The Hohokam of Southwest North America

The Hohokam reached an apex of sociopolitical development between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries in the Sonoran Desert of North America. Hallmarks of the Hohokam tradition included red-on-buff pottery, large-scale canal irrigation agriculture, and monumental buildings, including ball courts, platform mounds, towers, and Great Houses. The development and elaboration of Hohokam society from their ceramic-producing predecessors during more than two millennia (ca. 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1450, or later) is a remarkable example of an arid land adaptation in the New World. The enigmatic collapse of Hohokam society took place shortly before European colonialists entered the North American Southwest in the mid–sixteenth century. Various agents (e.g., floods, disease, warfare) of this event are poorly understood and require additional study. So, too, does the degree of historical continuity between contemporary indigenous peoples and precontact archaeological cultures (e.g., Hohokam) in what is now Arizona and northern Mexico.     

Flood-Damaged Canals and Human Response,A.D. 1000–1400, Phoenix,Arizona, USA

The scale of prehistoric canal construction in the North American Southwest peaked in a.d. 450–1450, during what has been named the Hohokam Millennium. Explanations for the eventual Hohokam “collapse” remain elusive. Environmental disturbances, such as floods, that were once manageable may have become unmanageable. Recent archaeological excavations of Hohokam canals in Phoenix identified stratigraphic evidence for three destructive floods that date to a.d. 1000–1400 within two large main canals in System 2, Hagenstad and Woodbury’s North. Woodbury’s North Canal was flood-damaged and abandoned sometime after a.d. 1300. Thereafter, no main canals of similar size were constructed to supply villages within System 2 and the area was depopulated. Our investigation provides the first stratigraphic evidence for a destructive flood during the late Classic period in the lower Salt River Valley and is compatible with the hypothesis of diminished resilience to environmental disturbance at the end of the Hohokam Millennium.     

Southwest and northwest: Recent research at the juncture of the United States and Mexico

Research within the last 3 to 5 years is summarized for the southern part of the southwestern United States and adjacent northwest Mexico. In an effort to identify important new sources of information, the literature of contract archaeology is cited, along with more widely available journal and book publications. Topics considered include Late Archaic farmers, early ceramic villages, subsistence and agricultural technology, settlement stability and residential mobility, community organization, and developments of the late prehistoric period sociopolitical complexity.     

Caddoan Area archaeology since 1990

This paper summarizes recent archaeological research efforts, and changing perspectives, about the native history of the Caddo peoples who lived in the Caddoan Archaeological Area, which centers on the Great Bend of the Red River in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Of particular focus are the origins and early developments of the Caddoan tradition, regional diversity, subsistence changes and agricultural intensification, sociopolitical dynamics, and Caddoan-European interaction.     

The Hohokam of the American Southwest

The Hohokam, the prehistoric farmers of the southern Arizona desert, have been the subject of increased archaeological investigation in the last two decades. This research is altering traditional views of the Hohokam. New data provide a stronger basis for discussing Hohokam origins and culture history. Although best known as irrigation farmers, the Hohokam had a complex subsistence base that relied on hunting, gathering, and a variety of farming techniques. Studies of site structure and settlement patterning reveal a degree of social complexity greater than previously recognized. The Hohokam were tied to surrounding groups through evolving exchange and interaction networks.     

Characterizing the rural landscape during the Iron Age and Roman period (ca. 1200 b.c.–a.d. 400): An intensive survey of Wadi al-Feidh,southern Jordan

Abstract

Archaeological surveys in the southern Levant have traditionally focused on areas with favorable climates and flat terrain where large urban sites are found, corresponding with a research focus on social complexity and state formation. Fewer surveys have explored the rocky, difficult-to-reach areas where large-scale agriculture was rare. This article uses survey data from the 2009 survey of Wadi al-Feidh, southern Jordan, to demonstrate the importance of exploring these environmentally marginal areas. Employing an intensive survey methodology, we recorded a range of sites and features previously unrecognized in this region. These findings suggest that subsistence patterns shifted from small-scale, mixed agro-pastoralism in the Iron Age (1200–586 b.c.) to a more intensive, top-down strategy of agricultural production by the Roman period (ca. 100 b.c.–a.d. 400). The results provide new insight into regional socioeconomic change in the southern Levant from the perspective of peripheral communities.     

