quantity and quality‚ it became Human Ecology ‚ Vol. 26‚ No. 2‚ 1998 267 0300-7839/98/0600-0267 $15.00/0 Ó 1998 Plenum Publishing Corporation 1 Department of Anthropology‚ Indiana University‚ Student Building 242 ‚ Bloomington‚ Indiana 47405.