Fire and Salt: Human Niche Construction and Holocene Landscape Evolution on the Pacific Coast of Southern Mesoamerica [Hardcover]

Fire and Salttraces 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. These threats may pale, however, in comparison to the imminent threat posed by sea-level rise over the coming decades, especially if worst-case scenarios come to pass. By inventorying resources, including cultural resources, this book makes a first step toward mitigating the effects of environmental degradation that appear all but unavoidable.Hector Neffis a professor of anthropology at California State University, Long Beach. He is the coeditor ofCeramics of the Indigenous Cultures of South America: Studies of Production and Exchange through Compositional Analysis. “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 ofArchaeology and Identity on the Pacific Coast and Southern Hil³%