Jeffrey R. Parsons

Half a century ago, when archaeologist Jeffrey R. Parsons began fieldwork in Mexico and Peru, he could not know that many of the sites he studied were on the brink of destruction. The rural landscapes through which he traveled were, in many cases, destined to be plowed under and paved over. In Remembering Archaeological Fieldwork in Mexico and Peru, 1961–2003, Parsons offers readers a chance to see archaeological sites that were hundreds or thousands of years old and have since vanished or been irrevocably altered. Hundreds of photographs, accompanied by descriptions, illustrate the sites, the people, and the landscapes that Parsons encountered during four decades of research in these regions. Parsons is now emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and has published many archaeological monographs as well as ethnographic research on salt, fish, and other items used for traditional subsistence in Mexico. Foreword by Richard I. Ford.

This monograph presents data from a systematic regional archaeological survey carried out over an area of ca. 600 square kilometers during May through December 1973 by the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology.

Based on his study of the nearly vanished aquatic economy of Chimalhuacán in the Valley of Mexico, Parsons describes the surviving vestiges of aquatic insect collection and fishing and considers their developmental and archaeological implications within a broad context of historical, ethnographic, biological, ecological, and archaeological information from Mexico, North and South America, the Near East, and Africa. Activities, implements, artifacts, and landscapes are richly illustrated, in many cases with the author’s own photos and a number of vintage photographs. The study concludes that aquatic resources were fully complementary with agricultural products during prehispanic times in Mesoamerica where a pastoral economy was absent.

In the 1980s, a few traditional saltmakers were still manufacturing several kinds of salt in the eastern Valley of Mexico. This in-depth study of the methodology of this dying craft includes a comparative study of pre-industrial saltmaking around the world and considers the implications of this knowledge for future archaeological research.

This report is a descriptive tabulation of settlement pattern data collected by University of Michigan projects in the Valley of Mexico between 1967 and 1973. Data is presented in tabular form for hundreds of sites, including information on environmental zones, elevation, rainfall, soil depth, phases of occupation, and more.

In this volume, the authors present research on three important classes of artifacts from Mexico: Michael W. Spence and Jeffrey R. Parsons report on prehispanic obsidian exploitation in Central Mexico and Mary Hrones Parsons writes about Aztec figurines and spindle whorls from the Teotihuacán Valley.