More Than Maize: Modeling the Cotton, Wheat, (and Maize) Cultivation Niches beyond the Four Corners

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Multiscale Data and the History of Human Development in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Agricultural niche reconstruction efforts in the North American Southwest have primarily focused on maize and have primarily been focused in the Four Corners region. This paper expands that work by modeling the growing niches for cotton and wheat, also important crops for Ancestral Pueblo people, and investigating the maize niche in the Northern Rio Grande region of New Mexico. We build upon the PaleoCAR model by using climate data to assess locations where growing requirements for maize, cotton, and wheat were met and estimate yields. The model suggests that the maize niche was relatively healthy, followed by wheat, with cotton having a very limited niche that required additional agricultural technologies. These results are supported by pollen and phytolith data and provide an additional line of evidence to support a slower adoption of wheat relative to maize versus a quicker adoption of sheep (wool) relative to continued cotton cultivation by Ancestral Pueblo communities in the Northern Rio Grande. This case study, along with two preliminary case studies from northwest Colorado and north-central New Mexico, demonstrate how geographic and crop-type expansions of PaleoCAR and the SKOPE app can be used to address community-guided questions about past agricultural possibilities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Multiscale Data and the History of Human Development in the US Southwest

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50104