FOREWORD 
people could remain together. Life revolved around 
the individual family, which was only in temporary 
association with other families, and strong political 
controls and various sociopolitical features depend- 
ent upon prolonged and intimate contacts between 
persons were lacking. The only variations were in 
such patterns as shamanism or preferential marriage, 
the origin of which is therefore a historical problem. 
In the case of the more advanced horticultural 
peoples of America, a recognition of the ecological 
limitations is fundamental to an understanding of 
their present patterns and of their potentialities for 
change. In aboriginal times, the environment was 
exploited through fairly intensive hand cultivation 
of farm crops. Surplus production allowed leisure 
for developed handicrafts in which there was some 
local specialization. Under the aboriginal type of 
land utilization, various socioeconomic patterns were 
logically possible. People might have been scattered 
in individual families, each owning and living on its 
own land, as in the modern United States. Actually, 
however, the rural community became the prevalent 
pattern, and in many cases it appears that the sur- 
rounding lands were communally owned, being 
assigned annually to families. Despite a great popu- 
lation density, the size of these communities was 
limited by primitive transportational devices. Towns 
never exceeded a few thousand, and cities in the 
modern sense were unknown. Production was pre- 
dominantly for family consumption, and essential 
social and religious activities, the precise patterns of 
which varied widely in each region, were community 
affairs. 
The Spanish Conquest introduced new exploitative 
devices that greatly widened the latitude of possible 
ecological patterns. The plough, steel tools, new 
crops, and domesticated animals increased farm out- 
put, while beasts of burden and in some places 
wheeled vehicles made it possible for larger popula- 
tion centers to develop and for goods to be exchanged 
over greater distances. Presumably, these new 
factors permitted several possible social and eco- 
nomic arrangements, the choice of which was deter- 
mined by historical factors. Where the Indian was 
left comparatively unmolested, he could and evidently 
sometimes did continue more or less in the aboriginal 
patterns, the greater productivity serving mainly to 
increase his wealth. But in large areas, the hacienda 
system, an entirely new socioeconomic pattern, was 
introduced by the conquistadors, Under this system 
x 
a single Spaniard came to own a large estate, on 
which he produced a limited number of cash crops 
in great quantity for sale on an outside market. He 
hired Indians, whose lives he strictly regimented, to 
do the farm labor. Whether or not Indians came 
under the hacienda system depended above all on 
whether the crops that were in demand in the national 
or world market could be grown in and transported 
from the region in question. 
In most areas where the Indian came under the 
hacienda system, he rapidly lost not only his basic 
economic patterns but the essential social structure 
and behavior depending on them. Only residues of 
native attitudes and fragments of surreptitiously prac- 
ticed native religion remain. Under haciendas, 
acculturation was sudden, drastic, and undoubtedly 
traumatic, and at first it was imposed by force. But 
there is no reason to assume that ecological changes 
which slowly infiltrated without compulsive adoption 
were any the less compelling for being more gradual. 
Where Indians have had environmental potential- 
ities for surplus production, an accessible market, and 
opportunity to learn the cash system, acculturation 
has already taken them far toward assimilation to 
national culture. Crop specialization and cash sales 
have led to individual land ownership which in turn 
has disrupted the aboriginal family structure and 
community work habits. When the Indian comes 
to rely predominantly on a cash crop, his ignorance 
of improved farm techniques, together with his lack 
of capital for improved equipment, so handicaps him 
competitively that the process of acculturation com- 
monly terminates in his selling his land and becoming 
either a farm laborer or a worker in manufactures. 
Meanwhile, exposure to outside influences gradually 
eradicates his Indian characteristics. 
It appears that in many respects Indian accultura- 
tion throughout the area of aboriginal intensive 
horticulture has been very similar, but it would be 
hazardous in the present stage of knowledge to gen- 
eralize too broadly. The particular need is to estab- 
lish more precisely the limitations on land use in each 
locality. Then only will the role of historical and 
personality factors be clear. For Southwest Guate- 
mala, McBryde has clearly set forth the land-use 
factors which caused widely different acculturational 
trends in nearby areas. In the Lowlands and lower 
mountain slopes where sugarcane, bananas, cacao, 
coffee, and other crops could be grown in abundance 
for export, the hacienda system was implanted and 
