Abstract
Severe droughts in the middle-12th and late-13th centuries appear to have affected Anasazi (pre-Columbian Native American) populations. During the first drought most of the great houses in the central San Juan Basin were vacated; the second drought resulted in the abandonment of the Four Corners region. During the first drought, villages may not have been completely abandoned. The multi-year drought periods probably were characterized by reductions in both winter and summer precipitation. Maize is dependent on winter precipitation for its germination and initial growth and on summer (monsoonal) precipitation for its continued growth. Reductions in precipitation are hypothesized to have resulted in low yields of maize, the dietary staple of the Anasazi. A comparison of historic climate data and tree-ring-based reconstructions of precipitation in the Four Corners region with tree-ring-based reconstructions of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) indicate that severe and persistent drought in the Four Corners region occurs when the PDO is negative and the AMO is positive. Historic climate data from the greater San Juan Basin indicate that a negative PDO is characterized by reductions in both water-year and summer precipitation, reinforcing the concept that at least some multi-year droughts involved weakening of the summer monsoon with attendant decreases in the yields of maize.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ayers, R. S. and Westcot, D. W.: 1976, Water Quality of Agriculture, Irrigation and Drainage Paper No. 29, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome.
Axtell, R. L., Epstein, J. M., Dean, J. S., Gumerman, G. J., Swedlund, A. C., Harburger, J., Chakravarty, S., Hammond, R., Parker, J., and Parker, M.: 2002, ‘Population growth and collapse in a multiagent model of the Kayenta Anasazi in Long House Valley’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99, 7275–7279.
Benson, L. V., Kashgarian, M., Rye, R. O., Lund, S. P., Paillet, F. L., Smoot, J., Kester, C., Mensing, S., Meko, D., and Lindstrom, S.:2002, ‘Holocene multidecadal and multicentennial droughts affecting Northern California and Nevada’, Quaternary Science Reviews 21, 659–682.
Bradfield, M.: 1971, ‘The changing pattern of hopi agriculture’, Royal Anthropological Institute Occasional Paper No. 30, London.
Brown, D. P. and Comrie, A. C.: 2002, ‘Sub-regional seasonal precipitation linkages to SOI and PDO in the Southwest United States’, Atmospheric Science Letters 3, 94–102.
Brown, W. L., Anderson, E. G., and Tuchawena, R. Jr.: 1952, ‘Observations on three varieties of hopi maize’, American Journal of Botany 39, 597–609.
Burns, B. T.: 1983, Simulated Anasazi Storage Behavior using Crop Yields Reconstructed from Tree Rings, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson.
Carlyle, S. W., Parr, R. L., Hayes, G., and O'Rourke, D. H.: 2000, ‘Context of maternal lineages in the Greater Southwest’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 113, 85–101.
Coltrain, J. B. and Leavitt, S. W.: 2002, ‘Climate and diet in fremont prehistory: Economic variability and abandonment of maize agriculture in the great salt lake basin’, American Antiquity 67, 453–485.
Cook, E. R., Woodhouse, C. A, Eakin, C. M., Meko, D. M., and Stahle, D. W.: 2004, ‘Long-Term aridity changes in the Western United States’, Science 306, 1015–1018.
Cushing, F. H.: 1896, Outlines of Zuni Creation Myths, Government Printing Office, Washington D. C., p. 462.
Cushing, F. H.: 1920, Zuni Breadstuff, Museum of the American Indian, Indian Notes and Monographs 8, New York.
D'arrigo, R., Villalba, R., and Wiles, G.: 2001, ‘Tree-ring estimates of pacific decadal climate variability’, Climate Dynamics 18, 219–224.
Dean, J. S.: 1988, ‘A Model of Anasazi Behavioral Adaptation’, in Gumerman, G. J. (ed.), The Anasazi in a Changing Environment, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 25–44.
Dean, J. S.: 1992, ‘Environmental Factors in the Evolution of the Chacoan Sociopolitical System’, in Doyel, D.E. (ed.), Anasazi Regional Organization and the Chacoan System, Maxwell Museum Anthropology Paper No. 5, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, pp. 35–43.
