Andrew Sluyter

In Hispanic and Latino New Orleans: Immigration and Identity since the Eighteenth Century (LSU Press, 2015), my co-authors and I demonstrate the ways in which various Hispanic and Latino communities have long played central roles in creating New Orleans and its singular sense of place, not just since the influx of reconstruction workers after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but from the city’s very beginnings in the eighteenth century. This prize-winning book thereby makes a significant contribution to the polarized debate between those who argue for a US national identity with a homogenous, White, European cultural core versus those who demonstrate, as this study does, that places such as New Orleans emerged through thoroughly multicultural processes that continue through the present.

In Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cattle Herders of the Atlantic World, 1500–1900 (Yale University Press, 2012), I used innovative methods that combined complementary archival, material culture, and other primary sources to reveal the long-silenced voices of people of African origin in the establishment of cattle ranching throughout the Americas, including iconic herding practices such as lassoing cattle from horseback that have long been assumed—wrongly—to have European origins. That book and subsequent research on the same topic published as journal articles and book chapters play a significant role in demonstrating that enslaved Africans did not just provide labor in colonial economies but, rather, played active roles in establishing the novel landscapes of the colonial Americas, many elements of which persist to the present.

In Colonialism and Landscape: Postcolonial Theory and Applications (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), I developed an application of a postcolonial theory to geographical research on settler colonialism that incorporated both social-environmental and material-discursive processes to reveal, in particular, the racialized aspects of present-day places. That prize-winning book and two preliminary articles in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers (in 1999 and 2001) that developed that seminal theoretical contribution have by now been cited about 400 times by geographers, anthropologists, and others who have applied my “colonial triangle” approach to places and processes throughout the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia.

People on other continents had been raising domesticated cattle for millennia, mainly breeds of humped zebu (Bos indicus) in the tropics and of humpless taurine (Bos taurus) in temperate latitudes by the time the first cattle reached the Americas in 1493. From an initial beachhead on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, by the close of the 16th century, cattle had reached ranching frontiers throughout the region, from New Spain to the Pampas of the Río de la Plata. While regional varieties of cattle—such as the Corriente of Mexico, the Longhorn of the borderlands, and the Criollo of the Pampas—developed on each of the frontiers, they shared many characteristics: an emphasis on raising large herds of feral cattle on an open range to the virtual exclusion of crops in order to produce hides, tallow, and beef. Over the colonial period, herders pushed into new frontiers, and their social, cultural, and environmental characteristics became differentiated through the hybridization of antecedent African, European, and Indigenous practices. In addition to ranching, cattle became central to many other aspects of colonial societies, incorporated into farming to provide meat and dairy products as well as used as draft animals to pull carts and plows and power sugar and grain mills. Cattle had a major impact on Indigenous peoples, who not only adopted them into their agricultural systems but also suffered crop damage from free-ranging herds. In terms of environmental impacts, cattle herding had a broad impact on the vegetation of grasslands through grazing, rangeland burning, and the introduction of African grasses. Throughout much of Latin America, the end of the colonial period in the 19th century resulted in not only an expansion of cattle ranching but also the closing of the open range. The opening of export markets, urbanization, growing domestic markets, technological changes such as wire fences and refrigerated shipping, genocidal wars against Indigenous peoples to open new ranching frontiers, and the abolition of slavery all irrevocably altered the patterns and processes established during colonial times. Enclosing pastures with wire fences, for example, permitted ranchers to control breeding and thereby maintain European breeds such as Aberdeen Angus and Hereford that largely replaced Longhorns and other colonial breeds. In the 20th century, ranchers with herds of zebu breeds, such as Indubrasil, began to expand into new frontiers in tropical forests, particularly the Amazon, with immense impacts on Indigenous peoples and the environment.

When deaths among the enslaved and crew occurred during the eighteenth-century voyages of the vessels of the Middelburg Commercial Company, many of the officers who kept logbooks aboard drew skulls and crossbones, crosses, hourglasses, and other icons to mark those deaths. While some scholars have previously noted those icons preserved in the margins of 109 logbooks in the Zeeuws Archive in Middelburg, the Netherlands, this first comprehensive description and analysis of that iconography of death contributes a novel dimension to our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade. Many of the icons relate to memento mori symbolism that emerged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Dutch vanitas paintings and quotidian objects to emphasize the evanescence of mundane existence lived without spirituality, helping to reconcile the conspicuous consumption of material goods extracted from a global colonial empire with a Calvinist piety that abjured earthly possessions. The iconographical analysis reveals seventeen types of icons, ranging from basic marks such as an X to combinations of skulls, crossbones, hourglasses, and wings. Moreover, it reveals which icon types appear most commonly, how they changed over time, how they varied among logbook authors, and how they differed for deaths among the enslaved and crew.

