Abstract
In the early 1960s Richard Macneish designed a groundbreaking regional archaeological study focused on Mexico’s Tehuacán Valley. Enlisting the collaboration of specialists in paleobotany, zoology, geology, geography, hydrology, lithic technology, ethnography, and ethnohistory, MacNeish and his colleagues applied the results of their Tehuacán field and laboratory research to a processual-ecological model through which they fashioned a wide-ranging reconstruction of sociocultural evolution in that arid highland valley. Beginning with the arrival of nomadic hunter-gatherers, their story continued through the development of agriculture, settled village life, and increasing sociopolitical complexity, right up to the time of the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of indigenous