ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors indicate that the research problem they chose for themselves at Guila Naquitz was to develop a model that would not only deal with some of the underlying and more universal aspects of early domestication but also tie that process into the specific cultural pattern for the Valley of Oaxaca. Once the Holocene climate had been established in regions such as Oaxaca, pollen studies do not reveal a period so hot and dry that the post-Pleistocene vegetational communities would have been eliminated, although there were climatic fluctuations during the Archaic that might have caused those communities to migrate upslope or down-slope. Sometime between the establishment of this post-Pleistocene vegetational regime and the start of the fifth millennium b.c., the Indians of this part of Mexico began the cultivation of a series of plants, some of them native members of the Holocene thorn forest.