Dean, J. S.: 1996, ‘Demography, environment, and subsistence stress’, in Tainter, J., Tainter, B. B. (eds.), Evolving Complexity and Environmental Risk in Prehistoric Southwest, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, vol. XXIV, Addison-Wesley, New York, pp. 25–56.
Dean, J. S.: 2004, ‘Anthropogenic environmental change in the southwest as viewed from the Colorado Plateau’, in Redman, C. L., James, S. R., Fish, P. R., and Rogers, J. D. (eds.), The Archaeology of Global Change: The Impact of Humans on the Environment, Smithsonian Books, Washington DC, pp. 191–207.
Dean, J. S. and Funkhouser, G. S.: 2004, ‘Dendroclimatology and fluvial chronology in chaco canyon, Appendix A’, in Force, E. R., Vivian, R. G., Windes, T. C., and Dean, J. S., Relation of “Bonito” Paleo-channels and Base-Level Variations to Anasazi Occupation, Chaco, Canyon, New Mexico, Arizona State Museum Archaeological Series 194, 39–41.
Dean, J. S., Euler, R. C., Gumerman, G. J., Plog, F., Hevly, R. H. and Karlstrom, T. N. V.: 1985, ‘Human behavior, demography, and paleoenvironment on the colorado plateaus’, American Antiquity 50, 537–554.
Dean, J. S., Gumerman, G. J., Epstein, J. M., Axtell, Swedlund, A. C., Parker, M. T., and McCarroll, S.: 2000. ‘Understanding anasazi culture change through agent-based modeling’, in Kohler, T. A. and Gumerman, G. J. (eds.), Dynamics in Human and Primate Societies, Agent-Based Modeling of Social and Spatial Processes, Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 179–205.
Douglass, A. E.: 1929, ’The secret of the Southwest solved by talkative tree rings’, National Geographic Magazine 56, 736–770.
Eggan, F.: 1966, The American Indian: Perspectives for the Study of Social Chance, Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago.
Enfield, D. B., Mestas-Nuñez, A. M., and Trimble, P. J.; 2001, ‘The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and its relation to rainfall and river flows in the Continental U.S., Geophysical Research Letters 28, 2077–2080.
Forde, C. D.: 1931, ‘Hopi agriculture and land ownership’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 61, 357–405.
Fowler, A. P. and Stein J. R.: 1992, ‘Anasazi great house in space, time, and paradigm’, in Doyel, D. E. (ed.), Anasazi Regional Organization and the Chaco System, Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, Anthropological Paper No. 5, Albuquerque, pp. 101–122.
Fritts, H. C., Smith, D. G. and Stokes, M. A.: 1965, ‘The biological model for paleoclimatic interpretation of mesa verde tree-ring series’, in Osborne, D. (ed.), Contributions of the Wetherill Mesa Archaeological Project, Society for American Archaeology Memoir 19, Salt Lake City, pp. 101–121.
Fye, J. K., Stahle, D. W., and Cook, E. R.; 2003, ‘Paleoclimatic analogs to twentieth-century moisture regimes across the United States’, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 84, 901–909.
Gillespie, W. B.: 1984, ‘The environment of the chaco anasazi’, in Noble, D.G. (ed.), New Light on Chaco Canyon, Exploration, the Annual Bulletin of the School, of American Research, Santa Fe, pp. 37–44.
Graumlich, L.: 1993, ‘A 1000-Year record of temperature and precipitation in the sierra nevada’, Quaternary Research 39, 249–255.
Gray, S. T., Graumlich, L. J., Betancourt, J. L., and Pedersen, G. T.: 2004, ‘A tree-ring based reconstruction of the atlantic multidecadal oscillation since 1567 A.D.’, Geophysical Research Letters 31, L12205.
Grissino-Mayer, H. D.: 1996, ‘A 2129-Year reconstruction of precipitation for Northwest New Mexico, USA’, in Dean, J. S., Meko, D. M. and Swetnam, T. W. (eds.), Tree Rings, Environment, and Humanity, Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, pp. 191–204.
Guttman, N. B.: 1998, ‘Comparing the palmer drought index and the standardized precipitation index’, Journal American Water Resources Association 34, 113–121.
Hough, W.: 1915, The Hopi Indians, Cedar Falls, Iowa.