This project demonstrates how to use existing syntheses of many decades of historical social science research to produce empirically derived land-use maps in a GIS for large regions for a specific target year at a resolution appropriate to the calibration of existing anthropogenic land-cover change (ALCC) models. Disagreement among the outputs of various ALCC models results from differing estimates of population and assumptions about how much food a given population requires and the productivity per unit area of various types of cropping systems. The resulting ALCC model output of the spatial distribution of land uses at a given time becomes input for climate models, which thereby incorporate those uncertainties. To address the issue at a global scale, the LandCover6k working group of PAGES (Past Global Changes), has undertaken an international effort to empirically calibrate the HYDE ALCC model. This report on a contribution to that effort employs empirical data from previously published scholarship in geography, anthropology, and archaeology on the land use of Middle America centered on a target year of 1500 CE. Maps from those sources were digitized and georeferenced in a GIS (Geographic Information System) and used to digitize polygons in which each category of land use is known to have occurred during late precolonial and early colonial times, centered on the target year. The land-use typology used was agreed on at the first, 2015 LandCover6k meeting and includes five top-level categories: Pastoral; Urban and Extractive; Hunting, Fishing, and Gathering; No land Use; and Agriculture. This project further includes a dozen Agricultural subcategories specifically appropriate to Middle America in 1500 CE: agroforestry; orchards and orchard gardens; shifting cultivation; short-fallow cultivation; sloping-field terraces; bench terraces; cross-channel terraces; subsurface irrigation; floodwater irrigation; canal irrigation; recessional cultivation; and intensive wetland fields. The results are presented and discussed as sixteen GIS screenshots.

In the 12,000 years preceding the Industrial Revolution, human activities led to significant changes in land cover, plant and animal distributions, surface hydrology, and biochemical cycles. Earth system models suggest that this anthropogenic land cover change influenced regional and global climate. However, the representation of past land use in earth system models is currently oversimplified. As a result, there are large uncertainties in the current understanding of the past and current state of the earth system. In order to improve representation of the variety and scale of impacts that past land use had on the earth system, a global effort is underway to aggregate and synthesize archaeological and historical evidence of land use systems. Here we present a simple, hierarchical classification of land use systems designed to be used with archaeological and historical data at a global scale and a schema of codes that identify land use practices common to a range of systems, both implemented in a geospatial database. The classification scheme and database resulted from an extensive process of consultation with researchers worldwide. Our scheme is designed to deliver consistent, empirically robust data for the improvement of land use models, while simultaneously allowing for a comparative, detailed mapping of land use relevant to the needs of historical scholars. To illustrate the benefits of the classification scheme and methods for mapping historical land use, we apply it to Mesopotamia and Arabia at 6 kya (c. 4000 BCE). The scheme will be used to describe land use by the Past Global Changes (PAGES) LandCover6k working group, an international project comprised of archaeologists, historians, geographers, paleoecologists, and modelers. Beyond this, the scheme has a wide utility for creating a common language between research and policy communities, linking archaeologists with climate modelers, biodiversity conservation workers and initiatives.

Cartographic representations of the Middle Passage are nearly nonexistent but have great potential to increase understanding of the Atlantic slave trade as a complement to dominant, narrative approaches. Perhaps the congenital relationship between colonialism, the slave trade, and the mapping tools of the discipline of geography has dissuaded many from believing that cartography can contribute to critical understanding of the Middle Passage. Nonetheless, to illustrate the potential, the maps debuted in this article chart the death of enslaved Africans and their disposal overboard on twenty-five voyages by Dutch vessels sailing from the Gold Coast of West Africa to the South American colony of Suriname in the second half of the 18th century. Such cartographic representations complement narrative ones in the multidisciplinary effort to transform the Atlantic from a blank oceanic space into one with structures, agencies, and research questions that differ from those of continental and national historiographies, placing the Middle Passage at the epicenter of the human commodification necessary for the emergence of global capitalism in early modern times. The purpose of the maps is not so much analysis of the spatial-temporal patterns of death on the Middle Passage, a topic already well understood through decades of scholarship and better advanced through statistical approaches. Rather, the maps have a twofold purpose. First, they comprise spatial visualizations of archival data to evoke the horror of one aspect of the abhorrent commerce in human beings during the Atlantic slave trade, to conjure up the bloody horror of the crime scene that resulted from the entanglement of capital and black bodies. Second, following the theme of this special issue, the maps illustrate how to implement the collaborative ethos at the heart of the digital humanities by employing GIS (Geographic Information System) software that is free and open-source, open-access sharing of the online spatial database, and licensing that allows readers to create derivative maps and other types of visualization. Those best practices recognize that the descendants of the enslaved have a fundamental right to the raw data that scholars extract from the documents of the slave trade, a key tenet of the black digital humanities.

