ABSTRACT
In anthropology, studies on traditional agriculture began in the early twentieth century, related to the work of cultural anthropologists, historians, and geographers on the indigenous in areas of Mexico, their food system, and economic activities. Caballero and Casas, in their article on the domestication of plants and the origin of agriculture, presented archaeological and ethnobiological examples of past and present forms of plant management that Mesoamerican Indians developed. These two scholars’ opinion on traditional Mexican agriculture does not oversimplify the matter but ignores the research in Mesoamerica that is based on the social and cultural knowledge of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work, where studies involved a huge number of researchers. Traditional agriculture is characterized by combining components of the system itself, with others of the natural environment. For ecological anthropology, agrobiodiversity is a product of Man’s intervention in the ecosystem, of his inventiveness and creativity, and his interaction with the natural environment.
