An NSF Broader Impact Story in the Teotihuacan Valley of Mexico: 60 Years in the Making

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Innovations and Transformations in Mesoamerican Research: Recent and Revised Insights of Ancestral Lifeways" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For many, the “broader impact” of a grant proposal frequently involves outcomes that will happen somewhere between immediately and the next five years. Yet, the scope of the broader impact is often unexpected, unknown, and/or will take place many decades later. In 1960, when Eric Wolf received a small grant from NSF to support a conference on the Basin of Mexico, no one attending could have foreseen the profusion of quality research, student training, and community involvement that would take place in the coming years that vastly increased our understanding of the past (e.g., Armillas, Coe, Millon, Palerm, and Sanders). The Land and Water Revisited (LWR) documentary project is but another example of the broader impact of Wolf’s 1960 conference. LWR is a remake of Bill Sanders’s 1962 documentary, “Land and Water,” filmed during the second season of his 15-year Basin of Mexico Survey Project. The original film provides an invaluable snapshot of agricultural and land-use practices in the area just prior to the urban explosion of Mexico City. This poster details the personal, emotional, and broader impacts the LWR film project has had on several families in the Teotihuacan Valley.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Innovations and Transformations in Mesoamerican Research: Recent and Revised Insights of Ancestral Lifeways   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35709.0