‘A good wife stays home’: gendered negotiations over state agricultural programmes,upland Vietnam

Rural and livelihood studies, alongside development organisations, are stressing the importance of gender awareness in debates over food security, food crises and land tenure. Yet, within the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, these gender dynamics are frequently disregarded. In Vietnam, rice is intimately linked to the country's food security. Over the last decade, rice export levels, production methods, and local and global market prices have remained constant preoccupations for governmental and development agencies. Steadfast official approval for agricultural technologies and intensification has seen the domestic growth and importation of hybrid varieties of rice and maize seeds. Yet, the impacts of these technologies on upland ethnic minority rice producers and consumers in Vietnam have been overlooked. For these women and men, such as Hmong and Yao farmers, food security is a daily concern for their near-subsistence livelihoods. While strongly encouraged to grow these new seeds, insufficient research has examined the social realities and experiences of these upland minority groups. Moreover, how such agrarian policies and practices are being implicated in reconfiguring gender roles, relations and identities through transformations to individual and household livelihoods has been ignored. In this article, we focus on the gendered consequences of the government's hybrid rice programme for upland farmers. We reveal recent impacts on family relations, including rising intergenerational tensions across genders, and shifting responsibilities and new negotiations between young spouses. These dynamics are further complicated by household economic status, as household members access specific opportunities available to them to improve everyday food security.     

Mano size,stable carbon isotope ratios,and macrobotanical remains as multiple lines of evidence of maize dependence in the American southwest

While the level of agricultural dependence affects many aspects of human adaptation, estimating levels of dependence on maize through traditional archaeological techniques is problematic. Here we compare various measurements of manos (e.g., grinding surface area), macrobotanical evidence of maize use, and human collagen stable carbon isotope values from six regions of the American Southwest, encompassing 16 phases, as a means of assessing the power and limits of each approach for considering agricultural dependence. The analysis of each data class is considered separately, taking into account formation processes and arguments linking data and inferences. Correlations among the three data classes suggest that mano area and maize ubiquity can be considered ordinal measures of agricultural dependence, but Southwestern stable carbon isotope data have the analytical potential only to discriminate between little or no maize use and substantial maize use. The formation processes and linking arguments associated with each method must be considered when multiple lines of evidence are integrated in order to make sound behavioral inferences. Our results suggest that there were at least three patterns in the adoption of farming in the Southwest: early substantial use followed by continuous increasing maize dependence, initial intensive dependence with little change in later periods, and a long period of minor use followed by substantial dependence.     

BOSERUP BACKWARDS? AGRICULTURAL INTENSIFICATION AS ‘ITS OWN DRIVING FORCE’ IN THE MBULU HIGHLANDS,TANZANIA

Why do farmers intensify their agricultural practices? Recent revisions of African environmental historiographies have greatly enriched our understanding of human–environmental interactions. To simply point at poor farming practices as the main cause of deforestation, desertification and other processes of land degradation is, for example, no longer possible. The contemporary analytical focus is instead on the complex and often unpredictable set of causal relations between societal, ecological and climatic factors. In the literature on agricultural intensification, conventionally defined driving forces, such as population pressure and market demand, remain important explanatory factors despite a growing body of research that suggests more dynamic scenarios of agricultural development and landscape change. This article reports on a case where the common‐sense logic of population pressure theory has dominated the historical narrative of a local process of agricultural intensification among an agro‐pastoral people in north‐central Tanzania. By way of a ‘detailed participatory landscape analyses’ a more complex and dynamic historical process of intensification is suggested, in which the landscape and the process of agricultural intensification itself are in focus. It is concluded that the accumulation of landesque capital has been incremental in character, and that the process of agricultural intensification in the study area has largely been its own driving force based on self‐reinforcing processes of change, and not a consequence of land scarcity and population pressure. This result demonstrates the possibility and usefulness of reversing the Bose‐rupian argument in analyses of agricultural intensification.     

