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Now notorious for its aridity and air pollution, Mexico City was once part of a flourishing lake environment. In nearby Xochimilco, Native Americans modified the lakes to fashion a distinctive and remarkably abundant aquatic society, one that provided a degree of ecological autonomy for local residents, enabling them to protect their communities' integrity, maintain their way of life, and preserve many aspects of their cultural heritage. While the area's ecology allowed for a wide array of socioeconomic and cultural continuities during colonial rule, demographic change came to affect the ecological basis of the lakes; pastoralism and new ways of using and modifying the lakes began to make a mark on the watery landscape and on the surrounding communities. In this fascinating study, Conway explores Xochimilco using native-language documents, which serve as a hallmark of this continuity and a means to trace patterns of change.

When the anthropologist Paul Kirchhoff proposed a new definition of Mesoamerica in a landmark study from 1943, the first common characteristics he identified were technological and agricultural: the use of the digging-stick (coa) and “the construction of gardens by reclaiming land from lakes (chinampas).” For thousands of years, Native peoples across Mesoamerica drew on their technological innovations to devise bountiful kinds of farming that have been as diverse as the environments in which they were created. All of their farming systems required some degree of intervention in nature, be it through domesticating plants, tilling the soil, or altering the physical environment by making terraces and harnessing water supplies. On an essential level, then, technology and agriculture went hand in hand. Of the many kinds of Mesoamerican farming, the one that arguably modified the environment the most was a distinctive kind of wetland agriculture in which Nahuas—or Aztecs, the speakers of the Nahuatl language—constructed raised garden beds, known as chinampas, in the shallow, freshwater lakes of the Basin of Mexico. At the heart of this zone of wetland agriculture was the ancient city of Xochimilco. There the raised gardens filled the surrounding lake of the same name, and eventually came to cover a vast area of some 120 square kilometers. The construction and the intensive cultivation of the chinampas required a considerable investment of time and effort, a good deal of technical expertise, and the mastery of specialist skills and knowledge, including hydrology and engineering so as to manage water levels in the lakes through complex irrigation works. The intensive farming of the fertile, well-irrigated gardens, which could be cultivated year round, yielded sizable harvests of maize and other crops. So productive was chinampa agriculture that scholars have considered it one of the most abundant kinds of farming ever devised. As a technological innovation and environmental adaptation, the chinampas were crucial to changes in Mexican history: they generated surpluses sufficient for urbanization and the rise of Tenochtitlan, one of the early modern world’s great cities, as well as the expansion of the Aztec Empire. The chinampas remained important for the provisioning of the capital long after the Spanish conquest, and in spite of the desiccation of the Basin of Mexico, they are still cultivated in a few places today.

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Amos Megged offers fascinating insights into the history of colonial Mexico by examining the daily lives of single plebeian women of mixed ancestries from 1560 until 1750. Megged observes a striking tendency among single women, including those who chose to maintain relationships outside wedlock, to forge close connections with one another and to find succour from their solidarity. He explores the circumstances by which women became or chose to be single -all too often following abusive and coercive relationships with men -while also considering the women's efforts to acquire the necessities of life, raise children and contend with colonial institutions. Beyond the alternative arrangements they devised to live outside marriage, Megged also considers the single women's shared cultural experiences, including various ritual practices such as love magic.Megged's research is thorough and diligent. He utilises a range of documentary materials held in several archives, most notably Mexico City's Archivo General de la Nación. The core of his research relies on judicial records about matrimony, parental rights, inheritance, and alleged sexual, moral and religious transgressions. Most of the documents come from the jurisdictions of Puebla de los Ángeles and Mexico City. He argues that these urban contexts were vital to the formation of women's collective associations, and yet he also draws on a number of other examples from smaller communities like Huejotzingo and the mining settlements of Guanajuato. Megged employs several quantitative and qualitative methodologies to examine these sources. In addition to his analysis of sparse demographic data, he also makes use of biographical microhistories -most notably for Isabel de Montoya, a midwife and healer who ran afoul of the Inquisition -and he presents women's testimonies to offer insights into their own perspectives and mentalities, although, in practice, he offers relatively few examples of the women's statements.Drawing on these methods and sources, Megged argues that single plebeian women's collective associations were common and strong enough to constitute an informal but nevertheless enduring and 'institutionalised' form of social organisation. He further claims that these 'sisterhoods' of female-headed households, which were sometimes housed under the same roof, 'created a solid alternative to the paterfamilias and the patriarchal model'. The 'sisterhoods' served as 'pseudoconsaguinal families' for raising children and helping women to find work, gain access to safe accommodation, and contend with the legal system so as to defend their interests and claim parental and inheritance rights (p. 7). These 'sisterhoods' also provided the settings for distinctive and rich cross-cultural exchanges among individuals of mixed ancestries that, he asserts, drew considerably on specific African ethnic groups' cultural heritage. Some elements of the book are stronger than others. In a few places, the book would have benefited from proper attention to context, as with the discussion ...