Ancient Puebloan Agricultural Landscape Features, Northern San Juan Area

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The recent LiDAR-aided discovery of more than 60 mi² (155 km²) of Ancestral Puebloan agricultural features, roads, and ritual features in the Northern San Juan area brings into question many of our preconceived notions about prehistoric lifeways. Agricultural features, the focus of this discussion, are consistent in location, morphology, engineering design, and apparent function across a 110-mile-long (177-km) expanse of Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. These features, now almost imperceptible from the ground, include more than 1,060 miles (1,700 km) of constructed individual berms (ridges) thought to have originally measured about 1 m high, 2 m wide and 100-200 m in length, and to represent more than 4 million human-days of labor. The ridges have a consistent orientation, believed to facilitate snow harvesting. Ridges do not follow contours but tend to be roughly perpendicular to regional land-surface slopes of 0°-3°, and parallel to local surface slopes of 0°-3°. This design maximizes runoff harvesting and minimizes erosion in sandy soils, and ridges are seldom present in steeper terrains. Scarcity of erosional features indicate successful design and runoff manipulation. The extent of apparent “fields”, coupled with Chacoan great houses and roads may have implications for food production in areas further south.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38395.0