Hector Neff is a professor of anthropology at California State University, Long Beach. He is the coeditor of Ceramics of the Indigenous Cultures of South America: Studies of Production and Exchange through Compositional Analysis.

• List of IllustrationsList of TablesPreface and AcknowledgmentsChapter 1. IntroductionChapter 2. Fieldwork on the Proyecto Arqueológico Costa del SoconuscoChapter 3. Chronology and DemographyChapter 4. Archaic and Early Formative Niche Construction of the Soconusco CoastHector Neff, James T. Daniels, Paul Burger, and Heather ThakarChapter 5. Peak Salt: The Evolution of Specialized Salt Production during Middle through Terminal Formative TimesHector Neff, Paul Burger, and Marx Navarro CastilloChapter 6. Early Classic Abandonment, the Evolution of a Mesoamerican Tradeware, and the Enigmatic Early Postclassic PeriodHector Neff, Marx Navarro Castillo, and Sachiko SakaiChapter 7. Late Postclassic through Modern Use of the Eastern Soconusco WetlandsHector Neff, Janine Gasco, and Marx Navarro CastilloChapter 8. ConclusionReferences

“Hector Neff’s offers a unique and compelling analysis of the links between environment, technology, and human adaptation over the course of millennia. He brings to bear important and detailed new information and synthesizes it with older work. His distinctive contribution is to analyze how pyrotechnology, the basis of both salt production and pottery, impacted the coastal environmental zone and how the interaction between fire and salt led to the development of Mesoamerica’s most enigmatic pottery, Plumbate.” - Michael W. Love, co-editor of Archaeology and Identity on the Pacific Coast and Southern Highlands of Mesoamerica