Andrew Sluyter

Colonialism and Landscape in the Americas: Material/Conceptual Transformations and Continuing Consequences

Despite a congenital relationship between colonization and geographic scholarship, and despite the significance of colonial landscape transformation to current social and environmental challenges, a comprehensive geographic theory of colonialism and landscape remains incipient at best. In this article, a historical sketch provides some basic perspective on the scope appropriate to such a theory by outlining how the goals of scholarship on colonial landscape transformation have changed over the last century in relation to social and environmental context. The subsequent analysis compares and contrasts prior and existing conceptualizations of colonialism and landscape, each emphasizing particular elements and relationships at the expense of others but all thus jointly delineating what a more comprehensive framework must include. That analysis provides a preliminary basis for elaborating a comprehensive geographic theory of colonialism and landscape with an immediate focus on the Americas.

The Making of the Myth in Postcolonial Development: Material‐Conceptual Landscape Transformation in Sixteenth‐Century Veracruz

European colonialism entailed material and conceptual landscape transformations that continue to define the parameters for postcolonial development. The major conceptual landscape transformation, termed the “pristine myth” for the Americas, remains a cultural foundation for the binary categorization of the world into a rationally progressive West versus an irrationally traditional non-West, thus driving the social and environmental contradictions of postcolonial development efforts. Despite much evidence that contradicts the pristine myth—the myth in postcolonial development—it retains a pernicious grip on the Western popular imagination because attempts to falsify it have not demonstrated its emergence through a colonial process that materially and conceptually transformed landscapes while simultaneously obscuring such transformation. Study of sixteenth-century landscape transformation in the environs of the port of Veracruz demonstrates the significance of a material-conceptual, positive-feedback proces...

Environmentalist thinking and/in geography

In recent years, a new type of determinist environmental thinking has emerged. It can be understood to be one strand in a much broader realm of ‘environment talk’. Many human geographers have expressed a combination of scepticism and surprise at the apparently inexorable rise of the neo-environmentalist arguments which differ from early twentieth-century environmental determinism yet continue to draw upon biologistic accounts of human culture. Although geography has in recent years been at the forefront of the academic discussions of environmental change in relation to science, institutional context, political costs and human impacts, the discipline nevertheless has to contend with a widespread misperception of the place of environment in human affairs and the world’s future. This Forum discusses the context for the rise of, and consequences of, determinist accounts.

Regional, holocene records of the human dimension of global change: sea-level and land-use change in prehistoric Mexico

Abstract Regional, Holocene records hold particular relevance for understanding the reciprocal nature of global environmental change and one of its major human dimensions: “sustainable agriculture”, i.e., food production strategies which entail fewer causes of and are less susceptible to environmental change. In an epoch of accelerating anthropogenic transformation, those records reveal the protracted regional causes and consequences of change (often agricultural) in the global system as well as informing models of prehistoric, intensive agriculture which, because of long tenures and high productivities, suggest strategies for sustainable agricultural in the present. This study employs physiographic analysis and the palynological, geochemical record from cores of basin fill to understand the reciprocal relation between environmental and land-use change in the Gulf of Mexico tropical lowland, focusing on a coastal basin sensitive to sea-level change and containing vestiges of prehistoric settlement and wetland agriculture. Fossil pollen reveals that the debut of maize cultivation in the Laguna Catarina watershed dates to ca. 4100 BC, predating the earliest evidence for that cultivar anywhere else in the lowlands of Middle America. Such an early date for a cultivar so central to Neotropical agroecology and environmental change, suggests the urgency of further research in the study region. Moreover, the longest period of continuous agriculture in the basin lasted nearly three millennia (ca. 2400 BC-AD 550) despite eustatic sea-level rise. Geochemical fluxes reveal the reciprocity between land-use and environmental change: slope destabilization, basin aggradation, and eutrophication. The consequent theoretical implications pertain to both applied and basic research. Redeploying ancient agroecologies in dynamic environments necessitates reconstructing the changing operational contexts of putative high productivity and sustainability. Adjusting land use in the face of global warming and eustatic sea-level rise necessitates understanding sediment influxes to coastal basins which, in turn, depend on vegetation, climate, and land use in watersheds.

Analysis of maize (Zea mays subsp. mays) pollen: Normalizing the effects of microscope‐slide mounting media on diameter determinations

Abstract Maize (Zea mays subsp. mays) dominates the record of prehistoric agriculture in the Neotropics. Nonetheless, many significant questions of Zea systematics and evolution persist. Palynology provides a record central to addressing those questions, but determining pollen grain diameter remains a significant methodological issue: diameter is a key characteristic in identification, and diameter seems to be space‐time dependent — the latter phenomenon but little understood. One issue in analyzing diameter is the confounding effect of microscope‐slide mounting media. This study provides correction factors to normalize diameter among silicon oil, glycerine jelly, and acrylic resin (du Pont Elvacite), the last coming into increasing use without previous study of its effect on pollen grain size.

