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Research, Education, and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center: 3

Research, Education, and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center

3

3

From DAP Roots to Crow Canyon and VEP Shoots

Some Recollections

Timothy A. Kohler, Ricky R. Lightfoot, Mark D. Varien, and William D. Lipe

The 1970s were an exciting time in American archaeology. Processualism (or the New Archaeology), with its optimistic view that scientific approaches would unlock all aspects of the archaeological record, was ascendant. Legislation including the Reservoir Salvage Act of 1960 as amended (16 U.S.C. 469—often informally referred to as the “Moss-Bennett legislation”) and the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 as amended (16 U.S.C. 470) was making possible projects of a scale not seen in the United States since the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s (Knudson et al. 1986; Lipe 2018).

One such large-scale project was the Dolores Archaeological Program (DAP), mitigating the damage to the archaeological record of a reservoir and irrigation system being built on a 10 mi. stretch of the Dolores River and surrounding lands in southwestern Colorado in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Voggesser 2001). A later part of the project dealt with building and mitigating the effects of the water delivery system, which we don’t address here. As the DAP wound down, the nearby Crow Canyon Archaeological Center was emerging as a private, nonprofit research and education institution, affiliated at the time with the Center for American Archaeology based in Illinois (see Lightfoot and Lipe, chapter 2 in this volume). Our goal in this chapter is to show how the DAP contributed significant momentum, staff, methods, a firm local chronology, and theoretical inspiration to the Center and how the Center contributed to and interacted with the National Science Foundation–funded Village Ecodynamics Project (VEP).

The Dolores Archaeological Program

The DAP (figure 3.1) began in June 1978, was completed in December 1985, and had a total cost of nearly $10 million (Breternitz 1993), or some 31 million in 2020 dollars. In addition, the Bureau of Reclamation project provided funding for the construction of the Bureau of Land Management’s Canyons of the Ancients Visitor Center and Museum (CAVM), formerly the Anasazi Heritage Center, a state-of-the-art curation facility and museum near Dolores, Colorado. During six field seasons, DAP archaeologists surveyed and recorded 1,626 archaeological sites on more than 16,000 acres in the project area. In addition, field crews excavated all or part of 125 sites, collecting more than 1.5 million artifacts. The project produced a bookshelf of thirteen published volumes and 286 technical reports. These reports in turn gave rise to several theses, dissertations, and numerous publications in academic journals and edited volumes. Many of these publications and the DAP’s datasets are conveniently available online through the Digital Archaeological Record (https://core.tdar.org/project/5398/the-dolores-archaeological-program). The DAP was performed under the overall direction of David Breternitz, University of Colorado, with Washington State University (WSU) as a principal subcontractor.

Central Mesa Verde region, location of sites mentioned, and the V-E-P 1 and V-E-P 2 study areas

Figure 3.1. Map showing central Mesa Verde region, location of sites mentioned in this chapter, and the VEP I and VEP II north and south study areas. Courtesy of Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

The DAP was one of the largest contract archaeology projects ever conducted in the US, at its height employing more than 200 archaeologists in the field and lab and more than 540 people altogether over its seven and a half years. There were not enough archaeologists with experience in the local area to fill the required positions in the field, lab, publications, and administration sectors. The authors of this chapter are only a few of the many who gained their first experience in the archaeology of southwestern Colorado through the DAP. As the project began, William Lipe, a co-principal investigator on the DAP, was the only established researcher among the four authors here. In 1978, Lipe was an associate professor at WSU with experience in ancestral Pueblo societies west of the DAP in the Red Rock Plateau / Glen Canyon (Fowler 2006; Lipe 1970) and Cedar Mesa (Matson et al. 1988) areas of southeastern Utah. Tim Kohler, who eventually became a DAP co-principal investigator, came to the project in 1979 as an adjunct professor at WSU with a one-year-old PhD from the University of Florida and experience in Woodland-period villages in north-central and gulf coastal Florida. Mark Varien and Ricky Lightfoot began their careers in Texas, with Varien having worked in Mesoamerica and Oklahoma and Lightfoot in Alaska before coming to the DAP in 1979 and 1980, respectively. They both became crew chiefs and wrote or contributed to numerous DAP site reports, including the two-volume report on Grass Mesa Village (Lipe et al. 1988).

