The Land and Water Revisited Project

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 1961, archaeologist William T. Sanders traveled to México’s Teotihuacan Valley to film a documentary based on his 1957 Harvard dissertation. The film, Land and Water: An Ecological Study of the Teotihuacan Valley of México, provides an invaluable snapshot of agricultural and land-use practices in the area just prior to the urban explosion of México City. Sanders documented peasant farmers using masonry dams, canals, and splash irrigation; women and children washing clothes at a nearby spring; and the many uses of the native maguey plant. Cultural conservation was not the intention of the original film, but it is a sobering reminder of how quickly traditional landscapes and cultural adaptations vanish when sustainability is ignored. The Land and Water Revisited Project consists of 1) a look at what the original film captured; 2) a comparison of the old footage with the valley today; and 3) how researchers are currently studying the effects of urbanism in the Teotihuacan Valley. In the end, the film will be a modern and tangible view of the effects of unchecked and unregulated growth. Here we present the results of our 2018/2019 field seasons.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24174