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

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.