Ancestral Pueblo farmersexpanded into the deep, productive, well-watered soils of the central Mesa Verde region of southwestern Colorado around AD 600, and within two centuries built some of the largest villages known up to that time in the American Southwest. But only one hundred years later, those villages were empty, and most of the people had gone. This cycle repeated itself, though with many more people, from the mid-AD 1000s until1280, when Pueblo farmers left the entire northern Southwestpermanently. Our interdisciplinary team examines how climate change, population size, conflict, reso ... More

Ancestral Pueblo farmersexpanded into the deep, productive, well-watered soils of the central Mesa Verde region of southwestern Colorado around AD 600, and within two centuries built some of the largest villages known up to that time in the American Southwest. But only one hundred years later, those villages were empty, and most of the people had gone. This cycle repeated itself, though with many more people, from the mid-AD 1000s until1280, when Pueblo farmers left the entire northern Southwestpermanently. Our interdisciplinary team examines how climate change, population size, conflict, resource depression, and changing social and ceremonial organization contribute to explaining these dramatic shifts. Our conclusions depend in part on comparing the output from a series of agent-based models with the precisely dated archaeological record from this area. People visiting or living inthe Southwest, archaeologists working in Neolithic societies anywhere in the world, and researchers applying modeling techniques to understanding how human societies shape and are shaped by the environments we inhabit will read this book with interest.