The Nutritional Context of the Pueblo III Depopulation of the Northern San Juan: Too much maize?

Summary

The abandonment of the Four Corners area is a longstanding problem in

archaeology. Recent work has shown that the terminal occupation was

concentrated into a limited number of large defensive sites. This resulted in an

extreme emphasis on maize, which was untenable because of maize's low

amounts of Lysine and Tryptophan. I describe the processes that led to this

settlement pattern and the evidence for this diet. I then explain how the

combination of the settlement pattern and the extreme reliance on maize resulted

in a nutritionally fragile situation that collapsed. I end with a few thoughts on

the collapse.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the Death of Primitive Economic Man: Nutritional Archaeology for the 21st Century

Keywords

Spatial Coverage