In a new paper appearing in Nature Communications, SFI External Professor Tim Kohler and his colleague Kyle Bocinsky of Washington State University “have detailed the role of localized climate change in one of the great mysteries of North American archaeology: the depopulation of the southwest Colorado by Ancestral Pueblo (Anasazi) people in the late 1200s,” according to a press release by Eric Sorensen for WSU.
The researchers used tree-ring chronologies to inform a model of precipitation and temperature during the 13th century migration, and calculated the effects of climate change on traditional maize crops of the Ancestral Pueblo people. Their research suggests that some 40,000 prehispanic farmers moved from the Mesa Verde area of southwest Colorado in response to a drought that would have devastated the stability of their agricultural niche. They presumably migrated to the Pajarito Plateau in the northern Rio Grande, a more stable climate in which they could continue to farm their preferred crop by the same methods.
Their conclusion takes its place among several hypotheses for the depopulation of the region.
Can this research, the authors ask, help us understand our own present and future in the face of global climate change? “What is different about our present predicament is that large areas of the globe are expected to experience or are experiencing [generally negative] climate change, all at the same time,” writes Bocinsky in an email. “What makes it a crisis is that the options available to the Ancestral Pueblo people — e.g., a move to greener pastures — are not likely to be feasible for those affected by climate change today.”
Read the paper in Nature Communications (December 4, 2014)
Read the press release on the Washington State University website (December 4, 2014)