Abstract
Fire regimes emerge partly from human activities that reflect cultural-ecological knowledge of the relationships among fire, vegetation, grazing, climate, and other variables, as well as social relations. More knowledge of such “fire cultures,” past and present, therefore remains necessary to better understand the causes and persistent consequences of landscape burning. In the neotropics, people have used fire for centuries to manage livestock pastures. Conventional wisdom has long posited that such practices derived solely from antecedent European and indigenous, Native American fire cultures. Analysis of accounts of rangeland burning from throughout the neotropics during colonial times, however, demonstrates that ranchers incorporated African fire cultures and that the timing of burning shifted from early during the dry season in the sixteenth century to late during the dry season by the nineteenth century.

A significant gap in our understanding of global change involves the linkages between historical land-use and land-cover change (LULCC), Holocene terrestrial carbon (C) pool fluxes, and climate change. To address that research problem, this method uses land grants for sheep ranches awarded in early colonial (1521–1620 CE) Mexico to quantify the amount of land converted from cropland to pastureland. Soil is the largest terrestrial C pool, and converting cropland to pastureland significantly increases soil C sequestration rates, thereby reducing atmospheric C. The land grants and associated archival documents contain location-specific information about soils, vegetation, hydrology, and other variables that make it possible to map the ranches in a Geographic Information System (GIS) and quantify LULCCs and terrestrial C pools over time and space. The results demonstrate the utility of such archival documents to research on Holocene global change, indicate that LULCC during Mexico’s colonial period increased the region’s soil C sequestration rate, and confirm previous research that has suggested that transformations associated with European colonization of the Americas acted as an anthropogenic contributor to the period of moderate cooling known as the ‘Little Ice Age’ (1550–1850 CE). Use link for full text PDF.

Following the introduction of cattle into the Caribbean in 1493, open-range ranching proliferated in a series of frontiers across the grasslands of the Americas through the nineteenth century, establishing novel social and environmental relations with consequences that persist to the present. While historians have recognized that Africans and Afro-descendants were involved in the establishment of those ranching frontiers, the emphasis has been on their labor rather than creative participation. Now material culture and other primary sources that complement archival documents have begun to reveal a fuller understanding of their roles. Two case studies illustrate how such complementary types of evidence reveal that African and Afro-descended herders took active roles in the processes of innovation regarding use of the lasso from horseback in North America and water-lifting technology in South America. Such contributions were critical to the expansion of open-range cattle throughout the Americas and consequent environmental transformations. Use link for full text PDF.

A longstanding assumption posits that white ranchers from the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, provided the knowledge to establish the first cattle ranches in Louisiana in the mid-eighteenth century, that blacks merely provided the labor, and that the herding ecology involved was the same as that of the Acadian ranchers who followed. Reconstruction of the locations of the first major ranches and the backgrounds of their owners and slaves, however, reveals that none of them came to Louisiana from Saint-Domingue and that the ranches occupied the western margin of the Atchafalaya basin, an environment quite different than the prairies of southwestern Louisiana later inhabited by Acadian ranchers. While the sources cannot yield a complete account of the process through which cattle ranching became established, they do suggest that none of the white ranchers brought relevant experience from the Caribbean or France, that some of the blacks might have brought such experience from Africa, and that people of African, European, native, and mixed origins all contributed knowledge and creativity, as well as labor, in founding a distinctive herding ecology that differed substantially from that of the subsequent Acadian ranches. Use link for full text PDF.

Produced along the Río de la Plata during the nineteenth century, shipped to Havana, and consumed by African slaves, the salt-cured beef known as tasajo affected both of those places and, to some degree, the Atlantic world in general. Initial exploration of the tasajo trail that connected Buenos Aires and Cuba employs primary sources such as nineteenth-century descriptions and shipping records to characterize the landscapes, places, routes, and agents of the largely unexplored research territory of that anomalous commodity: one that, unlike others such as sugar, slaves not only produced but also consumed; one that underpinned more prominent, latitudinal transatlantic flows such as the slave trade, yet itself flowed meridionally; one that, like all those flows, had an oceanic component that comprised an actively lived space of flows rather than a dead space of separation; and one that might be mundane, yet helped fuel major transformations of two of the principal nodes of Hispanic Atlantic.

