Fine-Grained Chronology Reveals Human Impacts on Animal Populations in the Mesa Verde Region of the American Southwest

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Research, Education, and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the central Mesa Verde region a combination of numerous excavations and precise chronological control allows us to group selected faunal assemblages into time periods that represent only a few human generations. We examine fauna from eight time periods spanning approximately 700 years in a region that saw substantial changes in human population size and regional settlement organization. We demonstrate that modest human population growth had an immediate impact on abundance of large game animals (notably deer), and local deer populations remain depressed until hunting pressures eased. In contrast, smaller mammals seem to have been much more resilient to hunting and trapping. The most significant change in faunal procurement was the introduction and intensification of domestic turkey production. This required changes in agricultural production, storage, and labor allocation. Some of the changes that we document would have been so rapid that they would have been observable within one or two human generations and must have had an impact on social relations within and between communities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Research, Education, and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35565.0