The result was a scientific finding of major importance, recovered under conditions that tested everyone involved, documented in a way that preserved the maximum possible information, and published in a form that the international scientific community could evaluate and build on.

The World She Inhabited

The Yucatán Peninsula approximately twelve thousand to thirteen thousand years ago was not the jungle-draped landscape of the Classic Maya period.

It was not the landscape of any period of dense human settlement and intensive agriculture.

It was a landscape in ecological transition — the end of the Pleistocene, when the cooler, somewhat drier conditions of the Ice Age were giving way to the warmer, wetter climate of the Holocene.

The vegetation of the Yucatán at this period was probably more open than the dense tropical forest of later millennia — more grassland, more scrub, more of the kind of mosaic environment in which large herbivores like gomphotheres and ground sloths could thrive.