Environmental Change and Human Adaptation in the Ancient American Southwest

Edited by David E Doyel, Jeffrey S Dean

Archaeology provides an ideal avenue for examining long-term processes and interrelationships between human behavior and environmental stability, variation, and change. The American Southwest is particularly well suited for such 'deep-time' investigations because of its comprehensive archaeological record, rich ethnographic and historical data on its peoples, and unmatched reconstructions of multiple environmental variables across a broad range of spatial and temporal scales.

This volume contains a varied and instructive set of studies of human behavioral adaptation to environmental change in the ancient Southwest. It makes significant contributions to southwestern prehistory, settlement pattern studies, agriculture, behavioral ecology, paleo-environmental reconstruction, and statistical and computer-aided modeling. The mix of case studies and syntheses covers the Colorado Plateau, Sonoran Desert, Mogollon Highlands, and Rio Grande Valley and summarizes the work of some of the leading researchers in the region.

David E. Doyel owns and operates Estrella Cultural Research and is adjunct faculty in anthropology at Arizona State University.

Jeffrey S. Dean is professor of dendrochronology (Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research) and professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, and curator of archaeology for the Arizona State Museum.

Praise and Reviews:

"An excellent contribution to our understanding of human ecology and the prehistory of the American Southwest." — Daniel Larson, California State University, Long Beach

"The authors should be commended for the excellent job the chapters do in showing how environmental change can be used to strengthen our understanding of the past, as all of the social and politiacal processes took place within a variable context that significantly influenced the trajectory of human response. Of interest not only to Southwestern researchers, but to researchers anywhere who want to see how they can astutely examine human-environment interactions."—Journal of Field Archaeology