Fire and Salt
Fire and Salt
Human Niche Construction and Holocene Landscape Evolution on the Pacific Coast of Southern Mesoamerica
“A unique and compelling analysis of the links between environment, technology, and human adaptation over the course of millennia.”—Michael W. Love, coeditor of Archaeology and Identity on the Pacific Coast and Southern Highlands of Mesoamerica
Fire and Salt traces the history of how human activities have helped build the littoral landscape of Pacific coastal southern Mesoamerica over the past five thousand years. Evidence comes from airborne Lidar, surface reconnaissance and excavation within the mangrove-estuary zone, sediment coring, and a chronological framework encompassing nine ceramic complexes extending from Early Formative to Historic times.
In presenting the landscape as it exists today, this volume also describes what may soon be lost. The mangrove forests harbor a record of the human past, a focus of the present volume, but they also shield the coast from storms and tsunamis, provide nurseries for commercially important marine species, and store large amounts of carbon.
“Hector Neff’s offers a unique and compelling analysis of the links between environment, technology, and human adaptation over the course of millennia. He brings to bear important and detailed new information and synthesizes it with older work. His distinctive contribution is to analyze how pyrotechnology, the basis of both salt production and pottery, impacted the coastal environmental zone and how the interaction between fire and salt led to the development of Mesoamerica’s most enigmatic pottery, Plumbate.”—Michael W. Love, co-editor of Archaeology and Identity on the Pacific Coast and Southern Highlands of Mesoamerica
Hector Neff is a professor of anthropology at California State University, Long Beach. He is the coeditor of Ceramics of the Indigenous Cultures of South America: Studies of Production and Exchange through Compositional Analysis.