Long-Distance Staple Transport in Western Mesoamerica: Insights Through Quantitative Modeling

Conceptualizations of pre-Hispanic staple transport remain underdeveloped. Conventional wisdom has long maintained that while “prestige goods” could demand long-distance transport, staple transport was short distance. A quantitative model reveals the fallacy of that argument and establishes the possibility of long-distance, overland staple transport in Mesoamerica by using maize tribute transport between Zempoala and Tenochtitlan as an example. This conclusion has implications for understanding Mesoamerican interregional exchange, ecology, and society.

THE RECENT INTELLECTUAL STRUCTURE OF GEOGRAPHY

An active learning project in an introductory graduate course used multidimensional scaling of the name index in Geography in America at the Dawn of the 21st Century, by Gary Gaile and Cort Willmott, to reveal some features of the disciplines recent intellectual structure relevant to the relationship between human and physical geography. Previous analyses, dating to the 1980s, used citation indices or Association of American Geographers specialty‐group rosters to conclude that either the regional or the methods and environmental subdisciplines bridge human and physical geography. The name index has advantages over those databases, and its analysis reveals that the minimal connectivity that occurs between human and physical geography has recently operated more through environmental than through either methods or regional subdisciplines.

Renegotiating Barbuda's commons: recent changes in Barbudan open-range cattle herding

Barbuda remains little developed and sparsely populated relative to its neighbors in the Leeward Lesser Antilles, a rather extraordinary and relatively unknown Caribbean place. Much of its distinctiveness derives from the communal land-tenure system, itself rooted in three centuries of open-range cattle herding. Yet, as revealed through interviews, newspaper archives, and landscape observations, open-range cattle herding has declined over the past three decades, with related changes in land tenure. As the new Barbuda Land Act came into effect in 2008, codifying the communal tenure system, the very landscape elements that manifest open-range herding have become obscure. In particular, the rock-walled stockwells have become largely defunct, many of the walls lie in ruins or have been entirely consumed by the crusher that converted them into gravel to surface roads. With the principal land use that had supported communal control largely out of practice, usufruct access to land now largely obsolete, the new act might have little actual impact in preserving Barbudas uniqueness.

(Post-) K New Orleans and the Hispanic Atlantic: Geographic method and meaning

Abstract An explicitly methodological case study conducted for a multidisciplinary symposium on the Atlantic relationships of pre- and (post-)Katrina Louisiana illustrates some methods that geographers might usefully contribute to an emergent Atlantic Studies. Three general types of method apply to a substantive question related to the hurricane that struck on the morning of 29 August 2005: Is (post-)Katrina New Orleans emerging as a Hispanic place in contrast to its predominant pre-Katrina associations with the Black and French Atlantics? One type of method involves spatial analysis of data, whether social survey data such as census enumerations, environmental data such as flood depth and persistence, or others. Another relies on fieldwork that combines informal interviews with observation of landscape elements, both those diagnostic of past relational processes and those suggestive of emerging ones. The third employs analysis of long-term dynamics in the relationships among places, in this particular case New Orleans, the Canary Islands, Honduras, and other places of the Hispanic Atlantic. That mix of methods makes understandable some of the processes driving the emerging Hispanic geography of New Orleans, such as new Hispanic in-migrants creating a place for themselves among the Vietnamese of New Orleans East. The question of whether New Orleans is really emerging as a Hispanic place thus begins to become much more meaningful than the categorical claims to date, which have cited a relatively minor increase in the proportion of a social survey category termed Hispanic, while ignoring the much more significant shifting location of New Orleans within the network of relational processes that comprise the Hispanic Atlantic.

Sixteenth-century soil carbon sequestration rates based on Mexican land-grant documents

A significant gap in our understanding of global change involves the linkages between historical land-use and land-cover change (LULCC), Holocene terrestrial carbon (C) pool fluxes, and climate change. To address that research problem, this method uses land grants for sheep ranches awarded in early colonial (1521–1620 CE) Mexico to quantify the amount of land converted from cropland to pastureland. Soil is the largest terrestrial C pool, and converting cropland to pastureland significantly increases soil C sequestration rates, thereby reducing atmospheric C. The land grants and associated archival documents contain location-specific information about soils, vegetation, hydrology, and other variables that make it possible to map the ranches in a Geographic Information System (GIS) and quantify LULCCs and terrestrial C pools over time and space. The results demonstrate the utility of such archival documents to research on Holocene global change, indicate that LULCC during Mexico’s colonial period increased the region’s soil C sequestration rate, and confirm previous research that has suggested that transformations associated with European colonization of the Americas acted as an anthropogenic contributor to the period of moderate cooling known as the ‘Little Ice Age’ (1550–1850 CE).