PROJECT RVEAL: A SPATIALLY INTENSIVE PALEOENVIRONMENTAL RECONSTRUCTION OF HUMAN-LAND INTERACTIONS

The Lower Rio Verde Valley, Oaxaca, Mexico has been the focus of intensive archaeological exploration for the past twenty years. Through this ongoing research we have an excellent understanding of the valley’s cultural history and through a companion geomorphic and paleopedological study we have reconstructed the changing fluvial history of the valley and coastal region in great detail. Initial occupation of the valley appears to have occurred by the Archaic period (4700 cal B.P. ). Significant demographic expansion occurred by the Late Formative period (2350-2065 cal B.P.) following floodplain aggradation, alluviation, and a change in stream morphology from a meandering to a braided form. During the Classic (1620-1060 cal B.P.) and Postclassic periods (1060-505 cal B.P.), major shifts in settlement and land use occurred, primarily from the productive floodplain to the piedmont (which today has limited productivity). These changes appear to have occurred as a result of political developments, rather than responses to climatic or landscape change. Paleoenvironmental reconstructions from 2 floodplain sites, approximately 5km apart indicate periods of land use and abandonment by local farmers through time; however this data provides insufficient spatial intensity for comparison with the archaeological data thus precluding examination of human decision making involv­ing land use, subsistence, and labor allocation which occur at much finer spatial and temporal scales.

In order to rectify this knowledge gap we have developed and instigated Project RVEAL: The Río Verde Early Agricultural Landscape Project. To this end we have collected cores from multiple sedimentary depositional sites (lacustrine, estuarine and archaeological) and are undertaking multi-proxy paleoecological analyses (e.g. pollen, phytoliths, charcoal). This regionally dense suite of sites will enhance our spatial and temporal understanding of the local vegetation and human manipulation of the land for agriculture. This paleoecological dataset will complement and enhance the existing rich archaeological and geomorphological datasets. In this presentation we present new data and relate the findings to regional cultural developments.