Karen Schollmeyer, under the supervision of Dr. Margaret Nelson, will examine relationships between prehistoric climatic variability, human impacts on the environment, and changes in archaeological settlement patterns in the eastern Mimbres area of southwestern New Mexico. Around A.D. 1130 large, long-occupied villages in the area were depopulated as people moved into smaller, dispersed hamlets. Explanations for this dramatic settlement reorganization and accompanying changes in material culture are linked to both resource stress and social changes.
The relationship between resource stress, particularly food stress, and changes in human behavior has been a key research issue in anthropology for decades. Resource stress is often cited as contributing to social and cultural changes, including shifts in settlement patterns. This project examines the role of food stress in the depopulation of large villages. Current approaches to understanding this change suggest human impacts on wild resources, a period of decreased precipitation, and social pressures may all have contributed to decisions to move from aggregated villages to dispersed hamlets. However, the effects of these changes on the levels of resource stress experienced by human populations have not been clearly demonstrated. Environmental explanations focused on long term population-resource imbalances may have been overemphasized in accounting for cultural changes in the area. Such changes may be better explained by factors-such as relative changes in resource availability at shorter time scales-more directly perceptible by humans and thus more likely to influence behavioral changes.
In order to understand these changes, theoretical perspectives from human behavioral ecology are used to generate expectations about how variation in resource availability would have influenced human behavior, including perceptions of food stress and appropriate responses, if the Mimbres settlement reorganization was in part a strategy for minimizing risks of food stress. Archaeological data on settlement patterns, plant remains, and faunal assemblages are used to assess the degree to which temporal changes in resource use suggest responses to food stress as predicted by theory. Two mathematical models inform the interpretation of the archaeological data. A discrete time dynamic model of artiodactyl population change in response to human hunting pressure estimates annual large game availability from A.D. 1000 to 1230. A second mathematical model of productive agricultural land as a function of rainfall and human land use assesses changes in the availability of productive agricultural field areas based on water catchment analysis, soil moisture characteristics, and considerations of human impact on soils. The results of these analyses will indicate how temporal and spatial variability in levels and frequencies of food stress contributed to human decisions to change settlement and land use strategies.
This research builds on recent archaeological fieldwork and combines a variety of analytical methods. The results will contribute to the current debate on factors influencing the Mimbres settlement reorganization. The striking contrast between the settlement reorganization examined here and well-known regional abandonments in other areas of the Southwest may also illuminate patterns in human behavior related to flexible, resilient strategies for dealing with environmental change. This PhD dissertation research will provide educational opportunities for Schollmeyer, and involve an undergraduate assistant in scientific research.
