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."
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A geographer takes new look at 'unfavourable' wetlands.,
By davids@dino.coacade.uv.mx (Mexico) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Favored Place: San Juan River Wetlands, Central Veracruz, A.D. 500 to the Present (Hardcover)
'A Favored Place' is a highly complex analysis of wetland history, tracing its development through pre-Columbian times to the present. This is no easy task. Siemens' book guides us through detailed archaelogical aspects, how Spanish conquerors 'read' the land they found themselves in on the Mexican Gulf coast, what a nineteenth century German colonist saw, and how twentieth century planners thought and proposed to do with 'unfavourable' wetlands. Siemens presents us with a rich and elaborate text, which will be obliged reading for specialists (especially historians, and geographers), but also a delight for a more general public interested in the way perceptions diverge over what is desirable and/or feasible when we come up against such troublesome concepts as traditional and modern. Even though the book abounds in complex technical and methodological questions, amply backed up by maps, illustrations, photographs, and diagrams, Siemens has an enviable command of language, thus permitting the lay reader easy and enjoyable access to the mysteries of what has so often been considered 'unfavourable', but after this re-reading turns out to be 'favourable': that is, flooded bottom-lands. At the end of the day, no preconceived view of the subject escapes Siemens' scalpel.
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