LOL, yeah, I tried not to take it personally that folks are ignoring me
Bev, sometimes the best way to get ignored on this list is to post something actually about homesteading.
After reading the link it started a whole round of discussion here, and it has a great deal to do with homesteading and the prospects of homesteading.
The chinampas are like a great number of other horticultural phenomena such as the highland farming in New Guinea, the terraced gardens of the Incas, the mesa gardens of SW, etc. They were very skillful adaptations of greatly increasing the fertility and productivity of the land but at the same time adapting food plants and animals for a specific niche.
People look for that ideal homestead, and there was even one fellow I heard rumors of that wrote a book about it. It is well to look for the place best suited for yourself, but not to take half a lifetime doing it. Make your best shot and then make a stand there.
A study of the agricultural goings on in meso-Ameraica gives us a couple of other insights into today's circumstances as they relate to homesteading. First I'd point this out: The Aztecs had plenty of gold, as did the Mayans and Incans. But among them it was never money, it was adornment. Sahagun recorded a great deal about Hahuatl society and preserved a few of the Aztec codices. The basis of the economy was reckoned in corn, specfically in tortillas. When lists of things such as stipends for warriors and retainers, cost of weapons, etc. needed an accounting or exchange rate, they were noted with symbol that represented a number of tortillas. This echos many other such ancient economies such as the Minoan, Shang dynasty of China, and ancient Egypt. Egypt had plenty of gold too, but expenses were not reckoned in gold but rather in measures of barley. In feudal Japan the cost of things were reckoned in so many 'koku' of rice, the amount needed to feed one peasant family for a year. Many societies have had gold but did not ever use it as money. This belies the infomercial that gold has been a unrivaled storehouse of wealth for 5000 years. It most certainly has not, and such societes as the meso-American, Incan, and ancient Egyptian show, it is not universally recognized as having intrinsic worth that could be translated into anything practical as we imgaine it could today.
That leads me to, and explains, the second thing the Chinampas teach us. As is pointed out in Bev's article, the Aztecs didn't invent the system, in fact it might not have been Nahuatl speaking people at all. The archeological evidence shows that the areas where chinampas were the basis of agriculture had several waves of "civilization" that came and went. YET the knowledge of how to farm the chinampas persevered. What was happening there is better illustrated and preserved in oral tradition just a little south of there in the Mayan speaking areas. It was not until this previous century that the "ruins" of great Mayan civic centers were discovered in the jungles. Archological evidence reinforced by oral tradition tells how the peasant population was forced to support the wealthy but when the land around the cities became exhausted and drought aggravated the situation, the peasant families and clans simply moved deeper into the jungle to farm new land and abandoned the cities. The wealthy (ass-sitters) starved. Same thing seems to have happened in Mexico, when times got dicey enough, the chinaperos simply withdrew to more remote locations and the wealthy ass-sitters died. Mexico city itself was founded by a group of just such expats.
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