Producida en las riberas del Río de la Plata durante el siglo diecinueve, despachada a La Habana, y consumida por esclavos Africanos, la carne de res curada de sal y llamada tasajo tuvo un impacto sobre ambos lugares y, de cierto modo, sobre el mundo Atlántico en general. Esta exploración inicial del sendero tasajo que conectó Buenos Aires y Cuba utiliza fuentes primarias tal como descripciones y documentos de embarcación del siglo diecinueve para caracterizar el paisaje, los lugares, las rutas y los intermediarios del territorio de investigación en gran parte inexplorado de esta mercadería anómala. Una mercadería que, a diferencia de otras como el azúcar, los esclavos no solamente produjeron pero también consumieron; que sostuvo flujos latitudinales transatlánticos más destacados como el comercio de esclavos, pero que circuló meridionalmente; que, como todos esos flujos, tuvo un componente oceánico que compuso un espacio de flujos vivido activamente más que un espacio muerto de separación; y que podría ser banal pero que ayudó a alimentar trasformaciones mayores de dos de los principales centros del Atlántico hispánico. Use link for full text PDF.

The Geographical Review possesses many long-standing strengths that are well worth celebrating in this centennial volume. This essay complements the series of forthcoming essays, with a focus on the Geographical Review’s commitment to the historical dimension and the resulting insights into present-day issues often lacking elsewhere. For example, content analysis has revealed that since the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Transactions of the British Institute of Geographers, and Progress in Human Geography have shifted toward an overwhelming emphasis on the present and recent past. Some have even coined terms such as “recentism” and “temporal parochialism” to describe what seems to be a general tendency for “scholarship on social topics [to focus] increasingly on later periods at the expense of earlier ones." Use link for full text PDF.

Barbuda remains little developed and sparsely populated relative to its neighbors in the Leeward Lesser Antilles, a rather extraordinary and relatively unknown Caribbean place. Much of its distinctiveness derives from the communal land-tenure system, itself rooted in three centuries of open-range cattle herding. Yet, as revealed through interviews, newspaper archives, and landscape observations, open-range cattle herding has declined over the past three decades, with related changes in land tenure. As the new Barbuda Land Act came into effect in 2008, codifying the communal tenure system, the very landscape elements that manifest open-range herding have become obscure. In particular, the rock-walled stockwells have become largely defunct, many of the walls lie in ruins or have been entirely consumed by the crusher that converted them into gravel to surface roads. With the principal land use that had supported communal control largely out of practice, usufruct access to land now largely obsolete, the new act might have little actual impact in preserving Barbuda's uniqueness. Use link for full text PDF.

Some significant problems remain in understanding the establishment of open-range cattle herding in the Caribbean and North America, especially regarding the role of blacks in that process. Research to date has identified the Greater Antilles, especially Spanish Cuba and British Jamaica, as the sole Caribbean sources of settlers who established the herding systems of, respectively, Mexico and South Carolina. Yet an open-range cattle herding system also occurred in the British Lesser Antilles, which provided many of the settlers for the South Carolina colony. Archival and field research in Antigua and Barbuda provide the basis for comprehensive reconstruction of that system's material culture and herding ecology, demonstration of the role of blacks in its operation, and comparison with other relevant systems to consider whether the British Lesser Antilles might also have been involved in the process through which open-range cattle herders established themselves in South Carolina during the late seventeenth century. Use link for full text PDF.

An explicitly methodological case study conducted for a multidisciplinary symposium on the Atlantic relationships of pre- and (post-)Katrina Louisiana illustrates some methods that geographers might usefully contribute to an emergent Atlantic Studies. Three general types of method apply to a substantive question related to the hurricane that struck on the morning of 29 August 2005: Is (post-)Katrina New Orleans emerging as a Hispanic place in contrast to its predominant pre-Katrina associations with the Black and French Atlantics? One type of method involves spatial analysis of data, whether social survey data such as census enumerations, environmental data such as flood depth and persistence, or others. Another relies on fieldwork that combines informal interviews with observation of landscape elements, both those diagnostic of past relational processes and those suggestive of emerging ones. The third employs analysis of long-term dynamics in the relationships among places, in this particular case New Orleans, the Canary Islands, Honduras, and other places of the Hispanic Atlantic. That mix of methods makes understandable some of the processes driving the emerging Hispanic geography of New Orleans, such as new Hispanic in-migrants creating a place for themselves among the Vietnamese of New Orleans East. The question of whether New Orleans is really emerging as a Hispanic place thus begins to become much more meaningful than the categorical claims to date, which have cited a relatively minor increase in the proportion of a social survey category termed Hispanic, while ignoring the much more significant shifting location of New Orleans within the network of relational processes that comprise the Hispanic Atlantic. Use link for full text PDF.

