Climate, Community, and Connectivity in the Northern U.S. Southwest

All people are impacted by the global and regional processes that create climate. However, climate impacts play out on local scales, resulting in a diverse set of human-climate relationships across time and space. Thus, archaeological studies of human-climate relationships should work toward high-resolution reconstructions that allow us to trace the complex pathways by which global processes stressed local systems. The following chapters present three articles pursuing a detailed understanding of the role of climate stress on subsistence practices at persistent settlements in the Central Mesa Verde (CMV) region of the northern U.S. Southwest. These chapters present a refined method for identifying periods when climate acutely stressed people’s ability to subsist at three large, long-lived villages in the CMV from A.D. 600-1300, a high resolution maize productivity model to understand how people avoided maize shortages from A.D. 700-1300, and a novel method for documenting ancient roads across the U.S. Southwest to understand how communities in the CMV region and beyond were physically connected to one another. Results from these studies suggest that: 1) the effect of acute climate stress is strongly dependent on the resilience of subsistence and social systems at individual communities; 2) irrigation-based maize intensification was critical to the persistence of certain large settlements in the CMV region; and 3) persistent settlements, and possibly people’s willingness to endure climate stress, were also managed through regional connections and relationships.