A favored place : San Juan River wetlands, central Veracruz, A.D. 500 to the present / by Alfred H. Siemens.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Siemens, Alfred H., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Wetland agriculture--Mexico--San Juan River Region (Veracruz-Llave)--History.

Wetland agriculture.

Traditional farming--Mexico--San Juan River Region (Veracruz-Llave)--History.

Traditional farming.

San Juan River Region (Veracruz-Llave, Mexico)--Antiquities.

San Juan River Region (Veracruz-Llave, Mexico).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (320 pages) : illustrations, tables

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Austin, Texas : University of Texas Press, 1998.

Summary:

The wetlands of the San Juan Basin in Central Veracruz, Mexico, have been a favored place since the fifth century A.D., when Prehispanic people built an extensive network of canals and raised fields that allowed for almost year-round agriculture. Alfred Siemens' discovery of the remains of this network in the 1970s led him to uncover fifteen centuries of land-use history in the region. This book contains a full record of his findings. Siemens organizes his history of the San Juan Basin around the question: What relationships exist between Prehispanic agriculture and the production systems of the tropical lowlands in our own time? This focus allows him to chart the changes in human perceptions and uses of the landscape, from the Prehispanic wetland agricultural system to the drained pastures of today's cattle ranches. Amplified with air oblique photography, maps, and tables, and enriched with data from archaeology and colonial archives, this is an authoritative historical geography of a wetland landscape. Or, in the author's more modest words, "It seems to me that what I have here is a biography of a swamp."

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Tables

List of Figures

Portrait

Preface: An Amiable Collaboration

1. Finding and Deciphering Patterned Ground in the Lowlands of Mesoamerica

2. Deducing the San Juan Basin in A.D. 500

3. Probing the Ethnohistorical Literature Surrounding the Encounter

4. Reformatting Sixteenth-Century Documents

5. Maximizing Some Late-Eighteenth-Century Observations

6. Appreciating a Naturalist's Rendition of Central Veracruz in the Nineteenth Century

7. Struggling with a Technocratic Pathology of the Basin in Mid-Twentieth Century

8. Summing Up the Yields

References

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-292-75490-6

OCLC:

1280944915