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

Preface

Preface In this book, we seek to explain one of the classic problems in the archaeology of the Americas: the depopulation of the northern Southwest in the late AD 1200s. At the same time, we hope to contribute to migration studies more generally. The prehispanic history of the U.S. Southwest—even that of “sedentary farmers”—was marked by the recurrent movement of households and communities across local landscapes on generational timescales. Many of the relocations were apparently anticipated and socially nondisruptive. Against this background , though, several episodes stand out for the numbers of people affected, the distances moved, the permanence of the departures, the severity of the surrounding conditions, and the human suffering and culture change that accompanied them (Hegmon et al. 2008). By any of these criteria, the thirteenth-century AD conclusion to the farming way of life in the northern Southwest must have been among the most challenging and remarkable experiences in the lives of Pueblo people across many generations. For more than two thousand years, Pueblo peoples had been planting corn, building houses, and burying their dead on the plateaus and in the canyons of what is today southwestern Colorado, southeastern Utah, and adjacent portions of Arizona and New Mexico. No human society—and more especially, no farming community that for generations had built up its villages and fields—leaves its homeland lightly. As we will see, even the incomplete record available to archaeologists reveals a traumatic side to this departure. And yet, on long enough time scales, there would have been constructive and generative aspects to this crisis. One of them is obvious: human welfare can often be improved through migration from an environmentally poor area to an environmentally rich area. More subtly, as Boyd and Richerson point out, people also “tend to move to wealthier, safer, and more just societies from poorer, more violent, less just societies ” (2009:331, emphasis added). If there is assimilation, then such movement (or “selective migration”) can tend to increase the occurrence across societies of those group-beneficial values, institutions, or practices that made those societies more attractive. Readers of this volume will see that there is always a tension between whether to view depopulation as a catastrophic historical event or as part of a longstanding southwestern (indeed, human) process leading ultimately to social and economic forms that were quite possibly more advantageous for individuals in a society. This cannot be resolved because it was both of those things, on differing temporal and experiential scales. Ultimately, it is less fruitful to regard the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries as posing a dialectic between catastrophe and reorganization. Instead, we are coming to think of this era as having witnessed a competition between differing social and economic organizations in which selective migration was considerably hastened by severe climatic, environmental, and social upheaval. Moreover, as the chapters assembled here show, it is at least as true that emigration led to the collapse of the northern Southwest as that this collapse led to migration. It cannot have escaped the attention of any of the fifteen archaeologists (and one geologist) who gathered at the Amerind Foundation near Dragoon in late February 2008 that our circumstances were markedly more comfortable and secure than those of the people we were studying. We were convening at the invitation of John Ware, executive director of the Amerind, to revisit in more detail and at greater leisure the content of a 2007 Society for American Archaeology symposium, organized by Aaron M. Wright and me and moderated by Mark Varien, entitled New Light on the Thirteenth-Century Depopulation of the Northern Southwest. It was clearly time to revisit this problem, which as Varien shows in chapter 1 was a staple of southwestern archaeology in the first half of the twentieth century, but which has since been dealt with in a mostly oblique fashion. Many new paleoenvironmental data, and a great deal of archaeological survey and excavation, now permit us to be considerably more precise than we could be fifty years ago on the timing of the depopulation, the number of people affected by it, and the ways in which northern Pueblo peoples coped, and failed to cope, with the rapidly changing environmental and demographic conditions they encountered throughout the 1200s. Working from the other end, models are xii Preface now providing insights into the processes behind the patterns we see, helping us to narrow the range of explanatory plausibilities. We editors would like to thank the authors of this volume...