Abstract
Recent remote sensing research in the Tlalixcoyan basin, Veracruz, has identified patterns of raised fields and public civic-ceremonial plaza groups that suggest a local and decentralized strategy of cooperation to develop hydraulic and agricultural resources. This perspective provides support for Scarborough and Lucero’s (2010) cross-cultural conceptualization of hydraulic strategies in the semi-tropics, but we note some exceptions to their model as well. We conclude based on the remotely sensed data that (1) most of the interconnected field systems are too large or complex for a single family or lineage to have built and maintained alone; (2) the Tlalixcoyan settlement system is divided into clusters that likely represent social groupings akin to administrative districts; (3) each residential cluster possessed its own public civic-ceremonial plaza group; (4) each plaza group could have provided the seat of cooperation in the creation and maintenance of common-pool resources like raised fields; and (5) despite the implication of local hydraulic management within districts, the region as a whole presents a hierarchical settlement distribution with the Tlalixcoyan Monumental Complex at the top. The last two points represent central hypotheses generated from the remote sensing data that will be tested in future field research.
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