Leaving Mesa Verde - 9780816528851

"This volume is a significant advance in our knowledge of a number of important issues, and the authors cogently present past perspectives on culture change in the northern Southwest, balancing this with state-of-the-art explanatory frameworks drawn from various scientific specialities"---Michael Adler, editor of The Prehistoric Pueblo World, A.D. 1150-1350

It is one of the great mysteries in the archaeology of the Americas: the depopulation of the northern Southwest in the late thirteenth-century AD. Considering the numbers of people affected, the distances moved, the permanence of the departures, the severity of the surrounding conditions, and the human suffering and culture change that accompanied them, the adrupt conclusion to the farming way of life in this region is one of the greatest disruptions in recorded history.

Much new paleoenvironmental data, excavation, permit the twenty-five scientists represented here much greater precision in determining the timing of the depopulation, the number of people affected, and the ways in which northern Pueblo peoples coped---and failed to cope---with the rapidly changing environmental and demographic conditions they encountered throughout the 1200s. In addition, some of the scientists in this volume use models to provide insights into the processes behind the patterns they find, helping to narrow the range of plausible explanations.

What emerges from these investigations is a highly pertinent story of conflict and disruption as a result of climate change, environmental degradation, social rigidity, and conflict. Taken a as whole, the contributions included here reveal this era as one that witnesses a competition between differing social and economic organizations, in which selective migaration was considerably hastened by serve climatic, environmental, and social upheaval. Moreover, the chapters show that is is at least as true that emigration led to the collapse of the northern Southwest as it is that collapse led to emigration.