If the DAP had begun two decades earlier or later, its fundamental goals and methods would likely have been quite different (Lipe 2018). As it was, the general research design (Kane et al. 1983), also summarized in the implementation plan (Knudson et al. 1986), emphasized five problem domains: economy and adaptation, paleodemography, social organization, extraregional relationships, and cultural process. These concerns were solidly in the processual archaeology tradition. The DAP derived its explanatory goals and probabilistic sampling component from Lewis Binford (1964). More important to the project, though (and much more fun to read), was Kent Flannery’s Early Mesoamerican Village (1976), with its sparkling dialogue on the issues encountered in putting a processual approach on the ground in a Formative Stage society having many analogies with the Pueblo I period sites in the Dolores area. Michael Schiffer’s (1976) views on how archaeological assemblages and sites formed also deeply influenced DAP field procedures, forms, and the way we approached our analyses.

The DAP spatial, temporal, and sociocultural systematics were developed by Al Kane (1983), who was partly inspired by taxonomic schemes in Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips (1958). The spatial systematics began with activity areas and use areas and proceeded through household clusters, interhousehold clusters, habitations, intercommunity clusters, localities, sectors, districts, and regions. There was also a detailed typology of formal site types that included limited activity loci, seasonal loci, and habitations of various scales. These and other categories, and the provenience forms used in the field that also required considering assemblage formation processes, were crucial to the standardization essential to DAP’s success. Back at the lab, enforcement of these data-quality standards by lab director Paul Farley was a much-feared obstacle to assistant-crew-chief happiness. The attention to detail and standardization in field and lab data were essential to making data digitally accessible and useful for comparative analyses. More than for any other large project of its time, the DAP field-provenience and laboratory-recording methods were structured around use of computers (Udick and Wilshusen 1999).

Reflecting on the project fifteen years after its close, Lipe (1999) considered the main substantive and methodological contributions of the DAP to be the following:

  • • an improved understanding of Pueblo culture from AD 650 to AD 900;
  • • more attention to the environmental and climatic conditions during this period than was typical in archaeological projects;
  • • an increased understanding of processes of sociocultural change (especially those underlying formation of large villages from small hamlets);
  • • development of archaeological methods;
  • • great attention to data comparability and quality control that accompanied data computerization, starting with the project’s elaborate recording forms that were designed to make this possible (see also Schlanger and Kohler 2006).

The contractual nature of the DAP also demanded prompt publication of all field and lab results, inculcating good habits in all participants.

Connected with Lipe’s last two points, we would add that the ability to work on problems using large datasets potentially spanning dozens of sites and employing data from several material categories was revolutionary in the context of world archaeology in that era. Later research of both Crow Canyon and the VEP would build on these advances. While contractual obligations guided DAP work, the project aspired to be more than a good CRM project as evidenced by the many publications produced by DAP researchers. Their problem-oriented research addressed some 300 years of change using a highly resolved chronology, imparting a clear sense of how a number of variables changed through time in a linked fashion. The many possible examples of these studies include Allen Kane (1986), William Lipe (1986), Timothy Kohler et al. (1986), Sarah Schlanger (1987, 1988) and Richard Wilshusen (1986, 1987). These and other publications powerfully illustrate the utility of large datasets in which various types of information confront each other, sometimes using computational approaches including simulation to derive or test hypotheses.

Crow Canyon Archaeological Center’s Early Years

Merger with the Center for American Archaeology

The DAP’s final full-scale field season was in 1983, though lab work and report writing continued until December 1985. As the DAP was winding down, the Interdisciplinary Supplemental Education Programs (I-SEP), popularly known as the Crow Canyon School, had become the southwestern branch campus of the Center for American Archaeology (CAA) based in Illinois (see Lightfoot and Lipe, chapter 2 in this volume). In 1985, Crow Canyon became independent of CAA and in 1986 changed its name to the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. With the start of excavations at the Duckfoot site in 1983 (see figure 3.1), Crow Canyon became committed to conducting long-term archaeological research projects, designed and managed by resident professional staff, with campus-based education programs closely integrated with the research (Varien and Lightfoot 2006). As we describe throughout the rest of this chapter, the coincidence of the ending of DAP and the transition at Crow Canyon created a significant long-term advantage for Crow Canyon.

