Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica was the only civilization in the ancient world which flourished without access to major domesticated animals such as horses, cattle, pigs, and sheep (Diamond, 1999). Therefore, fishing, hunting, and gathering had to provide all the nutritional complement to agriculture (Parsons, 2006, 2010, 2011; Rojas, 1998), and aquatic environments were by far the most productive landscapes in Mesoamerica (Parsons, 2010, 2011). Ethnohistorical and ethnographic research has allowed us to characterize the Mesoamerican aquatic lifeway by means of three basic subsistence activities: (a) fishing, which included many edible water species besides fish; (b) hunting, including aquatic species such as waterfowl, reptiles, amphibians, and many others, as well as terrestrial species from the lake basin and the nearby hills; and (c) gathering of plants obtained for nutritional, medicinal, and many other purposes, such as building material and basket weaving, and finally insects and...
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Williams, E. (2014). Aquatic Environments in Mesoamerica: Pre-Hispanic Subsistence Activities. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_10090-1
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