The Use of Land and Water Resources in the Past and Present Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico

The Use of Land and Water Resources in the Past and Present Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico
Author: Anne V. T. Kirkby
Publisher: U OF M MUSEUM ANTHRO ARCHAEOLOGY
Total Pages: 204
Release: 1973-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 194909846X

In the first volume of a series on Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Valley of Oaxaca, Anne V. T. Kirkby investigated the agricultural production in the valley. With land-use data gathered at the time of her study (the 1960s), she created population and distribution models to help archaeologists interpret prehistoric settlement patterns in the region.

The Keepers of Water and Earth

The Keepers of Water and Earth
Author: Kjell I. Enge
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2014-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 029275597X

Agrarian reforms transformed the Mexican countryside in the late twentieth century but without, in many cases, altering fundamental power relationships. This study of the Tehuacán Valley in the state of Puebla highlights different strategies to manipulate the local implementation of federal government programs. With their very differing successes in the struggle to regain and maintain control of land and water rights, these strategies raise important questions about the meaning of the phrase "locally controlled development." Because Mexico is dependent on irrigation for 45 percent of its cash crop production, national policy has focused on developing vast government controlled and financed irrigation systems. In the Tehuacán Valley, however, the inhabitants have developed a complex irrigation system without government aid or supervision. Yet, in contrast to most parts of Mexico, water rights can be bought and sold as a commodity, leading to accumulation, stratification, and emergence of a regional elite whose power is based on ownership of land and water. The analysis provides an important contribution to the understanding of local control. The findings of this study will be important to a wide audience involved in the study of irrigation, local agricultural systems, and the interplay between local power structures and the national government in developing countries. The book also presents unique material on gravity-fed, horizontal wells, known as qanat in the Middle East, which had been unknown in the literature on Latin America before this book.

Maize

Maize
Author: Duccio Bonavia
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 605
Release: 2013-05-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1139619942

This book examines one of the thorniest problems of ancient American archaeology: the origins and domestication of maize. Using a variety of scientific techniques, Duccio Bonavia explores the development of maize, its adaptation to varying climates and its fundamental role in ancient American cultures. An appendix (by Alexander Grobman) provides the first-ever comprehensive compilation of maize genetic data, correlating this data with the archaeological evidence presented throughout the book. This book provides a unique interpretation of questions of dating and evolution, supported by extensive data, following the spread of maize from South to North America and eventually to Europe and beyond.

The Early Mesoamerican Village

The Early Mesoamerican Village
Author: Kent V Flannery
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2019-10-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1315418673

One of the classic works of archaeology, The Early Mesoamerican Village was among the first studies to fully embrace the processual movement of the 1970s. Dancing around an ongoing dialogue on methods and goals between the Real Mesoamerican Archaeologist, the Great Synthesizer, and the Skeptical Graduate Student, it is both a seminal tract on scientific method in archaeology and a series of studies on formative Mesoamerica. It critically evaluates techniques for excavation, sampling of sites and regions, and stylistic analysis, as well as such theoretical factors of explanation as population pressure, trade, and religion and launched similar studies for several later generations of archaeologists. A new Foreword by Jeremy Sabloff is featured in this edition.

Seeking a Richer Harvest

Seeking a Richer Harvest
Author: Tina Thurston
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2006-11-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0387327622

Subsistence intensification, innovation and change have long figured prominently in explanations for the development of social complexity among foragers and horticulturalists. This set of global case studies re-examines the ‘subsistence question’ in light of recent research. It contrasts traditional approaches with recent archaeological research that presents human driven strategies for power, prestige, and status as causes of subsistence intensification.

