Modeling ecological resilience and human-environment interactions in engineered landscapes of the prehistoric American southwest

Summary

The prehistoric human footprint in the American southwest is extensive and includes large and small structures, agricultural features, and other signatures of long and variably intensive landscape use. The southwest Jemez Mountains, focus of the current study, have been occupied continuously for the past 2,000 years, and by circa 1300 CE were densely settled in a network of large village sites and fieldhouses. Evidence from tree-rings and fire scars suggests that prior to ca. 1900 Jemez ponderosa pine forests sustained frequent, low-severity surface fires that maintained open-canopy conditions with park-like understory plant communities, a fire regime that has been significantly altered in the past 150 years by changes in climate and human activities. Prehistoric peoples in the Jemez region likely significantly influenced forest structure, fuel properties, ignitions, and thus landscape fire dynamics, but did not appear to erode the long-term persistence of ponderosa pine forests. We use a coupled natural-human systems process model, informed by rich archaeological, ethnographic, and dendrochronology data sets, to assess the magnitude and importance of human influence on fire regimes and ecological resilience. Results highlight the complexity and extent of prehistoric engineered landscapes, and identify future human activities and climate conditions likely to trigger ecosystem instability.

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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