were founded. The Archaeology Department in the new (1964) National Museum of Anthropology was expanded, and during the 1970s and 1980s, the National Institute of Anthropology and History founded regional centers staffed by archaeologists in principal Mexican states. The National Autonomous University of Mexico developed specific institutions for anthropological and archaeological research, including the Center for Maya Studies and the Institute for Anthropological Investigations. Some state governments and state universities founded or expanded archaeology programs, the largest of which was organized by Veracruz University in Jalapa.

Since the beginning of the 1960s, the number of both national and foreign archaeological projects in Mexico has greatly increased, and they focus on studying regions and cultural processes that previously received little or no attention. The most representative programs include three long-term projects that began in 1960 in the central highlands: William Sanders’s Teotihuacán Valley project, Rene Millon’s study of urbanism at Teotihuacán, and Richard MacNeish’s multidisciplinary program investigating the origins of agriculture in the Tehuacán Valley in the state of Puebla. Partially based on previous theoretical frameworks, these projects now involved much more ambitious research designs that meant many seasons of fieldwork done by large staffs of archaeologists and students.

Sanders’s work consisted of the first systematic settlement pattern survey of a large region in Mexico. His field methodology was based principally on Willey’s pioneer study in the virú valley of peru, and his initial theoretical goals centered on Steward’s and Armillas’s conceptions of cultural ecology. Sanders soon expanded the project to include the entire basin of Mexico—with the collaboration of Jeffrey Parsons, Richard Blanton, and others—and during nearly fifteen years of investigations, his project recovered crucially important information concerning hundreds of settlements and 3,000 years of human occupation. The surveys are especially significant because they recorded many sites that since have been destroyed by the growth of modern Mexico City and its suburbs. Sanders, Parsons, and Santley published a general summary of the project in 1969, and Parsons’s volumes (1971) on the settlement systems for specific areas of the basin provide a further wealth of data.

Millon’s (1973, 1981) Teotihuacán project produced the first detailed study of urbanism in Mesoamerica. His staff mapped the entire pre-Hispanic city, which covered nearly twenty square kilometers, and the published map in book form is a model of rigorous archaeological reporting. Fieldwork combined excavations and surface surveys helped to define different periods of growth in the ancient city and to identify specific neighborhoods and craft areas. The initial mapping program produced many subsequent investigations by project members such as George Cowgill’s statistical analyses of social organization, Rattray’s fine ceramic chronology, and Spence’s studies of obsidian tool production.

MacNeish’s archaeobotanic project in the Tehuacán Valley was primarily dedicated to analyzing domestication processes for maize and other key Mesoamerican cultivated plants. Fieldwork concentrated on the excavation of deep deposits in dry caves and regional settlement pattern studies covering several thousand years of occupations from early preceramic horizons until the sixteenth-century a.d. Spanish conquest (Byers and MacNeish 1967–1976). This work obtained valuable information concerning the origins of agriculture and settled life, the development of irrigation systems, and the evolution of complex societies. The Tehuacán project was a truly multidisciplinary program as it integrated the archaeologists’ research with that of biologists, botanists, geologists, and other specialists who studied materials in the archaeological record that commonly had been ignored in previous Mesoamerican studies: plant remains, animal bones, pollen, human coprolites, fiber textiles, etc.

The three long-term projects made fundamental contributions to the development of archaeology in Mexico. Their central significance goes beyond their extensive findings concerning specific peoples and cultural processes and lies chiefly in their theoretical and methodological frameworks. These provided new perspectives