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 encounter of the ancient Maya city center of El Pilar on the contemporary divide 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 decades 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.