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The settlement of high-altitude uplands by early agropastoralists demanded specific kinds of social and economic adaptation. Upland valley systems in north-west Argentina were used extensively during the Formative period (200 BC to AD 850). New investigations of the alluvial fans of the Tafi Valley show how the occupation history of the region developed across time and space, demonstrating remarkable stability over 1000 years of agropastoral exploitation. The dense but scattered distribution of early farmers across this landscape highlights household continuity through a period of regional population growth.

The University of Pennsylvania Museum's Tikal Project of 1958–1968 was one of the great Maya investigations of the twentieth century. It was the most ambitious study of a Maya city so far undertaken, with scores of staff, graduate students and local workers engaged in a range of activities from mapping the site core and its surrounding settlement, to stripping the tropical forest from the colossal temple-pyramids and restoring them, to establishing an occupation history that eventually showed an origin for Tikal in the mid-first millennium BC and abandonment more than sixteen centuries later at the end of the Classic period. The impact of the project's results, publications and cadre of trained Mayanists moving out into the academic world was substantial and led to several decades of a Tikal-centric view of ancient Maya civilisation.