In the Gulf Lowlands of Veracruz, over 15,000 hectares of raised field agriculture has been identified through remote sensing and pedestrian survey. In 2017, I published an attempt to generate a comprehensive GIS database of these raised fields based on satellite remote sensing (Worldview 2 and 3 images from DigitalGlobe augmented by opensourced imagery on Google Earth and Lidar data published by INEGI). 

Raised fields (also sometimes called drained fields) involved the excavation of canals down in floodprone areas and piling that sediment on the planting platform to raise it above the annual flood stage. In the tropics, this is a highly productive agricultural technique that can increase crop yields and resilience, but it is labor intensive with maintenance activities needed yearly to muck out the eroded sediment that fills in the canals with heavy flooding and rainfall. Moreover, these fields are sometimes so large, and bordered by as many as dozens of households, that cooperation in their construction and maintenance would have been necessary. It is a major research objective of mine to understand how that coordination among households took place. Today, most of the canals have been infilled with eroded sediment, but the canal fill soils are organic rich and tend to hold more moisture than the eroded platform. That contrast in soils creates a contrast in vegetation health on the surface that can be detected easily using a variety of techniques that emphasizes the reflectance of plants in the near infrared spectrum (e.g., NDVI). 

There have been few attempts to date these agricultural features, which was one of the reasons we (Amber VanDerwarker, Lourdes Budar, and Gibrann Becerra) started the Tlalixcoyan Archaeological Project (PATlali). The Tlalixcoyan basin is one of the areas of densest raised fields in the region, but they are of a different morphology (wider platforms, deeper and more substantial canals). In summer 2024, we cored those raised fields, but have not yet processed the soil samples.