Content analysis of Geography in America (Gaile and Willmott 2003), which collects forty-seven chapters written by representatives of each of the specialty groups of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), reveals much about the recent intellectual structure of the discipline (Sluyter et al. 2006). One striking feature of that structure is the lack of intellectual connectivity, measured in practitioners named and publications cited, between the chapters of the Latin Americanist Specialty Group (LASG) and the Historical Geography Specialty Group (HGSG). Detailed comparison of the HGSG chapter and the Historical and Cultural Perspectives section of the LASG chapter addresses the character of that lack of connectivity, its causes, and some possibilities for its improvement.

El análisis del contenido de la Geografía en América (Gaile y Willmott 2003), que recoge cuarenta y siete capítulos escritos por los representantes de cada uno de los grupos de la especialidad de la Asociación de Geografos Americanos (AAG), revela mucho sobre la estructura intelectual reciente de la disciplina (Sluyter et el al. 2006). Una característica llamativa de esa estructura es la carencia de la conectividad intelectual, mediada por los profesionales nombrados y las publicaciones citadas, entre los capítulos del grupo de la especialidad latinoamericanista (LASG) y del grupo de la especialidad de la geografía histórica (HGSG). La comparación detallada del capítulo de HGSG y de la sección histórica y cultural de las perspectivas del capítulo de LASG trata el carácter de esa carencia de la conectividad, de sus causas, y de algunas posibilidades de su mejora. Use link for full text PDF.

While in New Spain from 1803 to 1804, Alexander von Humboldt interacted with some of its landscapes and the texts that represented them. Analysis of those interactions regarding the Basin of Mexico and the Gulf lowlands demonstrates what purely text-based studies of the production of places cannot: The contrasting landscape elements and patterns that had emerged over millennia during precolonial times in those two places, their relative degrees of depopulation during the colonial era, and the relative degrees of rigor Humboldt applied to interacting with the resulting landscapes and the texts that represented them greatly affected his representations of those places in his 1811 Essai politique sur le royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne. His representations of the precolonial Basin of Mexico as productively developed and of the precolonial Gulf lowlands as pristine have influenced the transformations of those places in the two centuries after New Spain became the Mexican republic through its wars of independence (1810–1821). Use link for full text PDF.

An active learning project in an introductory graduate course used multidimensional scaling of the name index in Geography in America at the Dawn of the 21st Century, by Gary Gaile and Cort Willmott, to reveal some features of the discipline's recent intellectual structure relevant to the relationship between human and physical geography. Previous analyses, dating to the 1980s, used citation indices or Association of American Geographers specialty-group rosters to conclude that either the regional or the methods and environmental subdisciplines bridge human and physical geography. The name index has advantages over those databases, and its analysis reveals that the minimal connectivity that occurs between human and physical geography has recently operated more through environmental than through either methods or regional subdisciplines. Use link for full text PDF.

When James Blaut was a graduate student at the Louisiana State University (LSU) during the 1950s, Hill Memorial Library housed the general stacks rather than special collections like the 22 linear feet of boxes labeled ‘‘Kniffen (Fred B) Papers’’.1 Half a century later, the letters and other materials that Kniffen saved help bring to life the process through which one of his doctoral students, namely Blaut, produced a dissertation. At the end of that process of research and writing, in 1958, Blaut had worked out a natural/social theory that would remain central to his thinking throughout the subsequent 42 years of his career. Moreover, because Kniffen was Carl Sauer’s third doctoral student and a key figure in the so-called Berkeley School, Blaut’s natural/social theory must relate in some way to the emergence of geographical cultural and political ecology, the two Sauer’s academic progeny championed in the decades following 1958.

While anything more than a tentative understanding of how Blaut’s early natural/social theorization relates to the subsequent trajectories of cultural and political ecology remains too ambitious a task relative to the brevity of this forum, some provisional conclusions become possible on the basis of two fundamental tasks. The first must be a description of the dissertation, with an emphasis on natural/social theorization. The second task must be, because the interactions between doctoral student and major professor are central to the genesis of any dissertation, an analysis of the relationship between
Blaut and Kniffen. Use link for full text PDF.

During the first decade of Environmental History, articles on Latin America have achieved equality and diversity. While understandably far fewer than articles on North America, those on Latin America represent a proportion roughly equal to those on Europe, Asia, and Africa. Also, they span a diversity of subregions, topics, and approaches. From Patagonia to the Rio Grande, from Andean slopes to Amazonian lowlands, they cover agricultural to industrial topics. And they approach them from several complementary perspectives: ecological, cultural, political, and economic.

