Anabel Ford Ph.D. Email & Phone Number

Santa Barbara, California

President of a non profit based in the conservation community of Santa Barbara, California, ESP~Maya encourages the visionary work at El Pilar, where indigenous practices demonstrate there are alternative paths to prosperity and conservation. We draw on the wisdom of forest-gardeners and community conservationists in the Maya forest. To perpetuate the ancient tradition of forest gardeners and “archaeology under the canopy” through * environmental and cultural sustainability * economic viability * research and education * analysis of how ancient practices apply in modern times

The Duke of Edinburgh Awards of Belize encourages youth to challenge themselves -- I am on the board to engage the challenges of field work at El Pilar.

University Of California Santa Barbara

Anabel Ford is the Director of an interdisciplinary collective of researchers on the UCSB campus, the MesoAmerican Research Center. The Center has integrated social science research in the Mesoamerican region. Projects have range from the impact of volcanoes in ancient times to the implications of nature in the Pre-Columbian art. The research brings together partners from such diverse disciplines as geology, engineering, agriculture, and biology to address problems that are centered in the social sciences. Scholars from the US, Europe, and Mesoamerica have visited UCSB in the context of collaborative research and as speakers on Mesoamerican themes.

Ucsb

Anabel Ford is the Director of the Mesoamerican Research Center at the University of California at Santa Barbara, as well as President of the nonprofit organization Exploring Solutions Past (ESP~Maya). She is a distinguished Maya archaeologist who has decoded the ancient Maya landscape. Her discovery of the ancient Maya city center of El Pilar on the contemporary border of Belize and Guatemala promises to be the first cultural and natural Peace Park of the world. Her passion for the common people of the ancient Maya together with contemporary international politics, conservation and development, and interdisciplinary research has inspired the vision of Archaeology Under the Canopy. With more that thirty years of field experience and her broadly inquisitive mind, she sees the Maya forest as a garden created by the ingenious Maya. Her work, now internationally acclaimed, brings to the fore the importance of exploring solutions past.