The Ecology of Agglomeration and the Rise of Chaco Great Houses

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Decisions individuals make about where to live have profound consequences for everything from climate and conflict, to migration, inequality, the origins of agriculture, and urban development. It is not surprising that understanding and explaining those decisions remains an open and active area of research within archaeology. Many of the important innovations coming out of that research are owing to the application of an optimality model from Behavioral Ecology known as the Ideal Free Distribution. Crucial to this model is the notion of negative density-dependence, or the idea that the quality of a habitat declines as a function of increasing population size, which is assumed to lead to increasing competition for limited resources. However, the model has in recent years also become a tool for investigating possible positive density-dependent effects, otherwise known as Allee or agglomeration effects. Here, we seek to explore such effects by applying the model to the distribution of Chaco great houses and neighboring residential sites in the North American Southwest, using data and analytical tools provided by the cyberSW project. One potential challenge we hope to address with this analysis is the difficulty of disentangling environmental from socioeconomic agglomerations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37038.0