I don´t do mountains: regional survey in the Tequila valleys of Jalisco

Author(s): Verenice Heredia Espinoza

Year: 2015

Summary

Steve Kowalewski has created the largest full-coverage survey block in the entire world. He has championed survey because of the information it provides on regional and macro-regional processes. This can only be done by walking transect after transect covering large amounts of land. There is neither magic nor trick; it only takes hard work. Steve´s leadership and teachings on survey methods have benefited even the most peripheral areas of Mesoamerica. Based on the methods I learned from Steve, I implemented a full-coverage regional survey in the Tequila valleys of West Mexico covering nearly 1000km2, assembling an important corpus of data. The implementation of full-coverage survey has enhanced our understanding on diverse anthropological problems such as increasing social complexity, the dramatic sociopolitical changes at the end of the Classic period and how these changes are linked to larger macro regional processes. Finally, the Postclassic, a key period that had been neglected, is now beginning to be understood. The survey has opened thousands of years of occupation that can and are contributing to the development of anthropological theory on early states, and it has provided a diachronic, dynamic perspective on the pre-Hispanic history of the valleys (long dureée).

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Cite this Record

I don´t do mountains: regional survey in the Tequila valleys of Jalisco. Verenice Heredia Espinoza. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 395859)

Keywords

Geographic Keywords
Mesoamerica

Spatial Coverage

min long: -107.271; min lat: 12.383 ; max long: -86.353; max lat: 23.08 ;