The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This year (2019) marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of the seminal work by William Sanders, Jeffrey Parsons, and Robert Santley, The Basin of Mexico: Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization. The seminal nature of the book lies in its innovative approaches to understand the linkages between demographic growth, settlement location, social and political complexity, and both anthropogenic and nonhuman induced environmental processes. The paradigms and approaches that the book proposed framed the way archaeologists and other scientists have approached the evolution of society and environment is approached in the Basin of Mexico. This symposium aims at bringing together archaeologists and scientists devoted to the study of paleoenvironments to discuss the book’s legacy and to share subsequent and recent advances in the understanding of the processes that The Basin of Mexico tackled at its time. It intends to build on the multi-disciplinary spirit of the book to bring together archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and scholars working on environmental reconstructions of the basin. We also encourage researchers whose scope of study has sought to go even deeper into the past and to more recent periods in the area’s history.

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-14 of 14)

  • Documents (14)

Documents
  • Basin Enterprise: the Next Generations (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Fournier. Cynthia Otis Charlton.

    This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Basin of Mexico book elucidated for a broader audience the work and philosophy of William Sanders and his first generation of collaborators and students and has influenced many generations of Mesoamerican scholars since. We draw on the broad studies of long-term work carried out...

  • "The Basin of Mexico: Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization" y nuestras excavaciones en el Sur de la Cuenca de Mexico (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mari Carmen Serra Puche.

    This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cuando llegó a nosotros el contenido The Basin of Mexico: Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization se nos abrió un horizonte nuevo para explorar una región fundamental de nuestro patrimonio arqueológico como es el sur de la cuenca de México. Guiados por las enseñanzas...

  • The Evolution of a Revolution: "The Basin of Mexico: Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization." (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Deborah Nichols.

    This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Before the 1960s, books about ancient urbanism and cities often included no references to the prehispanic Americas. V. Gordon Childe’s "urban revolution" was conceived as a phenomenon of the "Old World" as the "cradle of cradle of civilization." Landmark projects in Central Mexico:...

  • From Tlacolol to Metepantle: A Reappraisal of the Antiquity of the Agricultural Niches of the Central Mexican Symbiotic Region (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabel Rodríguez López. Aleksander Borejsza.

    This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the benefit of a culture-ecological mindset and thousands of man-hours spent in the then still extensive countryside of the Basin of Mexico, The Book devoted many pages to the discussion of traditional farming techniques, potential maize yields, and abandoned agricultural...

  • Household Lake Exploitation and Aquatic Lifeways in Pre-Aztec Central Mexico (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin De Lucia.

    This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lake exploitation was central to ways of life and culture in the Basin of Mexico. Evidence of lake exploitation, however, is often difficult to document archaeologically. Thus, discussions of production and exchange in pre-Aztec times usually focus on more durable goods such as...

  • In the Beginning: TVP and TMP -- Reflections on the Classic Teotihuacan Period Survey in the Teotihuacan Valley, 1962-1964 (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Kolb.

    This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In June 1960, Eric Wolf organized an NSF-sponsored conference of 11 American and Mexican archaeologists held at the University of Chicago to evaluate the status of previous anthropological studies focusing on the Basin of Mexico and to coordinate future research. This led to two...

  • Interaction Between the Basin of Mexico and West Mexico In the Prehispanic Era (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Dan Healan.

    This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nearly fifty years ago Paul Tolstoy and David Grove argued that a major component of the so-called Tlatilco complex was West Mexican in origin, raising awareness of substantial interaction between the Basin of Mexico and an area then considered largely peripheral to Mesoamerica....

  • Long and short-term lacustrine and fluviolacustrine dynamics in relation to prehistoric settlements: The case of Lake Texcoco (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Cordova.

    This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite the existence of archaeological data from surface surveys and excavations, the extent and dynamics of the lake and its shores over time are poorly known. Archaeological works often refer to a model of distribution of the Basin of Mexico’s lakes that is to a large extent fixed...

  • Paleoindians from the Basin of Mexico: How do they fit in the early peopling of the Americas? (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Silvia Gonzalez. Samuel Rennie. David Huddart.

    This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Basin of Mexico is important in the debate on the early peopling of the Americas because several well preserved Paleoindian/Preceramic individuals have been found in the lake sediments/volcanic deposits surrounding the Late Pleistocene Lake. They include: Peñon Woman III,...

  • Prehispanic chinampas at El Japón, Xochimilco: Structure and Chronology (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Guillermo Acosta-Ochoa. Emily McClung de Tapia. Laura Beramendi-Orosco. Diana Martinez-Yrizar. Galia Gonzalez-Hernandez.

    This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Japón in San Gregorio Atlapulco, Xochimilco (Mexico City) was a Postclassic-Early Colonial chinampa community, previously reported and partially surveyed by Lechuga (1977), Parsons et al. (1982, 1985), Ávila López (1995) and González (1996). In 2013, investigators from the...

  • The role of pedogenesis in palaeosols of Mexico basin and its implication in the paleoenvironmental reconstruction (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Solleiro-Rebolledo. Georgina Ibarra. Sergey Sedov.

    This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most of the paleoenvironmental information for the Basin of Mexico for the basin comes from sedimentary proxies, which unfortunately are incomplete for the terminal Pleistocene and the Holocene. In this paper, we present a temporal and spatial reconstruction of past soil cover in the...

  • Slow violence and environmental inequality in the Valley of Mexico (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only John K. Millhauser.

    This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Valley of Mexico project was unprecedented in its documentation of demographic, social, and environmental processes over millennia. Nevertheless, its findings are limited because participants did not systematically collect archaeological data about settlements after the Spanish...

  • Twentieth century settlement patterns in the Basin of Mexico: In search of Pre-Colombian roots for regional demography and land use (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Larry Gorenflo.

    This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological settlement pattern surveys in the Basin of Mexico during the 1960s and 70s capitalized on cultural behavior that seemed to share important connections with the Pre-Columbian past. The labor-intensive agricultural economy that dominated the region throughout much of the...

  • Urban growth and land use at Chicoloapan, an Epiclassic town in the southern Basin of Mexico (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Clayton. Michelle Elliott.

    This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The extensive surveys of the 1960s that culminated in Sanders, Parsons, and Santley’s pivotal 1979 volume put numerous archaeological sites on the map and advanced knowledge of the changing sociopolitical landscape of the Basin of Mexico through time. Data resulting from this work,...