Hunt, A.:1953, Archeological Survey of the La Sal Mountain Area, Utah, University of Utah Archeological Papers No. 14, Salt Lake City.
Johnson, C. D., Kohler, T. A., and Cowan, J.: 2005, ‘Modeling historical ecology, thinking about contemporary systems’, American Anthropologist 107, 96–107.
Judge, W. J.: 1989, ‘Chaco Canyon – San Juan Basin’, in Cordell, L. S., and Gumerman, G. J. (eds.), Dynamics of Southwest Prehistory, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C., pp. 1–12.
Kerr, R. A.: 2000, ‘A North Atlantic climate pacemaker for the centuries’, Science 288, 1984–1986.
Kohler, T. A.: 2002, ‘The final 400 years of prehispanic agricultural society in the Mesa Verde region’, Kiva 66, 191–204.
Kohler, T. A.: 2004, ‘Prehistoric human impact on upland North American southwestern environments: Evolutionary ecological perspectives’, in Redman, C. L., James, S. R., Fish, P. R., and Rogers, J. D. (eds.), The Archaeology of Global Change: The Impact of Humans on the Environment, Smithsonian Books, Washington DC, pp. 2241–2242.
Larson, D. O. and Michaelsen, J.: 1990, ‘Impacts of climatic variability and population growth on virgin branch anasazi cultural developments’, American Antiquity 55, 227–249.
Larson, D. O., Neff, H., Graybill, D. A., Michaelsen, J. and Ambos, E.: 1996, ‘Risk, climatic variability, and the study of southwestern prehistory: An evolutionary perspective’, American Antiquity 61, 217–242.
Lekson, S. H.: 1984, Great Pueblo Architecture of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, p.299.
Levy, J. E.: 1992, Orayvi Revisited, School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, p. 198
Lindsay, L. W.: 1986, ‘Fremont Fragmentation’, in Condie, C. J. and Fowler, D. D. (eds.), Anthropology of the Desert West, University of Utah Anthropological Papers No. 110, Salt Lake City, pp. 229–252.
Linsley, B. K., Wellington, G. M., and Schrag, D. P.: 2000, ‘Decadal sea surface temperature variability in the subtropical South Pacific from 1726 to 1997 A. D., Science 290, 1145–1148.
Lyneis, M. M.: 1996, ‘Pueblo II-Pueblo III change in southwestern Utah, the Arizona strip, and Southern Nevada’, in Adler, M. A. (ed.), The Prehistoric Pueblo World, AD 1150-1350, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, pp. 11–28.
MacDonald, G. M. and Case, R. A.: 2005, ‘Variations in the Pacific decadal oscillation over the past millennium’, Geophysical Research Letters 32, L08703, 4 pp.
Mantua, N. J., Hare, S. R., Zhang, Y., Wallace, J. M. and Francis, R. C.: 1997, ‘A pacific interdecadal climate oscillation with impacts on salmon production’, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 78, 1069–1079.
McCabe, G. J., Palecki, M. A. and Betancourt, J. L.: 2004, ‘Pacific and Atlantic ocean influences on multidecadal drought frequency in the United States’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101, 4136–4141.
Meko, D. M. and Baisan, C. H.: 2001, ‘Pilot study of latewood-width of conifers as an indicator of variability of summer rainfall in the North American monsoon region’, International Journal of Climatology 21, 697–708.
Minnis, P. E.: 1981, Economic and Organizational Responses to Food Stress by Non-Stratified Societies: An Example from Prehistoric New Mexico, Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Mitchell, V. L.: 1976, ‘The regionalization of climate in the Western United States’, Journal of Applied Meteorology 15, 920–927.
Muenchrath, D. A., Kuratomi, M., Sandor, J. A. and Homburg J. A.: 2002, ‘Observational study of maize production systems of Zuni farmers in semiarid New Mexico’, Journal of Ethnobiology 22, 1–33.
Newman, D. E.: 1996, ‘Pollen and macrofossil analysis’, in Talbot, R. K. and Richens, L. D. (eds.), Steinaker Gap: An Early Fremont Farmstead, Museum of Peoples and Cultures Occasional Papers No. 2, Brigham Young University, Provo, pp. 123–148.
