The Late Archaic Across the Borderlands: From Foraging to Farming

by Bradley J. Vierra (Editor)

Why and when human societies shifted from nomadic hunting and gathering to settled agriculture engages the interest of scholars around the world. One of the most fruitful areas in which to study this issue is the North American Southwest, where Late Archaic inhabitants of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts of Mexico, Arizona, and New Mexico turned to farming while their counterparts in Trans-Pecos and South Texas continued to forage. By investigating the environmental, biological, and cultural factors that led to these differing patterns of development, we can identify some of the necessary conditions for the rise of agriculture and the corresponding evolution of village life. The twelve papers in this volume synthesize previous and ongoing research and offer new theoretical models to provide the most up-to-date picture of life during the Late Archaic (from 3,000 to 1,500 years ago) across the entire North American Borderlands. Some of the papers focus on specific research topics such as stone tool technology and mobility patterns. Others study the development of agriculture across whole regions within the Borderlands. The two concluding papers trace pan-regional patterns in the adoption of farming and also link them to the growth of agriculture in other parts of the world.

328 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2005

Reviews

[Nathan Casebolt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Today, the border between the United States and Mexico feels like an unsolvable knot of problems domestic, international, criminal, and ethical. Thousands of years ago, though, these arid borderlands posed a different problem: survival.

This collection of essays presents what we think we know about the prehistory of this region, and specifically of its long transition from bands of nomadic foragers and hunters to settled farming communities. The essays vary in complexity, but are pretty accessible to the determined reader.

I learned a lot. First, agriculture in this region is a Mexican import. Ancient maize descended from a variety of wild Mexican grass. Knowledge of how to farm it migrated northward, revolutionizing cultures as it spread. Maize (along with squash, beans, and amaranth) enabled the settled, organized, communal lifeways that produced iconic cultures like the Puebloans with their cliff-side cities. Thanks, Mexico!

Second, social impacts of agriculture are reflected in human bone structures. Male and female femurs of roving hunter-gatherer bands are equally thick. Tribes that mixed in cultigens show a sexual division of labor: male femurs remain thick from long-range hunting trips, but female femurs thin dramatically as women kept the home crops growing. Cultures that fully invested in farming left equally-thin femurs regardless of sex.

Finally, the growth of agriculture was uneven across the borderlands. The Tucson area of southern Arizona developed sophisticated irrigation and canal systems over 3,000 years ago, whereas south Texas seems never to have adopted agriculture at all — these folks maintained Stone Age lifeways right up until the Spanish incursions. I guess Texans will always be uncivilized brutes.

I enjoyed this book even though it was written by specialists for specialists. I don’t have the academic toolkit to appreciate every detail of carbon dating and sediment layers and diagnostic stone points, but there’s plenty here to interest the non-specialist who’s willing to slow down and climb some big words.