From Tlacolol to Metepantle: A Reappraisal of the Antiquity of the Agricultural Niches of the Central Mexican Symbiotic Region

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.

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 features. Terraced slopes, irrigation networks, and chinampas, the triad of intensive techniques identified by Sanders in 1956 as distinctive of his Central Mexican Symbiotic Region, were discussed in this order, one of increasing technological sophistication, labor investment, and yield. The Book theorized that their adoption roughly followed this order on a regional scale, but acknowledged the pitfalls of dating unexcavated features by association with surface sherd scatters. Stratigraphically-constrained contexts explored in the last forty years in the Basin, Puebla-Tlaxcala, Morelos, and the Toluca Valley put us on a firmer footing in reconstructing the order of infilling of the different agricultural niches. They confirmed the existence of swiddening and early development of irrigation in the Formative but failed to uncover widespread evidence of terracing or wetland agriculture prior to the Postclassic. Aztec agriculture now looks less like the final flourishing of millennia-old traditions and more like a singular historical achievement in the face of adversity posed by inherited land degradation.

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): 23352