Ni F., Cavazos, T., Hughes, M. K., Comrie, A. C., and Funkhouser, G.: 2002, ‘Cool-season precipitation in the southwestern USA since AD 1000: Comparison of linear and nonlinear techniques for reconstruction’, International Journal of Climatology 22, 1645–1662.
Olson, R. A. and Sander, D. H.: 1988, ‘Corn production’, in Sprague, G. F. and Dudley, J. W. (eds.), Corn and Corn Improvement, 3rd edn., Agronomy Monograph 18, American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America and Soil Science Society of America, Madison, Wisconsin, pp. 639–686.
Petersen, K. L.: 1988, ‘Climate and the Dolores River Anasazi’, University of Utah Anthropological Papers 113, 1–151.
Petersen, K. L.: 1994, ‘A warm and wet little climatic optimum and a cold and dry little ice age in the southern rocky mountains, U.S.A.’, Climatic Change 26, 243–269.
Robinson W.J. and Rose, M. R.: 1979, Preliminary Annual and Seasonal Dendroclimatic Reconstruction for the Northwest Plateau, Southwest Colorado, Southwest Mountains, and Northern Mountains, Climatic Regions, A.D. 900–1969, Manuscript on File at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona, Tucson.
Rose, M. R., Robinson, W. J., and Dean, J. S.: 1982, Dendroclimatic Reconstruction for the Southwestern Colorado Plateau, Manuscript on file at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona, Tucson.
Rudy, J. R.: 1953, An Archaeological Survey of Western Utah, University of Utah Anthropological Papers No. 12, Salt Lake City.
Salzer, M. W.: 2000, ‘Temperature variability and the Northern Anasazi: Possible implications for regional abandonment’, Kiva 65, 295–318.
Schubert, S. D., Suarez, M. J., Pegion, P. J., Koster, R. D., and Bacmeister, J. T.: 2004, ‘On the Cause of the 1930s dust bowl’, Science 303, 1855–1859.
Shaw, R. H.: 1988, ‘Climate requirement’, in, Sprague, G. F and Dudley, J. W. (eds.), Corn and Corn Improvement, Agronomy Monograph No. 18, Madison, pp. 609–638.
Stahle, D. W., Cook, E. R., Cleaveland, M. K., Therrell, M. D., Meko, D. M., Grissino-Mayer, H. D., Watson, E., and Luckman, B. H.: 2000, ‘Tree-ring data document 16th century megadrought over North America’, EOS, Transactions American Geophysical Union 81, 121.
Stephen, A. M.: 1936, Hopi Journal of Alexander M. Stephen, in Parsons, E. C. (ed.), Columbia University Contribution to Anthropology 23, Columbia University Press, New York.
Stevenson, M. C.:1904, The Zuni Indians, their Mythology, Esoteric Fraternities, and Ceremonies, 23rd Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.
Stewart, G. R.: 1940, ‘Conservation in Pueblo agriculture’, Scientific Monthly 51 329–340.
Stine, S.: 1994, ‘Extreme and persistent drought in California and Patagonia during mediaeval time’, Nature 369, 546–549.
Stuiver, M., Reimer, P. J., and Braziunas, T. F.: 1998, ‘High-precision radiocarbon age calibration for terrestrial and marine samples’, Radiocarbon 40, 1127–1151.
Titiev, M.: 1944, Old Oraibi, a Study of the Hopi Indians of Third Mesa, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology 22, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Van West, C. R.: 1994, Modeling Prehistoric Climatic Variability and Agricultural Production in Southwestern Colorado: A GIS Approach, Reports of Investigations 67, Washington State University Department of Anthropology, Pullman, p. 258.
Varien, M. D., Van West, C. R., and Patterson, G. S.: 2000, ‘Competition, cooperation, and conflict: Agricultural production and community catchments in the central Mesa Verde region’, Kiva 66: 45–65.
Western Regional Climate Center, Desert Research Institute: 2004, http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Benson, L., Petersen, K. & Stein, J. Anasazi (Pre-Columbian Native-American) Migrations During The Middle-12Th and Late-13th Centuries – Were they Drought Induced?. Climatic Change 83, 187–213 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-006-9065-y
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-006-9065-y