Jeffrey R. Parsons, Prehispanic Settlement Patterns in the North
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 39 (2013) 139e151 143 Jeffrey R. Parsons, Prehispanic Settlement Patterns in the North- Fortunately the next cohort of settlement archaeologists western Valley of Mexico: The Zumpango Region. Ann Arbor, Museum acquired broader horizons and achieved more inspiring results, in of Anthropology Publications, University of Michigan, 2008, Mexico and Mesopotamia, where the key volume of Robert McC. xviii þ 438, US$44 paperback. Adams (Heartland of Cities: Surveys of ancient Settlement and Land Use of the Central Plain of the Euphrates, Chicago, 1981) remains an This attractive volume documents part of a major archaeological intellectual staple. In the meantime, spatial archaeology had turned survey of 1960e73 in the northern Basin of Mexico, part of which was to urban phenomena, but in a disciplinary mode and with insuffi- a lacustrine habitat in prehistoric times. Although the theoretical cient ethnocultural sensitivity (K.W. Butzer, ‘Other perspectives on framework is dated, the published record is important since the urbanism’, pp. 77e92, in J. Marcus, J.A. Sabloff, eds. The Ancient City, Zumpango area is now intensely disturbed, with most major sites School for Advanced Research, 2008). destroyed by industrial plowing. The project is of interest here because it was part of a basin-wide survey, which included Teoti- Karl W. Butzer huacan, directed by William Sanders and believed at the time to be University of Texas at Austin, USA state of the art ‘settlement archaeology’, an empirical and landscape alternative to L.R. Binford’s theory-driven positivism (see W.T. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2012.11.010 Sanders, J.
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