fieldwork in Mexico that continued into the 1940s. Initially he focused on the contemporary landscapes of Mexico but his interests grew to include the early Spanish presence in the region and the prehistoric Indian cultures of northwestern Mexico. He worked closely with other departments, especially anthropology and history. The scope of Sauer's work expanded in scope to include investigations into the timing of man's arrival in the Americas; the geography of Indian populations; and the development of agriculture and native crops in the Americas. Influence Carl Sauer's paper "The Morphology of Landscape" was probably the most influential article contributing to the development of ideas on cultural landscapes and is still cited today. However, Sauer's paper was really about his own vision for the discipline of geography, which was to establish the discipline on a phenomenological basis, rather than being specifically concerned with cultural landscapes. "Every field of knowledge is characterized by its declared preoccupation with a certain group of phenomena," according to Sauer. Geography was assigned the study of areal knowledge or landscapes or chorology—following the thoughts of Alfred Hettner. "Within each landscape there are phenomena that are not simply there but are either associated or independent of each other." Sauer saw the geographer's task as being to discover the areal connection between phenomena. Thus "the task of geography is conceived as the establishment of a critical system which embraces the phenomenology of landscape, in order to grasp in all of its meaning and colour the varied terrestrial scene". The paper was also influential in poetry: Sauer's representation of landscape as contingent and heterogeneous, and his work's decentering of the human subject, influenced works by Charles Olson, Ed Dorn and J. H. Prynne. A collection of Sauer's letters while doing fieldwork in South America has been published. Sauer was a fierce critic of environmental determinism, which was the prevailing theory in geography when he began his career. He proposed instead an approach variously called "landscape morphology" or "cultural history." This approach involved the inductive gathering of facts about the human impact on the landscape over time. Sauer rejected positivism, preferring particularist and historicist understandings of the world. He drew on the work of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and later critics accused him of introducing a "superorganic" concept of culture into geography. Sauer expressed concern about the way that modern capitalism and centralized government were destroying the cultural diversity and environmental health