A Geospatial Assessment of Reservoirs and Nearby Communities on the Mesa Verde North Escarpment

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Water storage and control systems have long been of interest to archaeologists as a lens for studying communities’ attempts to mitigate environmental instability, especially in arid environments. In recent years, the increased availability of high-resolution paleoclimate reconstructions and digital terrain models has provided archaeologists with new ways to assess these vital resource management features. We demonstrate how modeling the annual volume of water collected by reservoirs across several centuries can inform a more nuanced understanding of how communities both benefited from and organized around these features through time. This poster presents a case study of three Ancestral Pueblo reservoirs on the Mesa Verde North Escarpment, a topographically-defined space located on the talus slopes between Mesa Verde National Park and the Great Sage Plain of southwestern Colorado in the northern U.S. Southwest. Four distinct communities occupy the escarpment, three of which include a clearly defined reservoir feature. For this project, we employ a series of hydrological models to quantify the water collected within these three reservoirs through time. With this analysis, we can better interpret how Ancestral Pueblo people actually used reservoirs, invested in group-level sustainability strategies, and organized their communities in geographical borderlands.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33365