Using Surface Archaeology to Estimate Ancestral Jemez Population Dynamics, AD 1300-1700

Summary

Determining the population of ancestral Pueblo villages has beguiled inquisitive observers from the 16th century down to the present day. Spanish explorers and colonial settlers floated wildly variable population estimates upon their initial visits to Pueblo villages. Today archaeologists are no different, offering demographic estimates that often differ by orders of magnitude. This "population problem" plagues the Jemez region of northern New Mexico in particular. In this paper, we present the results of our recent attempts to estimate the populations of large ancestral Jemez villages using surface maps generated from UAV (drone) data, LiDAR, and intensive ceramic sampling. We begin from historically documented examples (Pueblo villages dating to the post-1680 period), deriving a formula to estimate total floor area based on extant surface remains. We then apply those estimates to the large Jemez pueblos of the Classic Period (AD 1300-1600) and the early historic (AD 1600-1700) era to derive maximum population estimates.

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)   •
• Fire and Humans in Resilient Ecosystems in the American Southwest

Keywords

Spatial Coverage