Research Catalog

A favored place : San Juan River wetlands, central Veracruz, A.D. 500 to the present

Title
  1. A favored place : San Juan River wetlands, central Veracruz, A.D. 500 to the present / by Alfred H. Siemens.
Published by
  1. Austin : University of Texas Press, 1998.
Author
  1. Siemens, Alfred H.

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Details

Description
  1. xviii, 301 pages : illustrations; 24 cm
Summary
  1. "The wetlands of the San Juan Basin in Central Veracruz, Mexico, were a favored place for their ancient inhabitants. Around the fifth century A.D., Prehispanic people built an extensive network of canals and raised fields along the margins of lakes and rivers that allowed for almost year-round intensive agriculture. Alfred Siemens' discovery of the remaining traces of this ancient agricultural system 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' research contributes to knowledge in several fields. It adds a significant environmental dimension to our understanding of the Mesoamerican-European encounter in the sixteenth and succeeding centuries. And it offers a model of an ancient agricultural system that could still be used to aid in the subsistence of marginalized rural people in many tropical lowland areas. Amplified with original air oblique photography, maps, and tables, and enriched with data from both archaeology and colonial archives, this book is an authoritative historical geography of a wetland landscape. Or, in the author's more modest words, "In unbuttoned moments, it seems to me that what I have here is a biography of a swamp.""--Jacket.
Subject
  1. Wetland agriculture > Mexico > San Juan River Region (Veracruz-Llave) > History
  2. Traditional farming > Mexico > San Juan River Region (Veracruz-Llave) > History
  3. Antiquities
  4. Traditional farming
  5. Wetland agriculture
  6. Wetlands
  7. Agricultura > México
  8. Arqueologia mesoamericana > México
  9. Restos culturais (arqueologia) > México
  10. Agriculture traditionnelle > Mexique > San Juan (cours d'eau ; région)
  11. Écologie des zones humides > Mexique > San Juan (cours d'eau ; région)
  12. San Juan River Region (Veracruz-Llave, Mexico) > Antiquities
  13. Mexico > San Juan River Region (Veracruz-Llave)
Genre/Form
  1. History.
Contents
  1. 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.
Owning institution
  1. Princeton University Library
Bibliography (note)
  1. Includes bibliographical references (p. [273]-289) and index.