Pueblo Bonito, one of the largest great houses in New Mexico's Chaco Canyon. It was built after one of several cultural transformations that WSU's Kyle Bocinsky and Tim Kohler document in their Science Advances paper. (Photo by Nate Crabtree)
Posted on 04/11/2016 5:29:00 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Washington State University scientists... say the region saw three other cultural transitions over the preceding five centuries. The researchers also document recurring narratives in which the Pueblo people agreed on canons of ritual, behavior and belief that quickly dissolved as climate change hurt crops and precipitated social turmoil and violence...
Bocinsky, WSU Regents Professor Tim Kohler and colleagues analyzed data from just over 1,000 southwest archaeological sites and nearly 30,000 tree-ring dates that served as indicators of rainfall, heat and time. Their data-intensive approach, facilitated by climate reconstructions run at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, gives a remarkably detailed picture of year-to-year changes.
This is particularly important as droughts of just five or ten years were enough to prompt major shifts in the small niches where Pueblo people grew maize, their major crop...
The researchers said the first period of exploitation, known as Basketmaker III, took place between 600 and 700 A.D. It ended with a mild drought and was followed by a period known as Pueblo I, in which the practice of storing maize in underground chambers gave way to storage in rooms above ground.
The researchers think this represents a shift from unrestricted sharing of food to more restricted exchanges controlled by households or family groups. The period ended around 890 with a slightly larger drought.
The exploitation phase of the Pueblo II period ran from 1035 to 1145 and was marked by large shared plazas and great houses -- what we would today call McMansions -- in the Chaco Canyon area south of Mesa Verde, Colo.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.wsu.edu ...
Pueblo Bonito, one of the largest great houses in New Mexico's Chaco Canyon. It was built after one of several cultural transformations that WSU's Kyle Bocinsky and Tim Kohler document in their Science Advances paper. (Photo by Nate Crabtree)
The Pueblo guys had SUVs and spray deodorant?
It’s the Mongol hordes sweeping across Eurasia in those SUVs fault.
Exactly. Plus air conditioners. If they had just banned A/C in the old pueblo they’d still be farming corn today.
It’s always been thought drought cycles had a lot to do with the abandonment of sites like Chaco. If you’ve been to a few of those sites or a live site like the Hopi you realize how close to the edge Puebloan agriculture lived in the arid climate.
Yes we Khan! Yes we Khan!
99 bottles of Kumis on the wall, 99 bottles of Kumis...
Which ancestor of AlGore had the carbon credits scam?
Do these tools really believe that climate is never supposed to change and that the only reason it changes is because of humans?
Yeah, Colorado Tanker, Chaco is a fascinating place. The climate would have needed to have been somewhat wetter than it is now to even imagine supporting such a developed culture.
It appears that water management was much on their minds then, too. It is not certain that all their construction that appears to us now to be designed for water control actual was for irrigation, I am sure that much of it was.
I’ve been several times to Chaco. Its current mysteries are matched by its beauty.
Thanks Sunken for putting this up.
Oldplayer
I thought it was long established that drought led to their decline???
Speaking of pueblo ruins, let me throw in a plug for Hovenweep National Monument.
Nice place to visit. Self guided tour with some cool architecture, including a square tower. Its a little ways off the beaten path- 60 miles west of Cortez, Colorado, so bring a full tank of gas and some snacks. Theres a ranger station with facilties for you to use.
It was also the end of the paved road of the Four Corners manhunt back in the 90’s where a search for was carried out for 3 gunmen who stole a water truck for unknown reasons and shot a cop in Cortez before fleeing into the desert where they met their end.
If the natives get restless, tell them I sent you. :)
http://www.colorado.com/articles/hidden-colorado-gem-hovenweep-national-monument
I now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.
The practice resulting in the thousands of south west residential sites boils down to bert’s assertion:
The Kids moved away
The old folks died.
That same assertion applies today and is visible in many abandoned southern farms. (which by the way are similar to the six rooms and a kiva of the south west. the farms houses have 6 or 8 rooms as well) the kids moved away, grannie finally died. the kids never returned and the farm was engulfed with plant life.
On a larger but different scale, the process is underway in the cities. It is most noticeable in Deetroit and Baltimore but also in Cicero IL and Memphis.
the kids moved away and the old folks died.
The climate change is trivial compared to the assertion
My 1st husband and I prowled Chaco and other ruins-he was from NM, and both of us were fascinated with the past. There are ruins a bit like Chaco in northern Mexico-it is plain to see that the climate was getting drier from the irrigation trenches with flat rocks on top to slow evaporation, the structures with wells inside that appear to be just for that, the riverbeds that have been dry for centuries, evidence of raids with buildings set on fire and people massacred in fields and houses, their granaries emptied, etc.
Anyone idiotic enough to buy into the manmade climate change BS just needs to visit some of those pueblo sites-on both sides of the border-to see how the climate has always changed over a large area long before there were any coal plants or SUVs-it is just how this part of the universe works...
Yup, climate change is 100 percent natural 100 percent of the time.
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