March 17–19, 2014

Migration, Group Formation, and Economic Development in the Pueblo World

For the past decade, the Village Ecodynamics Project has been investigating coupled natural and human systems in the prehispanic U.S. Southwest through empirical archaeological research and agent-based modeling. In 2009, several members of the VEP team began a second phase of research that includes an expansion of the original study in southwest Colorado and the development of a second study area in the northern Rio Grande region of New Mexico. The project team met at SAR to discuss how to best utilize these data to address research questions on migration, group formation, and co-evolution of institutions and economies.

The first goal to emerge was the production of a co-authored, synthetic paper on the project for a journal, such as Science or PNAS. The suggested title of the envisioned paper was, “The Great Migration: Socioecological Failure and Social Transformation in the US Southwest.” Before this paper could be written, participants found it necessary to produce a series of articles as precursors. Several articles have been published since the seminar was held, including:

Ortman, Scott G. “Discourses and Human Securities in Tewa Origins.” In The Archaeology of Human Experience. Michelle Hegmon (Ed.). Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association.

Ortman, Scott G., and Grant L. Coffey. “Universal Scaling: Evidence from Village-Level Societies.” In Scaling and Complexity in Human Organizations. Luis Bettencourt, Jose Lobo, and Geoffrey West (Eds.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (Princeton Primers in Complexity).

2015. Glowacki, Donna M. Living and Leaving: A Social History of Regional Depopulation in Thirteenth-Century Mesa Verde. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

2014. Bettencourt, Luis M. A. “Impact of Changing Technology on the Evolution of Complex Informational Networks. Proceedings of the IEEE, 102(12):1878-1891.

2014. Bocinsky, R. Kyle, and Timothy A. Kohler. “A 2,000-Year Reconstruction of the Rain-Fed Maize Agriculture Niche in the US Southwest.” Nature Communications, 5:5618.

2014. Kohler, Timothy A. Scott G. Ortman, Katie E. Grundtisch, Carly M. Fitzpatrick, and Sarah M. Cole. The Better Angels of Their Nature: Declining Violence Through Time among Prehispanic Farmers of the Pueblo Southwest. American Antiquity 79(3): 444-464.

2014. Kohler, Timothy A., and Kelsey M. Reese. “Long and Spatially Variable Neolithic Demographic Transition in the North American Southwest.” PNAS, 111(28): 10101-10106.

Timothy A. Kohler, Chair
Regent’s Professor, Department of Anthropology, Washington State University

Scott G. Ortman, Chair
Omidyar Fellow and Lightfoot Fellow, Santa Fe Institute and Crow Canyon Archaeological Center

Craig D. Allen
Research Ecologist and Station Leader, US Geological Survey, Jemez Mountains Field Station, New Mexico

R. Scott Anderson
Professor, School of Earth Sciences and Environmental Sustainability, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff

Luis N. A. Bettencourt
Professor, Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico

R. Kyle Bocinsky
Graduate Student, Department of Anthropology, Washington State University, Pullman

Stefani Crabtree
Doctoral Student, Department of Anthropology, Washington State University, Pullman

Donna Glowacki
John Cardinal O’Hara CSC Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame

Ziad Kobti
Director and Associate Professor, School of Computer Science, University of Windsor, Ontario

José Lobo
Research Faculty, School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe

David Stahle
Distinguished Professor, Department of Geosciences, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

Mark D. Varien
Research and Education Chair, Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, Cortez, Colorado