Yet those same contributions do exhibit one notable bias: recentism. They disproportionately focus on the twentieth century, followed closely by an affinity for the nineteenth. In fact, twice as many articles focus on those two centuries as on all others combined.  Use link for full text PDF.

The article focuses on the role of native food production knowledge systems and practices in improving the agriculture of the West. For instance, the people of the Momposina wetlands of the Caribbean coast of South America classify animals primarily on the basis of their habitats, a more useful perspective for environmental conservation than modern taxonomists' focus on morphologies and phylogenetic relationships. Further, farmers who are trying to remain native to their places can draw on global resources and expertise to help them do so, as opposed to modern agriculture. Use link for full text PDF.

In Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997; hereafter GGS), Jared Diamond grandiosely claims that the current differentiation of the world into rich and poor regions has a simple explanation that everyone else but him has overlooked: differences in environment have determined the different “fates of human societies” (pp 3, 15, 25–26). Such a revival of the environmental determinist theory that the horrendous living conditions of millions of people are their natural fate would not ordinarily merit scholarly discussion, but since GGS won a Pulitzer Prize, many people have begun to believe that Diamond actually offers a credible explanation of an enormously deleterious phenomenon. GGS therefore has such great potential to promote harmful policies that it demands vigorous intellectual damage control. As a contribution to that effort, this essay not only demonstrates that GGS is junk science but proposes a model of the process through which so many people, including scientists who should know better, have come to think so much of such a pernicious book and, more generally, of neoenvironmental determinism. Use link for full text PDF.

Despite a congenital relationship between colonization and geographic scholarship, and despite the significance of colonial landscape transformation to current social and environmental challenges, a comprehensive geographic theory of colonialism and landscape remains incipient at best. In this article, a historical sketch provides some basic perspective on the scope appropriate to such a theory by outlining how the goals of scholarship on colonial landscape transformation have changed over the last century in relation to social and environmental context. The subsequent analysis compares and contrasts prior and existing conceptualizations of colonialism and landscape, each emphasizing particular elements and relationships at the expense of others but all thus jointly delineating what a more comprehensive framework must include. That analysis provides a preliminary basis for elaborating a comprehensive geographic theory of colonialism and landscape with an immediate focus on the Americas.  Use link for full text PDF.

European colonialism entailed material and conceptual landscape transformations that continue to define the parameters for postcolonial development. The major conceptual landscape transformation, termed the “pristine myth” for the Americas, remains a cultural foundation for the binary categorization of the world into a rationally progressive West versus an irrationally traditional non-West, thus driving the social and environmental contradictions of postcolonial development efforts. Despite much evidence that contradicts the pristine myth—the myth in postcolonial development—it retains a pernicious grip on the Western popular imagination because attempts to falsify it have not demonstrated its emergence through a colonial process that materially and conceptually transformed landscapes while simultaneously obscuring such transformation. Study of sixteenth-century landscape transformation in the environs of the port of Veracruz demonstrates the significance of a material-conceptual, positive-feedback process in the emergence of a myth of increasingly rational land-use over the course of the colonial and postcolonial periods, when, in fact, the opposite transformation has occurred. That landscape served as the beachhead for the Spanish colonization of North America and thus influenced the initial conceptualization of New Spain, as well as undergoing some of the earliest material transformations due to disease and livestock introductions. Although this occurred early in the process of global colonization, a detailed database of land-grant documents enables reconstruction of interactions among population, vegetation, livestock, and categories of land use, cover, and tenure. Identification of such key variables in a positive-feedback process that simultaneously transformed landscape and obscured that transformation tentatively provides the basis for a more general falsification of the myth in postcolonial development. Use link for full text PDF.

Mapping land grants to cattle and sheep ranchers in the lowlands of the Veracruz region of Mexico documents the dimensions of Spanish pastoralism and with additional analysis suggests the density of livestock. Although livestock density pushed the ecological limits of the region, there was little evidence of environmental degradation. Perhaps overgrazing was prevented by the seasonal move of livestock between the wet and dry savanna. Use link for full text PDF.