Farming, Hunting, and Fishing in the Olmec World

Farming, Hunting, and Fishing in the Olmec World
Author: Amber M. VanDerwarker
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0292773781

The Olmec who anciently inhabited Mexico's southern Gulf Coast organized their once-egalitarian society into chiefdoms during the Formative period (1400 BC to AD 300). This increase in political complexity coincided with the development of village agriculture, which has led scholars to theorize that agricultural surpluses gave aspiring Olmec leaders control over vital resources and thus a power base on which to build authority and exact tribute. In this book, Amber VanDerwarker conducts the first multidisciplinary analysis of subsistence patterns at two Olmec settlements to offer a fuller understanding of how the development of political complexity was tied to both agricultural practices and environmental factors. She uses plant and animal remains, as well as isotopic data, to trace the intensification of maize agriculture during the Late Formative period. She also examines how volcanic eruptions in the region affected subsistence practices and settlement patterns. Through these multiple sets of data, VanDerwarker presents convincing evidence that Olmec and epi-Olmec lifeways of farming, hunting, and fishing were driven by both political and environmental pressures and that the rise of institutionalized leadership must be understood within the ecological context in which it occurred.

Feeding Chilapa

Feeding Chilapa
Author: Chris Kyle
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2014-10-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0806185872

How industrialization undid a region in Mexico Scholars once treated regions as fundamental units of social organization, influencing the affairs of communities and households. Chris Kyle renews that perspective by charting the history of a preindustrial region in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. Examining the city of Chilapa and its surrounding countryside, he documents a region’s initial formation, subsequent evolution, and ultimate dissolution, brought about by the forces of industrialization. Feeding Chilapa traces the emergence of Chilapa as a textile center in the late eighteenth century, the reorganization of the city’s hinterland in the mid-nineteenth century, and the ultimate dissolution of the region in the mid-twentieth century. When improved transportation enabled the movement of cheap goods over long distances, subsistence and artisanal production declined or disappeared, and labor relations, settlement geography, and migration patterns were transformed. Kyle offers a new perspective on the immigration debate, exploring the factors that lead rural citizens to leave economically depressed regions for larger Mexican cities, border industries, or the United States. Written to be accessible to undergraduates, this volume offers a counterpoint to traditional community-based studies and our understanding of change in Latin America. Chris Kyle is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and author of numerous scholarly articles on rural Mexico.

Social Adaptation to Food Stress

Social Adaptation to Food Stress
Author: Paul E. Minnis
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 1985-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226530248

Combining anthropology, archeology, and evolutionary theory, Paul E. Minnis develops a model of how tribal societies deal with severe food shortages. While focusing on the prehistory of the Rio Mimbres region of New Mexico, he provides comparative data from the Fringe Enga of New Guinea, the Tikopia of Tikopia Island, and the Gwembe Tonga of South Africa. Minnis proposes that, faced with the threat of food shortages, nonstratified societies survive by employing a series of responses that are increasingly effective but also are increasingly costly and demand increasingly larger cooperative efforts. The model Minnis develops allows him to infer, from evidence of such factors as population size, resource productivity, and climate change, the occurrence of food crises in the past. Using the Classic Mimbres society as a test case, he summarizes the regional archeological sequence and analyzes the effects of environmental fluctuations on economic and social organization. He concludes that the responses of the Mimbres people to their burgeoning population were inadequate to prevent the collapse of the society in the late twelfth century. In its illumination of the general issue of responses to food shortages, Social Adaptation to Food Stress will interest not only archeologists but also those concerned with current food shortages in the Third World. Cultural ecologists and human geographers will be able to derive a wealth of ideas, methods, and data from Minnis's work.

Soils, Climate and Society

Soils, Climate and Society
Author: John D. Wingard
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2013-03-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1607322137

Much recent archaeological research focuses on social forces as the impetus for cultural change. Soils, Climate and Society, however, focuses on the complex relationship between human populations and the physical environment, particularly the land--the foundation of agricultural production and, by extension, of agricultural peoples. The volume traces the origins of agriculture, the transition to agrarian societies, the sociocultural implications of agriculture, agriculture's effects on population, and the theory of carrying capacity, considering the relation of agriculture to the profound social changes that it wrought in the New World. Soil science plays a significant, though varied, role in each case study, and is the common component of each analysis. Soil chemistry is also of particular importance to several of the studies, as it determines the amount of food that can be produced in a particular soil and the effects of occupation or cultivation on that soil, thus having consequences for future cultivators. Soils, Climate and Society demonstrates that renewed investigation of agricultural production and demography can answer questions about the past, as well as stimulate further research. It will be of interest to scholars of archaeology, historical ecology and geography, and agricultural history.