Leaving Mesa Verde: Peril and Change in the Thirteenth-Century Southwest

About the Contributors

About the Contributors karen r. adams trained in both anthropology and biology to acquire background as a southwestern United States archaeobotanist. For four decades, she has analyzed and reported on plant remains from archaeological sites in all major southwestern prehispanic culture areas, in addition to in northern Mexico. She has published widely on maize (Zea mays) and other domesticates, as well as on the range of wild plants utilized by prehispanic groups. She has also synthesized the archaeological records of specific wild plants (tobacco, beeweed, reedgrass), regional areas, and the Greater American Southwest. nancy j. akins is an archaeologist and director of the osteological laboratory for the Office of Archaeological Studies in Santa Fe. Her work has primarily been in the middle and upper Rio Grande and Chaco Canyon and includes both field investigations and laboratory analysis. Her interests include applying bioarchaeological and zooarchaeological data to broader issues relating to social organization, mobility, and subsistence. james r. allison is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Brigham Young University. He received his PhD from Arizona State University in 2000. His primary research interests are the small-scale societies of the northern Southwest, quantitative methods , ceramic analysis, and archaeological theory, and he has conducted archaeological research in northern Utah, the Virgin region, and the Four Corners area. larry v. benson is a senior scientist with the National Research Program of the U.S. Geological Survey and is chief of the Arid Regions Climate Project. Much of his research is focused on the creation of records of past climate change, including lake-sediment-based records of change in the hydrologic balances of Great Basin surface-water systems . His research also includes cosmogenic dating of glacial features 422 About the Contributors in the Front Range and south-central Colorado. Most recently, his research has focused on the response of southwestern Native Americans and midwestern Mississippian Cahokians to climate change via their dependence on a maize-based subsistence base. michael s. berry completed the requirements for a PhD in anthropology from the University of Utah in 1980. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he held positions as a database programmer and network-systems engineer, working primarily with Fortune 500 companies. He is currently regional archeologist for the Bureau of Reclamation in Salt Lake City, Utah. eric blinman is director of the Office of Archaeological Studies at the Museum of New Mexico, New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. He received his MA and PhD in anthropology from Washington State University after completing his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley. His interests include ceramic and textile technologies of the Southwest, archaeomagnetic dating, past environmental change, and the social history of Puebloan peoples. Eric has authored or coauthored more than 150 articles, book chapters, reviews, contract reports, and professional papers. In 2007, he participated in a colloquium on Past Climate Change: Human Survival Strategies that was convened by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden in Narsaq, Greenland. He serves as an outside member of several graduate committees at the University of New Mexico, and he is an instructor in Native American studies for Colgate University’s Santa Fe Study Group. He has also authored or coauthored nine popular articles and delivers between fifteen and twenty-five public presentations or demonstrations each year as part of the Education Outreach Program of the Office of Archaeological Studies. jeffrey l. boyer grew up with an historian in Taos, New Mexico, and had little choice but to go into some profession that studies the past. Between 1982 and 1987, he was curator of anthropology and director of the Contract Archaeology Program for what was then the Kit Carson Memorial Foundation, an historic preservation institution and public museum in north-central New Mexico. Since 1987, he has been About the Contributors 423 a supervisory archaeologist/project director with the Museum of New Mexico’s Office of Archaeological Studies in Santa Fe. Boyer’s analytical interests lie in Euroamerican artifacts, earthen building materials, and geomorphology. His research interests are wide ranging but focus, at least for the moment, on early Pueblo community development and organization in the northern Rio Grande, ritual form and organization, Pueblo and Euroamerican frontiers, and comparative archaeological manifestations of Puebloan and Euroamerican worldviews. catherine m. cameron is professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado. She works in the northern American Southwest, especially on the Chaco and post-Chaco eras (AD 900–1300). Her research interests include migration, understanding the evolution of complex...