Slow violence and environmental inequality in the Valley of Mexico

Summary

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 Conquest. Although the Conquest was an unprecedented event, its aftermath was shaped by long-term process with deep historical roots. This paper reexamines the value of project data to understand the post-Conquest world in light of 'slow violence,' a term that Rob Nixon coined to call out the temporal and environmental dimensions of structural violence. If structural violence denotes covert and sanctioned inequality, slow violence denotes gradual and accretive changes to structures of violence, especially the unequal consequences of environmental degradation. This paper asks to what extent the project’s data document pre-Conquest processes of slow violence and how these processes affected the aftermath of the Conquest. For answers, I compare pre-Conquest trends in settlement patterns, resource exploitation, and environmental change with evidence of the persistence of settlements after the Conquest. In so doing, I find that even decades after the completion of the Valley of Mexico project, the data remain vital as empirical evidence against with which new theories can be evaluated.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24216