Cultural Change and Continuity on Chapin Mesa Redux

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Nearly 50 years ago, Art Rohn (1977) published “Cultural Change and Continuity on Chapin Mesa”. It was a landmark study focused on using the archaeological record to assess cultural change in relation to continuity of Pueblo communities on Chapin Mesa on the Mesa Verde cuesta. Since that time not only has there been nine major survey projects producing new site data, but also the development of new technologies and methods for analyzing settlement patterns including climate reconstructions, demographic modeling, and Lidar scanning that were not available to Rohn. Today, there are now over 1200 known sites on Chapin Mesa. This paper presents the preliminary results of a new effort to re-evaluate the Chapin Mesa settlement trends that incorporates systematic seriation and demographic analysis with climatic reconstructions. It shows that Chapin Mesa was one of the most densely populated areas in Central Mesa Verde between 750 and 1100 CE. This highly connected social landscape played a critical role in the subsequent cultural changes on the Mesa Verde cuesta, when central mesa top communities dispersed, and alcove villages emerged in response to climatic and social stresses.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53535