Under the guidance of Dr. Helen Pollard, Christopher Stawski will examine the settlement of the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin (LPB) by the Tarascan Empire from the Late Preclassic (100 B.C.) to the time of Spanish Conquest (circa A.D. 1525). Located in the highlands of the Mexican state of Michoacán, the LPB was the core of the Tarascan Empire, a major rival of the Aztecs. This lake basin has been the focus of not only archaeological and anthropological research, but also geological, geographical, ethnohistoric, and paleoecological research. Mr. Stawski's research will combine all these types of data into a multi-disciplinary, multi-scalar analysis that will explore the process of settlement and the ways in which the Tarascans and their ancestors modified, adapted and cultivated the landscape.
The research is important because the region underwent significant environmental change over this time period and the work will show how humans living in a traditional society responded to this change to maintain a functioning and expanding social system. The work is directly important because it will increase understanding of many societies in multiple parts of today's world.
Due to firsthand accounts from the Spanish, and the rich ethnohistoric and archaeological data, much is known about the Tarascan State during the Late Postclassic time period that led into the Spanish conquest (A.D. 1350 to 1525). However, what is still relatively unknown is the manner in which the lake basin became the core of a major Mesoamerican empire. The goal of this research is to provide a longitudinal study of the peopling of the lake basin, including analysis that will answer questions of how and why certain communities were settled, moved, or grew during certain time periods. Key to this is the nature of the human-environmental relationships in the lake basin, and how they changed the foundations of the socio-political setting of the area. Through the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), high resolution satellite imagery, and an archaeological database that has collected and accumulated data from the past 40 years of work in the LPB, Mr.Stawski will be able to map and analyze the communities and landscape over a period of 1,600 years. This will provide a means to determine the variables that affected cultural transformations, environmental fluctuations, and state emergence at varying scales and with multiple lines of evidence.
This research will have a broader impact, both through its intellectual merit as well as on the social science community. It will continue a long tradition of multi-disciplinary work, and contribute to on-going collaborative efforts between American, Mexican and French researchers in archaeology, anthropology, history and the physical sciences. The project should make a direct contribution to the literature on human-environmental relationships and the emergence of secondary states. Furthermore, this research will be an outlet for the accumulated data of 40 years of research in the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin, and will be able to provide new and updated data for the region that has yet to be published and presented. This proposed research would provide a means for this data to be disseminated to other academic and professional forums, in hopes that this renewed interest in West Mexican anthropology, archaeology, and ecology will spark an international and inter-disciplinary movement towards intellectual collaboration.
The primary goal of this research was to determine the structure of the settlement system for the prehispanic Lake Pátzcuaro Basin, over a period of approximately 1,600 years leading up to the Spanish conquest of the Tarascan Empire. A secondary goal was to explain the role of the Tarascan state formation and the state’s political economy in the latter years of settlement in the Basin. In order to perform a settlement systems analysis, specific satellite imagery was utilized for intensive spatial analysis within the study area. These data sets were vital to the analytical framework, and such an analysis could not have taken place without the satellite imagery provided by the funds awarded by NSF. The method used in this research specifically required the satellite imagery and digital elevation model in order to reconstruct the Prehispanic landscape of the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin. This was done through a creation of a cost surface model, which realistically depicts human movement across the landscape. From this, the imagery aided in the modeling of human interaction between communities and aspects of the landscape, including areas relating to subsistence and resource acquisition, such as the lakeshore and agricultural land. Through complex spatial statistics, such as cost-distance analysis and gravity modeling, the settlement analysis was able to model how and why humans were actively choosing and settling across the landscape, and how the emergence of the state was ultimately attained given the social, political and climatic environment. Ultimately, this analysis illustrates that the settlement system for the LPB is much more complex than initially hypothesized, and that active decision-making, based on a variety of variables, on the part of communities structured settlement. The analysis shows a high level of interaction between communities and the landscape, which displays the complex human-environment relationships that defined the southern extent of the lake basin. The lakeshore and fluctuating lake levels provided a complex environment to attempt to model, especially when the communities were mapped and added to the analysis. However, it is evident that the communities and the landscape form a symbiotic system that can only be discussed in tandem. This dissertation aided in further investigating these vital relationships, and provided a unique and useful method, through the utilization of satellite imagery, and GIS and spatial analysis to further explore the evolution of coupled human-environment systems. In conclusion, this dissertation proposes a much more complex view of settlement than previously hypothesized. Through the use of a detailed method that included community and landscape reconstruction and intense spatial analyses, a model of settlement was proposed for both an inter-regional and regional scale. The significance of this research is two-fold; it has compiled and utilized data, from various sources and field seasons, into one research project, and presented a holistic study of settlement for the lake basin. The research has also created new data and methods from which further analysis and research can be created, including research on Prehispanic landscapes, communities, human-environment relationships, and settlement and subsistence. Given the multiple scales of this model, and its appropriateness for application outside the basin as well, it stands to reason that this model may be used as a template for future research to ultimately strengthen and test the settlement systems model for the region and macro region, and further our understanding of Prehispanic communities, human- environment relationships, and the emergence of the Tarascan state.