Regional, Holocene records hold particular relevance for understanding the reciprocal nature of global environmental change and one of its major human dimensions: “sustainable agriculture”, i.e., food production strategies which entail fewer causes of and are less susceptible to environmental change. In an epoch of accelerating anthropogenic transformation, those records reveal the protracted regional causes and consequences of change (often agricultural) in the global system as well as informing models of prehistoric, intensive agriculture which, because of long tenures and high productivities, suggest strategies for sustainable agricultural in the present. This study employs physiographic analysis and the palynological, geochemical record from cores of basin fill to understand the reciprocal relation between environmental and land-use change in the Gulf of Mexico tropical lowland, focusing on a coastal basin sensitive to sea-level change and containing vestiges of prehistoric settlement and wetland agriculture. Fossil pollen reveals that the debut of maize cultivation in the Laguna Catarina watershed dates to ca. 4100 BC, predating the earliest evidence for that cultivar anywhere else in the lowlands of Middle America. Such an early date for a cultivar so central to Neotropical agroecology and environmental change, suggests the urgency of further research in the study region. Moreover, the longest period of continuous agriculture in the basin lasted nearly three millennia (ca. 2400 BC-AD 550) despite eustatic sea-level rise. Geochemical fluxes reveal the reciprocity between land-use and environmental change: slope destabilization, basin aggradation, and eutrophication. The consequent theoretical implications pertain to both applied and basic research. Redeploying ancient agroecologies in dynamic environments necessitates reconstructing the changing operational contexts of putative high productivity and sustainability. Adjusting land use in the face of global warming and eustatic sea-level rise necessitates understanding sediment influxes to coastal basins which, in turn, depend on vegetation, climate, and land use in watersheds. Use link for full text PDF.

Despite the wealth of Mexican archival data pertinent to understanding the ecological interaction between livestock and landscape during the sixteenth century in New Spain, some fundamental methodological issues persist in the use of the mercedes, or land grants. The degree of completeness of the extant mercedes record and the de facto areal extents of the cattle and sheep estancias both remain uncertain. A cartographic method applied to mercedes for the central Veracruz lowlands addresses those issues and suggests a general method for rigorous analysis of the data base. That method demonstrates that the extant mercedes provide a nearly complete record and that the de facto areal extents of the estancias fairly closely reflected the legal stipulations. Use link for full text PDF.

Despite the dramatic landscape changes Mexico has undergone due to the introduction of cattle ranching by the Spaniards in the early sixteenth century, the ecological origins of that pastroecosystem have remained obscure. About 1521, Gregorio de Villalobos implanted an Andalusian-derived herding ecology in the Gulf Coast lowlands that involved seasonal movement of cattle between wetlands and hill lands. Land-grant records demonstrate that as the colonial economy expanded, the transhumant model proliferated and came into conflict with those native settlements that had survived the pandemics of the early sixteenth century. In circumventing viceregal laws meant to protect native cultures and ecologies, ranchers prevented their recovery; the consequences persist to the present. Use link for full text PDF.

Geographers have led the effort to better understand Prehispanic, intensive wetland agriculture (“raised fields”) in Mesoamerica. An overview of that literature provides the database for a subsequent spatial-temporal analysis and a resource for primary research. The analysis employs maps to identify changing relationships among distribution, hectareage, and morphometry in order to address wetland agriculture's role in the emergence of sedentism, urbanism, statism, and corollary environmental change; its interrelationships with other agroecosystems and ecological parameters; and its productivity and sustainability. The result is a modest benchmark in the research process which identifies significant variables, putative patterns, and several testable hypotheses, namely 1) that wherever social processes elicited dense population nucleations and hydrology was appropriate, farmers built wetland fields; 2) that the emergence of intensive wetland agriculture was ecologically interrelated with terracing, canal irrigation, and extensive agroecosystems; 3) that morphometric variation among wetland fields reflected contextual variables of hydrology, population density, taxation, and centralization of decision making; and 4) that intensive wetland agriculture in Mesoamerica was a productive and sustainable agroecosystem. Use link for full text PDF.

Conceptualizations of pre-Hispanic staple transport remain underdeveloped. Conventional wisdom has long maintained that while “prestige goods” could demand long-distance transport, staple transport was short distance. A quantitative model reveals the fallacy of that argument and establishes the possibility of long-distance, overland staple transport in Mesoamerica by using maize tribute transport between Zempoala and Tenochtitlan as an example. This conclusion has implications for understanding Mesoamerican interregional exchange, ecology, and society.  Use link for full text PDF.

Some prominent Mesoamericanists long considered lowland central Veracruz to have been agriculturally unproductive prior to the Totonacs' construction of a canal-irrigation system at Zempoala during the Middle Postclassic period (A. D. 1200-1400). This evaluation reflects a long-standing negative predisposition toward tropical lowlands and a preoccupation with the significance of canal irrigation in the emergence of urban societies. However, an appreciation of mesoenvironments and their ecological interrelations has led to a reevaluation of agriculture in central Veracruz. In wetlands to the south of Zempoala, evidence of canals and planting platforms supporting maize cultivation by A. D. 500 demonstrates that people were intensively cultivating that mesoenvironment by the Classic period (A. D. 1-850). Moreover, vestiges of sloping-field terraces occur throughout some 1,000 km-2 of piedmont west of those wetlands. Direct evidence for crops and a chronology are still lacking for these latter fields, but ethnohistorical data and plant ecology suggest cotton, maize, agave, and a Prehispanic origin.

