Emily Jones

Across a Threshold: People, Animals, and Landscapes in Central New Mexico, 1300–1950 CE

The Tiguex War of 1540 marked the start of a dramatic socio-economic transformation of central New Mexico. Today home to Albuquerque and the associated urban sprawl of a 21st century Western city, the archaeological and historic records of the past five centuries in this region demonstrate the long-term impacts of the so-called “Columbian exchange” as well as the connection of these impacts to contemporary environmental change. Was this transformation a gradual process, with each step having a cumulative impact? Or was the transition more of a threshold change—an abrupt change in environmental processes and/or species composition in a formerly resilient landscape? Jones’s work uses the record of animal remains from archaeological sites, in conjunction with other documentary, paleoecological, and archaeological evidence, to answer these questions.