科学发展观视角的农业发展方式转变

转变农业发展方式与实践科学发展观是内在统一的,以科学发展观为统领是转变农业发展方式的灵魂。从科学发展观视角看,关键是在转变上下功夫,通过转变农业发展方式,实现农业又好又快发展,实现以人为本,统筹兼顾,推进农业协调发展     

The water question in feminism: water control and gender inequities in a neo-liberal era

The current neo-liberal moment in water policy appears to offer possibilities for realizing feminist ambitions. Several feminist scholars see the individualization and privatization of resource rights as offering possibilities for confronting gender inequalities rooted in, and reproduced by, historic and structural male favoured access to productive resources such as land and water. But we seriously doubt a progressive feminist potential of neo-liberal reforms in the water sector. We focus on water used for agricultural purposes, because neo-liberal water proposals are premised on taking water out of agriculture to uses with higher marginal economic returns. A first set of doubts involves water as a specific resource, largely because of its propensity to flow. Rights to water are less fixed and more prone to be contested at various levels and in different socio-legal domains than rights to other natural resources. The second set stems from our disagreement with the ideological underpinnings of the neo-liberal project. It reflects our concern about how water reforms articulate with wider political-economic structures and historical dynamics characterized by new ways of capitalist expansion. Furthermore, mainstream neo-liberal water policy language and concepts tend to hide precisely those issues that, from a critical feminist perspective, need to be questioned. Feminist reflections about tenure insecurity and social inequities in relation to water clash with the terms of a neo-liberal framework that invisibilizes, naturalizes and objectifies the politics and powers involved in water re-allocation. A feminist response calls for challenging the individualization, marketization and consumer/client focus of the neo-liberal paradigm.     

Voluntary Environmental Programs in the Public Sector: Evaluating an Urban Water Conservation Program in California

Solving conflictual environmental policy problems is increasingly falling under the purview of local governments and public agencies. Nonregulatory approaches, such as the development of voluntary environmental programs (VEPs), could offer a useful policy alternative as they often have greater political traction and flexibility. However, there has been little work examining the use of VEPs in the public sector. This article uses a new dataset from California to examine how political institutions affect decisions by local governments and public agencies to participate in a voluntary urban water conservation program and whether this program has improved the water conservation performance of its members. The results show that special district governments, private utilities, and water suppliers dependent on purchased water are more likely to participate in the program and to join early. However, urban water agencies that have joined the program have not reduced their per capita water use more than those that have not. These results underscore the influence of political institutions in public‐sector decision making and demonstrate that, as in the private sector, commitment to a VEP by local government and public agencies does not guarantee implementation or environmental improvements. While voluntary programs offer political and administrative advantages, in order for VEPs in the public sector to be effective they must be accompanied and supported by credible enforcement mechanisms, performance standards, and rigorous monitoring programs.     

Petitions from Peripheries of Empire: Louisiana and Québec

As stress on water resources increases from growing human demands and a changing climate, recognition of the need to develop effective strategies for water governance is expanding. Consequently, it is timely to consider the legacy of effective instances of water policy innovation that have been highly influential in water resource management in Canada. We present two historical examples of policy transfer – that is, when policy employed in one jurisdiction is adapted for use in another. The first is the late nineteenth-century adoption of water allocation law in the North-West Territories that was a noteworthy departure from how water had been allocated in eastern Canada. The second is the twentieth-century introduction of conservation authorities in Ontario as regional watershed-based management entities. These examples illustrate how, in an era of expert-driven natural resources management, notions of governance were adapted from Australia and the United States. They also reveal how the biophysically-based policy context of water influences which policy transfer mechanisms are appropriate for lesson-learning. We conclude that the potential for policy transfer and lesson-learning to shorten the policy innovation timeline must be viewed as a critical response to urgent and evolving demands on water.