They argue instead that early Colonial ranching focused on the sparsely cultivated plains. But, they may be overstating the complementarity of Spanish and Indian agriculture. In Tlaxcala the juxtaposition of plains and slopes is on such a small scale that it was difficult to confine livestock to the plains only, especially if they were seasonally waterlogged, www.selleckchem.com/products/s-gsk1349572.html or if the estancia or hacienda owners also wished to cultivate them. Several sites in Table 3 exemplify this juxtaposition. Animals spent time on slopes when driven in and out of the province, or taken to slaughter in towns and cities. In the

later Colonial period haciendas used the wooded commons of La Malinche to graze their animals, and references to frequent loss of animals falling into barrancas (at Cuamancingo) make clear that they roamed over rugged terrain, too (Trautmann, 1981, 178, 184). The geoarchaeological evidence is insufficient to uphold or reject the impact of grazing. I see circumstantial evidence to place an acceleration of land degradation in the 16th

or early 17th C. Given that even in the 17th C. roughly half the modern state was still in the hands of Indian farmers, and given how early their adoption of sheep, oxen, mules, barley, and the plow was, the usual associations of Spanish/Indian with pasture/arable were all but clear-cut, and I share Skopyk’s (2010, 433) reluctance to call the post-Conquest agriculture practiced by Indians ‘native’ (I would avoid ‘indigenous’ for the same reasons). The most important learn more geoarchaeological contribution is to bring out the importance of terrace collapse. In this respect the Tlaxcalan evidence points the same way as recent studies in the Basins of Mexico (Córdova, 1997 and Frederick, 1996) and Patzcuaro (Fisher et al., 2003, but see Metcalfe et al., 2007), the Toluca Valley (Smith et al., 2013), and the

Mixteca Alta (Pérez Rodríguez et al., 2011 and Rincón Mautner, 1999), all more densely populated than the Mezquital or Bajío that figured prominently in the debates of the 1990s. The trend in the new case studies is away from lakes and large rivers, and toward low-order streams, colluvial deposits, and abandoned field systems. What they lose in Inositol monophosphatase 1 coverage, they gain in spatial resolution, allowing us to establish firmer links between eroded cultivation surfaces and depositional environments. The material evidence of terraces and other forms of intensive prehispanic agriculture is getting younger, condensed into the Middle and Late Postclassic (Ávila López, 2006, 80–107, 320–43; Frederick, 2007, 119–21; McClung de Tapia, 2000). It seems that the agriculture practiced at the time was different, in degree and in kind, from what went on in earlier prehispanic periods. In Tlaxcala and elsewhere, there is no evidence of accelerated soil erosion, while there is positive evidence of widespread reclamation of previously degraded farmland through terracing.