Revisiting the Role of Water Control in the Prehispanic Basin of Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Water control likely was essential for reliable agricultural production in much of the Basin of Mexico over centuries of Prehispanic occupation. Deborah Nichols recognized this throughout her remarkable career, beginning with her doctoral research in the late 1970s but continuing through several studies of irrigation and ancient economies in different parts of the region. This paper builds upon the research of Nichols and others on water control in the Prehispanic basin, highlighting an analysis of settlement pattern data that identifies the likely widespread presence of irrigation in much of the region. It also explores climatic variability and challenges to water control in the basin based on geology, hydrology, and seasonal patterns of rainfall to explore both the importance of manipulating water and the difficulty in doing so over centuries of occupation. The paper identifies remaining opportunities to examine Prehispanic water control in the Basin of Mexico in a landscape where urban sprawl and commercial crop production have compromised much of the archaeological record. It concludes by exploring implications for widespread water control on Preshispanic sociocultural evolution and economy in a region that hosted large human occupations and complex societies for more than two millennia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50017