Ancestral Pueblo farmers encountered the deep, well watered, and productive soils of the central Mesa Verde region of Southwest Colorado around A.D. 600, and within two centuries built some of the largest villages known up to that time in the U.S. Southwest. But one hundred years later, those villages were empty, and most people had gone. This cycle repeated itself from the mid-A.D. 1000s until 1280, when Puebloan farmers permanently abandoned the entire northern Southwest. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book examines how climate change, population size, interpersonal conflict, resource depression, and changing social organization contribute to explaining these dramatic shifts. Comparing the simulations from agent-based models with the precisely dated archaeological record from this area, this text will interest archaeologists working in the Southwest and in Neolithic societies around the world as well as anyone applying modeling techniques to understanding how human societies shape, and are shaped by the environments we inhabit.

Comparing simulations from agent-based models with the precisely dated archaeological record from this area, this text will interest archaeologists working in the Southwest and in Neolithic studies as well as anyone applying modeling techniques to understanding how human societies shapes, and are shaped by the environment.

Outgrowth of a symposium at the 2006 Society for American Archaeology meetings in San Juan, and of a seminar at the Amerind Foundation. Cf. pref.

This volume celebrates and examines the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center’s past, present, and future by providing a backdrop for the not-for-profit’s beginnings and highlighting key accomplishments in research, education, and American Indian initiatives over the past four decades. Specific themes include Crow Canyon’s contributions to projects focused on community and regional settlement patterns, human-environment relationships, public education pedagogy, and collaborative partnerships with Indigenous communities. Contributing authors, deeply familiar with the center and its surrounding central Mesa Verde region, include Crow Canyon researchers, educators, and Indigenous scholars inspired by the organization’s mission to further develop and share knowledge of the human past for the betterment of societies. Research, Education, and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center guides Southwestern archaeology and public education beyond current practices—particularly regarding Indigenous partnerships—and provides a strategic handbook for readers into and through the mid-twenty-first century. Open access edition supported by the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center King Family Fund and subvention supported in part by the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center and the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society.

In Constructing Community, Alison E. Rautman uses the Salinas District in New Mexico to examine the relationships of subsistence practices, mobility, and settlement. Rautman tackles a very broad topic: how archaeologists use material evidence to infer and imagine how people lived in the past, how they coped with everyday decisions and tensions, and how they created a sense of themselves and their place in the world.

Sustainable Lifeways addresses forces of conservatism and innovation in societies dependent on the exploitation of aquatic and other wild resources, agriculture, and specialized pastoralism. The volume gathers specialists working in four areas of the world with significant archaeological and paleoenvironmental databases: West Asia, the American Southwest, East Africa, and Andean South America, and contributing to research in three broad time scales: long term (spanning millennia), medium term (archaeological time, spanning centuries or a few thousand years), and recent (ethnohistoric or ethnographic, spanning years or decades). By bringing an archaeological eye to an examination of human response to unpredictable environmental conditions, informed by an understanding of contemporary traditional peoples, the contributors to this volume develop a more detailed picture of how societies perceive environmental risk, how they alter their behavior in the face of changing conditions, and under what challenges the most rapid and far-reaching changes in adaptation have taken place. Sustainable Lifeways enhances our understanding of both the forces of conservatism and innovation which may have been in play in major transitions in the past, such as the development of complex society, and the expansions of early empires. Studies present examples of cattle herders in East Africa, hunter-gatherers and pastoralists in the Levant, South American fisher/farmers, and farmer/hunters of the U.S. Southwest.

Migration and Membership Regimes brings together ten essays on the history of settlement and migration in an analytical framework which reconceptualises the migrant-state relationship and explores the variety of membership regimes on five continents and over two millennia.