100th Anniversary Lecture with Tim Beach

Enjoy a free catered lunch, a presentation by alum Tim Beach (PhD '89) with the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin, and conversation with students, staff, and faculty from the geography, environment & society department. Lunch will be available starting at 12:30 p.m. and Dr. Beach will present from 1 to 2 p.m.. RSVP by Monday, September 22 at noon.

The Anthropic Neotropics: Reflections on a Century of Geography from the Prairie Peninsula to the Yucatán Peninsula

Research on the Neotropical Forests and their anthropogenic connections is expanding and evolving with more lidar studies anchored in field and lab research. In this talk, Beach will focus here on one example of ancient landesque capital or ‘nature-based solution’: ancient wetland agroecosystems. This work grew from a few studies in the 1960s around small areas of ancient canals that geographers observed from planes into a handful of studies by the 1990s. Debate about the nature, origins, chronology, and importance of wetland complexes started with the first studies but research declined to a few studies again in the 2000s as many doubts arose.  A few studies bridged those of the 2000s to the advent of widespread Lidar, when research on wetlands expanded in the late 2010s and field verification showed large areas of canal systems in the perennially and even seasonally wet regions of the Maya Lowlands. 

This presentation covers Maya wetland agriculture with comparisons to other neotropical wetland field systems in terms of the history of research, environments of construction and formation, types of wetland patterns, food production, areal extents, global implications, and future directions. Since Maya wetland research is expanding because Lidar imagery indicates more and more field systems, the field will re-evolve over the next decade as more projects take new views. Here he will review the positive and negative findings such as controversies about which features are natural, cultural, or some combination thereof, and how, when, and why they functioned.

About the Speaker

Dr. Timothy Beach is an internationally recognized leader in geoarchaeology, wetlands, agroecosystems, soils, and geomorphology, through hundreds of peer-reviewed publications and invited lectures from Beijing to the Vatican. His research—deriving from his soils lab at UT Austin and field sites around the world including Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, Turkey, Italy, Peru, Iceland, and the US Corn Belt—has substantially elevated our understanding of wetlands, geomorphology, human interactions with soils, and global change, especially relating to the Maya world. Beach is recognized with major awards from five disciplines and universities, including the G.K. Gilbert Award and Ellen Mosely-Thompson Paper of the Year Awards from the American Association of Geographers (AAG), the Kirk Bryan Award from the Geological Society of America (GSA), the Carl O. Sauer Distinguished Scholarship Award from the Conference of Latin American Geography (CLAG), and the Fryxell Award from the Society for American Archaeology (SAA). 

Beach also received fellowships from The Guggenheim and Dumbarton Oaks and is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, The Geological Society of America (GSA), and the American Association of Geographers (AAG). Since 2014 Beach has been the C.B. Smith Centennial Chair in U.S.-Mexico Relations and directed the Soils and Geoarchaeology Labs at UT Austin. Prior to UT Austin, he held the Cinco Hermanos Chair at Georgetown University, where he won the University’s Distinguished Research Award and the School of Foreign Service Professor of the Year Teaching Award.