Gardens of Prehistory: The Archaeology of Settlement Agriculture in Greater Mesoamerica

2. Factors Affecting Settlement Agriculture in the Ethnographic and Historic Record of Mesoamerica

ARCHAEOLOGY OF SETTLEMENT AGRICULTURE prehistoric agriculture but have also overshadowed problems of method and data recovery, obscuring the relationship between the facts of the archaeological record and the goal of understanding human organization and culture change. It is still the case that most information relating to the ancient agricultural societies of the New World (generally ceramic and lithic data from excavations and surface collections ) is only weakly linked, in any analytical sense, to the ascendant paradigm of high productive potentials, diverse technologies, and organizational variability now dominating the investigation of prehistoric agriculture. One of the most common methods for reconstructing ancient agriculture has been to turn to settlement pattern data to generate arguments concerning land-use strategies and changes in these strategies over time. Although settlement pattern studies have shown that strong correlations exist between particular classes of land and ancient settlement locations, they cannot tell us about the kinds of crops grown or the intensity of cultivation at those locations, that is, the system of cultivation employed within and around settlements. In the final analysis , the reconstruction of prehistoric agricultural systems is largely dependent upon our success at understanding the structure of the archaeological record and bringing both conventional data bases (ceramics and lithics) and less conventional (feature, landform, and chemical) analyses to bear on the spatial organization of settlement agriculture and its material outcome. For the time being archaeologists must still work toward the development of reliable methods that will help close the gap between data and the range of theoretical possibilities . Gardens of Prehistory: The Archaeology of Settlement Agriculture in Greater Mesoamerica is an attempt to narrow the middle-range gulf facing the study of prehistoric agriculture by presenting one set of possible approaches to understanding agricultural production within or close to the farmer's residence. As such, the studies are essentially spatial and examine a scale of analysis relevant to the settlement and its immediate environs. This midrange scale of analysis, a generally less developed sector of archaeological research, fits between the more traditional poles of regional analysis carried out in archaeological survey and smaller-scale, site-oriented analyses through archaeological ex9 KILLION cavation. Greater methodological and theoretical sophistication at this scale of analysis is needed, given the amount of data collected from large-scale horizontal excavations and the intensive surface collections that are now more commonly implemented in archaeological research. Gardens of Prehistory presents archaeological evidence for nearresidential agriculture across a range of tropical and subtropical environments in the Americas (see fig. P-1 in Preface). The studies examine a variety of environmental contexts (from northern New Mexico to Central America) where prehispanic societies developed on the economic foundations of tropical cultigens and where our understanding of early agriculture is now developing or undergoing significant revision. In the southwestern United States the record of both ancient and modem Puebloan agriculture has revealed a wide range of cultivation techniques practiced within and between settlements (Bradfield 1971; Cordell 1984; Fish and Fish 1984; Ford 1981; Forde 1931; Hack 1942; Masse 1979, 1981; Maxwell and Anschuetz, this volume; Woosley 1980). The existence of an equally diverse range of techniques employed within residential areas is now being established in the adjoining portions of northern Mexico (Doolittle 1980, this volume). To the south, in the highlands of central Mexico a variety of intensive agricultural strategies including intensive infield cultivation, terracing (Evans, this volume), and wetland field raising (chinampa agriculture) augmented shifting agriculture and floodplain irrigation as common components of highland agricultural production and settlement (Palerm 1955; Sanders, Parsons, and Santley 1979; Wolf 1959). In lowland Mesoamerica an earlier perspective of low technological diversity and productivity among prehispanic agricultural systems has been altered greatly, especially in the Maya region (Harrison and Turner 1978; McAnany, this volume; Siemans and Puleston 1972; Wilken 1971; Turner and Miksicek 1984). It is now reasonable to hypothesize that similar early systems of intensive cultivation extended to the Gulf Coast lowlands as well (Santley, this volume; Killion, this volume; Santley, Ortiz, and Pool 1987; Siemans et al. 1988). Throughout the Gulf Coast and eastern lowlands of Mesoamerica the near residential component of prehispanic agriculture clearly would have 10 ARCHAEOLOGY OF SETTLEMENT AGRICULTURE represented a critical element of intensive and sustained subsistence production. In Central America, and elsewhere, evidence for intensive cultivation practices close to habitation areas has been preserved below volcanic ash falls (Sheets 1983; Zier 1983, this volume), indicating the possibility of a more...