Resilient Communities of the Mesa Verde North Escarpment, AD 890–1300

Smallholder and subsistence-farming communities are communities of people who depend on natural resources for their livelihood, and who typically rely on long-term, inter-generational sharing of cultural knowledge concerning ecological systems, observations, and experiences of environmental processes. These types of communities account for 75\% of the world’s farms, and people within these communities comprise 60\% of the worldwide agricultural workforce. Recent research on the globalized impacts of climate change reveal profound disruptive effects at local levels in subsistence-farming communities and their surrounding ecosystems; and indicate the impacts of climate change are generally more extreme in contemporary subsistence-farming communities because these communities of people typically exist at the intersection of multiple, ever-changing, and potentially marginal dimensions of the human experience—the combination of which makes it more difficult to effectively address increasing periods of poor agricultural productivity as a result of climate change.

Studies on contemporary subsistence-farming communities repeatedly call for increasing our understanding of: the impacts of climate change on subsistence-farming communities; the populations most vulnerable to climate change; the adaptive measures available to communities to mitigate the effects of climate change, and; how the perception of climate change impacts household- and community-level responses to extreme weather events. Each of these four lines of inquiry can be summarized under the larger umbrella of one centralized research question: what are the long-term impacts of sustained climate change on subsistence-farming communities?

Archaeological datasets provide a longitudinal scale to observe the inter-generational effects of sustained climate change that inform the ultimate, rather than the proximate causes of collapse in social and ecological systems. When examining climate change in deep time, patterns of resiliency, degradation, and collapse can be observed as a recurring phenomenon that repeat ad infinitum, or until absolute societal collapse. By observing populations throughout multiple cycles of resiliency and degradation in deep time, repeated technological innovation and dynamic social patterns reveal household- and community-level responses to changing climatic regimes, entrenched in traditional ecological knowledge, and implemented at multiple scales of social organization.

The central Mesa Verde region in the northern US Southwest provides an ideal case study to explore the effects of sustained climate change on subsistence-farming communities through multiple cycles of resilience and degradation, as ancestral Pueblo people continuously occupied this arid, high-desert environment from 8000 BC through AD 1300, and successfully farmed this environmentally volatile space to reliably satisfy much of their annual caloric need from 200 BC through AD 1300. The following presentation discusses three articles pursuing a comprehensive understanding of the effects of sustained climate change on subsistence-farming communities by implementing a novel means of predicting household occupation on an annual timescale from AD 450 to 1300 across the central Mesa Verde region, measuring the efficacy of household-level efforts to mitigate the effects of annual environmental volatility by constructing local ecological niches for supplemental food production on the Mesa Verde cuesta from AD 890 to 1285, and combining the methods developed within these two projects to examine resiliency of four aggregated community centers on the Mesa Verde North Escarpment from AD 890 to 1300. Results from these research efforts provide insight into the compounding factors that augment the effects and perception of sustained climate change on subsistence-farming communities, contribute to identifying vulnerable populations during periods of climatic volatility, explore adaptive measures utilized by subsistence-farmers to mitigate the effects of sustained climate change, and observe how extreme climatic events can induce change at the household- and community-levels of social organization.