Algunos destacados mesoamericanistas han considerado a la parte central del estado de Veracruz como un área improductiva desde el punto de vista agrícola en tiempos anteriores a la construcción de sistemas de riego en Zempoala por los totonacos, a mediados del horizonte Postclásico (1200-1400 D. C.). Dicha evaluación refleja una predisposición negativa hacia las tierras bajas tropicales, así como una preocupación por el significado de la irrigación por canales en el proceso de formación de sociedades urbanas. Aparentemente, el clima subhúmedo, la vegetación de sabana y el sistema de drenaje caracterizado por una profunda incisión en el terreno, son factores que no favorecen una alta densidad de población ni el desarrollo de sistemas agrícolas intensivos. Sin embargo, una apreciación de los mesoambientes y sus interrelaciones ecológicas ha sido una tarea útil para la reevaluación de la agricultura en el centro de Veracruz. En las tierras inundables al sur de Zempoala, las evidencias de canales y plataformas de cultivo que sostuvieron el cultivo de maíz antes del 500 D. C., demuestran que este mesoambiente fue intensivamente cultivado durante el horizonte Clásico (1-850 D. C.). Además, algunos vestigios de terrazas en pendiente aparecen en un área de aproximadamente 1.000 km-2 sobre el piamonte que se encuentra al oeste de las tierras inundables. Sobre las laderas que componen los interfluvios que separan las barrancas, se extienden algunos alineamientos de rocas que siguen el contorno de las pendientes suaves, formando redes continuas en una extensión de cientos de hectáreas. El contexto ecológico y la morfología de estos rasgos sugiere un análogo: el metepantli, el cual ha sido usado como terraza en pendiente en el altiplano mexicano. Esta técnica agrícola ha servido durante mucho tiempo para incrementar la profundidad del suelo, acelerar la infiltración, y retenar la humedad en áreas subhúmedas. Necesidades similares motivaron a los agricultores a construir terrazas en pendiente en el centro de Veracruz. Queda todavía por conocer las evidencias directas de los cultivos y la cronología de estas terrazas en pendiente. Los datos etnohistóricos y la ecología vegetal sugieren la producción de algodón, maíz, maguey, y un origen prehispánico de estas terrazas. Por último, cabe afirmar que los datos obtenidos en las excavaciones podrán proveer material para coroborar estas hipótesis.  Use link for full text PDF.

You can find this website at http://sites.google.com/site/atlanticnetworksproject. It shares the results of my ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowhip project, a Web-based database using the logbooks of vessels that participated in Atlantic networks. Unlike most other such efforts in the humanities, this database was developed as a Geographic Information System (GIS) and thereby is intrinsically spatial. It focuses on mapping the routes of vessels between about 1750 and 1900 that carried cargos of coffee, sugar, spices, gold, and many other products as well as enslaved Africans between Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, South America, North America, and Asia.

This blog shares news and notes about my various teaching, research, and service efforts. Most of the posts will relate to courses I teach and to the Geography BA major. I am hopeful that the value of the blog as a whole will be greater than the sum of the posts–hence the blog’s title. If you are looking for more on my research, the other blogs and websites will be of more interest.

You can find this blog at http://aclsproject.blogspot.com. Its goal was to share my ongoing efforts while an ACLS Digital Innovation Fellow in 2012-13 to initiate a Web-based database using the logbooks of vessels that participated in Atlantic networks.

"This new course derives from my experience as a 2012-13 ACLS Digital Innovation Fellow (https://sites.google.com/site/atlanticnetworksproject/home/educational).

It is for students of any field in the humanities with no prior GIS experience and will combine hands-on exercises with discussion of readings and a GIS project of each student's own choosing. Students in Historical and Cultural Geography and Anthropology, Literature, History, Languages, Philosophy, Religious Studies, and other disciplines will learn how to acquire, prepare, map, and analyze information relevant to spatial patterns and processes in their fields. The goal is to publish those projects on the Internet (examples @ www.arcgis.com/home/gallery.html), acquire new skills and ways of thinking about your major, and  enhance its relevance in "the digital economy."

We will use the new ArcGIS 10, which provides an innovative  temporal function, on the computers in the classroom.

The required text will be The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship (http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=287756).

We will also draw readings from the open-access edition of Debates in the Digital Humanities (http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu).

You can take a look at the below poster for more information and check this space for updates over the summer, including a syllabus.

Enrollment is limited by the number of computers in the classroom.  Early enrollment will assure you a spot."