Crop subsistence yield variability within Late Postclassic (1325--1521 A.D.) and Early Colonial (16th century) Indigenous communities in the Tepeaca Region, Mexico

This study analyzes the impact of climate variability and human management strategies on the Late Postclassic (1325-1521 A.D.) and Early Colonial (16 th century A.D.) agricultural systems in the Tepeaca Region, Puebla, Mexico. This work seeks to model agricultural productivity at the household and regional levels and identify the buffering strategies developed by Tepeaca's populations against cyclical food shortfalls. A dualistic model for the agricultural and economic structure of the Tepeaca altepetl or state-level polity is proposed. Two independent forms of agriculture ran side by side in Tepeaca. One was subsistence agriculture carried out by macehualli tributary populations and characterized by a low-level production capacity geared towards food production for auto-consumption needs. The other was institutional agriculture, which dealt largely with the management and organization of agricultural systems destined for the support and finance of political institutions including the nobility and bureaucratic sectors of the community.;Both subsistence and institutional agriculture depended mainly on local rainfall agriculture systems for food production. Scholars acknowledge the unpredictable nature of rainfall agriculture. Inter-annual food supply is highly unstable due to environmental effects on cultivars (e.g., climatic variability, localized rain patterns and pests), and differential managerial strategies (timing of sowing, construction of features, planting patterns, weeding, crop nourishing). Such conditions produce variations in food production levels within households at the local and regional levels. In spite of this, archaeological research has given more attention to average agricultural production values when reconstructing socio-demographic processes and the development of complex agricultural systems over time. Little attention has been placed on understanding the divergences from the mean values when analyzing procurement strategies in subsistence and institutional agriculture. By applying mean values to overall agricultural production within a settlement or a region, the natural characteristics of agricultural production are obscured. Standardization can lead to an oversimplified view that a good or bad year's harvest will affect equally every sector of the community. In fact, each year a sector of the agricultural population obtains good yields while others do badly. At the institutional level, standardization of production is used in models that prefer a "top-down" view in order to estimate surplus extraction via the tributary systems. In such cases, food production is taken as being homogeneous for all sectors of the community and does not consider the dualistic nature of agricultural production. The instability of agricultural production had important repercussions on the Tepeaca indigenous agrarian structure and the prevailing land tenure systems. This affected the tributary demands that political entities could levy on the peasant majority. Demands on agricultural production were usually not placed on the food resource base of households. Rather, tributary demands focused on the labor force of peasants and the production of wealth items. This was possible by a sharp land tenure polarization in which the local nobility controlled vast territories. Commoner populations of macehualli where either smallholders under the auspices of a local tlahtoani ruler or landless peasants living in a noble's estate that in colonial times were known as terrazgueros.