A doctoral student of Binford’s at the University of Chicago, Stuart Struever was one of the leading proponents of processual archaeology in the 1960s, as well as the founder and president of the CAA, which acquired the Crow Canyon campus in 1983 and funded the expansion of its facilities and programs. Struever (1968) argued that to truly advance knowledge of past cultural systems, archaeology requires parent organizations to provide funding and facilities to sustain multidisciplinary teams to engage in long-term regional research programs, conduct excavations and surveys, and employ the full range of available methods in attacking explanatory problems.

The DAP successfully implemented the large-scale, multidisciplinary program of research advocated by Struever, but as a publicly funded data recovery project, it could not sustain the effort beyond its contractual dates. Fortunately, Crow Canyon emerged as a private, nonprofit institution just at the right moment to develop the facilities, capacity, and funding to maintain a long-term regional research program. Crow Canyon built upon and expanded the knowledge gained at DAP and has so far sustained the research effort for four decades beyond the end of DAP. (For more on Crow Canyon’s education programs and collaboration with American Indian advisors and partners, see Franklin and Patterson et al., chapter 9 in this volume.) Crow Canyon’s field and lab recording systems and forms were modeled on those developed by the DAP, making it easy to incorporate DAP veterans into its staff (Table 3.1.). In addition, Crow Canyon employed Art Rohr and Lynn Udick, former directors of the DAP information technology and database management, to set up the information technology systems at Crow Canyon to be consistent with those at DAP.

Table 3.1. People who worked at both the DAP and Crow Canyon, and their main roles.

Name

DAP Role(s)

CCAC Role(s)

CCAC Years

Mary Etzkorn

Field archaeologist

Lab archaeologist; publications editor

1987–2015

Betty Havers

Field volunteer

Field volunteer

1985–1994

George Havers

Field volunteer

Field volunteer

1985–1994

Megg Heath

Educational consultant

Director of education

1986–1992

Carla Hoehn

Publication / administration assistant

Chief financial officer

2019–present

Mark Hovezak

Field archaeologist

Assistant director: environmental archaeology

1990–1995

Tim Hovezak

Field archaeologist

Field archaeologist

2003–2004

Ed Huber

Field archaeologist

Project director: Green Lizard Site

1987–1988

Jim Kleidon

Crew chief / author

Assistant project director: Sand Canyon Pueblo

1986–1991

Tim Kohler

Locality supervisor: Grass Mesa; co-principal investigator; author

Research associate; Principal investigator: VEP; board member

2000–present

Kristin Kuckelman

Crew chief / author

Project director: Yellow Jacket, Goodman Point Pueblos; publications editor

1989–2019

Patricia Flint Lacey

Lab archaeologist/

analyst

Educator

1985

Ricky Lightfoot

Crew chief / author

Project director; president & CEO; board member/chair

1984–present

Carrie Lipe

Field archaeologist

Assistant project director: Duckfoot Site

1985–1986

William Lipe

Co-principal investigator (WSU) / senior staff author

Advisory board; director of research; board member

1982–present

Tom May

Draftsman

Draftsman

1985–1993

Neal Morris

Crew chief / author

Field assistant; draftsman

1985–present

Art Rohr

IT director

IT director

1990–1999

Angela Schwab

Lab staff

Lab director; IT staff; campus manager

1985–2005

Louise Schmidlap

Lab director

Lab archaeologist; publications director

1985–2015

Leslie Sesler

Field archaeologist

Field archaeologist

2003–2004;

2007–2008

Lynn Udick

Environmental archaeology field staff; IT staff; Publications staff

IT staff; publications director

1990–1999

Mark Varien

Crew chief / author

Project director; research director; co-PI: VEP; VP Programs; executive VP Research Institute

1987–present

Roger Walkenhorst

Field archaeologist

Educator

1987

Richard Wilshusen

Crew chief / author

Survey crew chief; director of research; research associate

1987–present

Note: The authors tried to remember everyone who worked at DAP and Crow Canyon and apologize if they missed anyone who should have been included.

