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The maguey plant plays a central role in cultural adaptation and cultural change in highland Mesoamerica. This book is a comprehensive study of the plant and its use. Includes chapters on maguey cultivation and pulque production, maguey fiber processing and spinning, and the archaeological implications of the available ethnographic and historic information about maguey utilization.

Based on his study of the nearly vanished aquatic economy of Chimalhuacán in the Valley of Mexico, Parsons describes the surviving vestiges of aquatic insect collection and fishing and considers their developmental and archaeological implications within a broad context of historical, ethnographic, biological, ecological, and archaeological information from Mexico, North and South America, the Near East, and Africa. Activities, implements, artifacts, and landscapes are richly illustrated, in many cases with the author’s own photos and a number of vintage photographs. The study concludes that aquatic resources were fully complementary with agricultural products during prehispanic times in Mesoamerica where a pastoral economy was absent.

In the 1980s, a few traditional saltmakers were still manufacturing several kinds of salt in the eastern Valley of Mexico. This in-depth study of the methodology of this dying craft includes a comparative study of pre-industrial saltmaking around the world and considers the implications of this knowledge for future archaeological research.