Different Reasons for Irrigation Development in Mesoamerica

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Testing/Further Research

            With this website, my goal is to answer the research question I chose which focuses on the different hypotheses regarding the reasons behind irrigation development in Mesoamerica because they originally lacked an interconnected and unified irrigation system. There were two possible hypotheses/explanations I came up with as to why irrigation developed in Mesoamerica: the change in climate and the domestication of crops. I obtained these hypotheses by reading "Chapter 10: Origins of Food-Producing Economies in the Americas" in our course textbook called The Human Past: World Prehistory & the Development of Human Societies (4th ed.) by Christopher Scarre. Looking at the two hypotheses that I came up with, both of them can essentially be tested to gather more data on the exact or general dates when irrigation development first began in Mesoamerica. To gather this data, we can use AMS dating in order to compare when climate change occurred versus when irrigation development started in Mesoamerica. 

            Focusing on the climate change hypothesis I came up with, the climate was originally cold and wet which then developed into a warmer and drier atmosphere. This change into a warmer and drier climate occurred around 7500 BCE as stated in our textbook. In order to test and see if this hypothesis is true, testing data found in my second hypothesis about the domestication of crops is beneficial. An important find when looking at my hypothesis of the domestication of crops is dating maize cobs found at Guilá Naquitz in Oaxaca, Mexico date. AMS radiocarbon dating was used to date these maize cobs in order to find the precise date of when the domestication of maize and other crops began. After dating these maize cobs, data came back that these cobs dated back to 4300 BCE! When climate change first began verses when the domestication of crops occurred did not happen suddenly it took thousands of years for these ancient Mesoamerican civilizations to domesticate various crops.

AMS Radiocarbon Dating

            Accelerator mass spectrometry dating, or AMS dating, was developed in the late 1970s. This type of dating "directly measures the mass of different isotopes" in order to give researchers an exact date of an artifact or other object (Levine & Stanish 2014:825). Archaeologists have done much research on dating maize cobs because there is a huge debate in the archaeology field of when the domestication of maize and other crops began. Further research needs to be done on other crops in order to build a more complete archaeological record on when irrigation development exactly began in order to better understand the agricultural systems of Mesoamerica.


Breakdown of what is used for AMS Dating
Source: Scientific Art Tests