During the last two decades, several ambitious archaeological projects have focused on the Basin of Mexico, especially on the great Middle Horizon state centered at Teotihuacán. This book summarizes an extensive survey of settlement patterns carried out by the authors and a team of students and assistants between 1960 and 1975. The objective of this survey was to gather information pertinent to ecological and political processes in the Basin between 1000 b.c. and a.d. 1519. Working within the “materialist paradigm” of cultural ecology and anthropology, the survey team focused on the development of agriculture, especially irrigation and terracing, and on the demographic profile of the area over time. This imposing project surveyed 3,500 square kilometers—approximately 75 percent of the agriculturally usable land mass of the Basin—locating an estimated 80 percent of all spatially isolatable communities.
Three introductory chapters, with thorough discussions of research methods and problems, are followed by the substantive core of the book: four chapters on the natural environment, settlement history, demographic history, and resource exploitation of the Basin of Mexico. The richness of the material presented here will make these chapters a benchmark for future studies of the area. Three final chapters address interpretive and theoretical issues and the future of research in the Basin. The authors fashion a model from traditional and much discussed theories to describe and analyze the evolution of ecological control and political systems in the Basin. This model incorporates Boserup’s theory of demography and agricultural intensification and Wittfogel’s theory of hydraulic agriculture and political centralization. The principles of population growth, least effort in subsistence production, and risk management underlie this model. Excavations, comparison to contemporary ethnographic material, and estimates of population carrying capacity are used to complement the survey research in testing the model. Theoretically, as well as substantively, this book will provide grist for some of the most important debates surrounding the demographic, technological, and political processes of the evolution of civilization in Mexico and elsewhere.
