The Scale, Governance, and Sustainability of Central Places in Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica

Feinman, Gary M.; Carballo, David M.

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-15800-2_11

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…In prior comparative studies of prehispanic Mesoamerican settlements, population (Feinman and Carballo, 2019) and population density (Feinman and Nicholas, 2012a) were correlated with more collective governance and higher degrees of collective action. The relationship between city density and more collective governance also holds for a global sample of premodern polities Fargher, 2011, 2012;Fargher et al, 2019).…”

Section: Historical Institutionalism and Key Emergent Conditionsmentioning

confidence: 84%

Sustainability and duration of early central places in prehispanic Mesoamerica

Feinman

Carballo²,

Nicholas³

et al. 2023

Front. Ecol. Evol.

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During the last millennium BCE, central places were founded across many regions of western (non-Maya) Mesoamerica. These early central places differed in environmental location, size, layout, and the nature of their public spaces and monumental architecture. We compare a subset of these regional centers and find marked differences in their sustainability--defined as the duration of time that they remained central places in their respective regions. Early infrastructural investments, high degrees of economic interdependence and collaboration between domestic units, and collective forms of governance are found to be key factors in such sustainability.

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Section: Historical Institutionalism and Key Emergent Conditionsmentioning

confidence: 84%

Sustainability and duration of early central places in prehispanic Mesoamerica

Feinman

Carballo²,

Nicholas³

et al. 2023

Front. Ecol. Evol.

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“…In prehispanic Mesoamerica, the act of writing or producing texts tended to be associated with high status and political principals [70] . Nevertheless, because prehispanic Mesoamerican governance was not organized in a uniform way [15,24,71] , the situational contexts and the audiences for communication, writing, and calendrics were variable.…”

Section: Conundrums and Questions To Probementioning

confidence: 99%

Communication, Computation, and Governance: A Multiscalar Vantage on the Prehispanic Mesoamerican World

Feinman

Carballo

2022

J. Soc. Comput.

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Writing has often been put forth as one indicator of civilization. This correspondence dovetails with the even broader cross-species expectation that the degrees of social complexity and levels of computational communication should closely correlate. Although in a general sense across human cooperative arrangements, a basic relationship between these variables undoubtedly exists, more detailed and fine-grained analyses indicate important axes of variability. Here, our focus is on prehispanic Mesoamerica and the means of computation and communication employed over more than three millennia (ca. 1500 BCE-1520 CE). We take a multiscalar and diachronic analytical frame, in which we look at 30 central places, six macroregions, and Mesoamerica as whole. By unraveling elements of "social complexity", and decoupling computation from communication, we illustrate that institutional differences in governance had a marked effect on the specific modes and technologies through which prehispanic Mesoamerican peoples communicated across time and space. Demographic and spatial scale, though relevant, do not alone determine time/space diversity in media of computational communication. This article is part of the theme issue "Evolution of Collective Computational Abilities of (Pre)Historic Societies".

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“…Despite the large synthetic studies that show temporal correlation of sociopolitical reorganization and climate change (4), there is limited empirical evidence of the agency of past societies, or how they changed land management strategies in response to climate change, especially at finer resolution examples that belie the meganarratives of causal climate/society relationships (5). Research has converged on this topic from a variety of perspectives (6)(7)(8)(9)(10), but few studies have explored both spatial and temporal dimensions of local-scale environmental management that are necessary to contextualize societal response to regional climate change.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Pre-Columbian fire management and control of climate-driven floodwaters over 3,500 years in southwestern Amazonia

Duncan

Loughlin

Walker

et al. 2021

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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In landscapes that support economic and cultural activities, human communities actively manage environments and environmental change at a variety of spatial scales that complicate the effects of continental-scale climate. Here, we demonstrate how hydrological conditions were modified by humans against the backdrop of Holocene climate change in southwestern Amazonia. Paleoecological investigations (phytoliths, charcoal, pollen, diatoms) of two sediment cores extracted from within the same permanent wetland, ∼22 km apart, show a 1,500-y difference in when the intensification of land use and management occurred, including raised field agriculture, fire regime, and agroforestry. Although rising precipitation is well known during the mid to late Holocene, human actions manipulated climate-driven hydrological changes on the landscape, revealing differing histories of human landscape domestication. Environmental factors are unable to account for local differences without the mediation of human communities that transformed the region to its current savanna/forest/wetland mosaic beginning at least 3,500 y ago. Regional environmental variables did not drive the choices made by farmers and fishers, who shaped these local contexts to better manage resource extraction. The savannas we observe today were created in the post-European period, where their fire regime and structural diversity were shaped by cattle ranching.

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The Scale, Governance, and Sustainability of Central Places in Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica

Cited by 7 publications

References 58 publications

Sustainability and duration of early central places in prehispanic Mesoamerica

Sustainability and duration of early central places in prehispanic Mesoamerica

Communication, Computation, and Governance: A Multiscalar Vantage on the Prehispanic Mesoamerican World

Pre-Columbian fire management and control of climate-driven floodwaters over 3,500 years in southwestern Amazonia

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