Maize, Construction, and Population Changes: One Way to Identify Sunk Cost Behaviors in Central Mesa Verde

Summary

This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

When the environment changes, sedentary people choose whether to stay and invest more in their current adaptive strategy, or abandon their land and residence to go somewhere with greater opportunities. For a well-understood portion of the upland US Southwest we ask: when the maize niche shrinks, do people continue investing in the landscape (displaying sunk cost behavior) or do they move? Schwindt et al. (2016) identified periods of shrinkage and growth in subregions of the Central Mesa Verde area, where Bocinsky and Kohler (2014) had previously estimated shrinkage and growth in the size of the maize niche. We now compare a population estimate developed using structure counts and ceramic tallies anchored by dendrochronology to the maize niche proxy. Further, in an effort to identify possible sunk cost behaviors when maize niches constrict, we use the dendrochronological record (Bocinsky et al. 2016) to see if people maintain or possibly even increase investment in a less productive landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32703