From 1983 on, Crow Canyon assumed the professional obligation of publishing detailed reports, written largely by its own staff, that summarized both field observations and laboratory analyses of its excavations. The DAP provided a model for this, with its large “descriptive” reports, sometimes running to hundreds of pages, made available to libraries, scholars, students, and the general public. In the 1980s, however, the ambitious goals of processual archaeology were promoting methods that produced ever-more-fine-grained types of data both in field recording and analysis, and hence ever-larger reports. Lipe, in his part-time role as Crow Canyon’s research director, was committed to the principle stated by Jesse Jennings, Lipe’s former boss on the Glen Canyon Project, endorsed by Dave Breternitz and observed throughout Lipe’s career, that unreported excavations are philosophically indistinguishable from pothunting. Lipe’s entreaties to Crow Canyon donors bore fruit, especially in the form of significant gifts from Peggy and Steve Fossett, for funding the Occasional Papers of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center “hard-copy” publications. Two volumes reporting Duckfoot site excavations and interpretations were eventually published in that series. In the mid-1990s, however, Executive Director Ian “Sandy” Thompson correctly perceived that data production in archaeology had outpaced the capacity of paper volumes and led the Center to develop ways to publish its work on the internet. The result has been an unbroken series of digital reports that cover all of Crow Canyon’s multiyear field projects, coupled with regulated access to the digital databases that were inspired by the pioneering work of the DAP. See https://www.crowcanyon.org/index.php/access-our-research/site-reports-databases.

The Duckfoot Site Project

Crow Canyon’s first excavation project, beginning in 1983, was at the Duckfoot site, a well-preserved Pueblo I period hamlet conveniently located about a mile northwest of the Crow Canyon campus (Lightfoot 1994; Lightfoot and Etzkorn 1993). The site provided an ideal opportunity for Crow Canyon to investigate a site contemporaneous with the Pueblo I period settlements in the DAP area but located in a different environment. This was also the opportunity for Crow Canyon archaeologists to employ the field and lab methods used at DAP and to build upon the DAP’s knowledge gains. Crow Canyon archaeologists spent five years supervising groups of students and adult volunteers in excavating this small habitation using mainly trowels and whisk brooms. A comparable site at the DAP would have been excavated in a few months using not just trowels and whisk brooms but also backhoes and shovels.

The Duckfoot Site provided an ideal opportunity to evaluate the DAP model of household organization, because Crow Canyon archaeologists excavated all of the twenty surface rooms, four pit structures, and the entire midden. (In light of Crow Canyon’s commitment to conservation goals in field archaeology, we point out that the sampling frame here was the locality’s population of Pueblo I period sites, which included a large number of unexcavated sites.) Excavation revealed the skeletal remains of seven people—including men, women, and children—on the floors of the four pit structures. Three of the four pit structure roofs burned and collapsed at the time of depopulation, resulting in charring of the human remains. The fourth pit structure did not burn, but a partial human skeleton was placed on the floor prior to the dismantling of the roof, which was deposited in the structure. The abundant usable tools and containers on structure floors and the human remains on pit structure floors indicate that the entire site was rapidly and simultaneously depopulated, with the pit structures being deliberately and ritually closed—leaving no possibility for the departing residents to return and reuse the settlement. While there are no clear indications why so many people died in such a brief time, there are hints elsewhere that some violence surrounded the termination of the Pueblo I period (e.g., Kohler et al. 2020). Burned roof timbers sealed the artifact assemblages and human remains and provided 375 tree-ring dates, more than half of which were cutting dates.

Ricky Lightfoot (1994) applied Michael Schiffer’s (1976) approach to the study of site-formation processes and evaluated the DAP models of household organization (Lightfoot 1994; Lightfoot et al. 2014). He used rim sherds to reconstruct the total discard assemblage of gray ware pottery in the midden, applying estimates of vessel use-lives to evaluate the rate of gray ware pottery discard and to model a typical household assemblage of pottery. With these results he could compare the structure floor assemblages to the expected household assemblage based on the midden accumulations. The floor artifact assemblages, activity area distribution, refitting of floor sherds between structures, and doorway connections between structures combined to form a model of household organization that differed from that developed at the DAP. In Lightfoot’s model, each pit structure and its associated suite of living and storage rooms represented the space occupied by one extended household. This model built on Stephen Lekson’s (1988) argument that the post-Basketmaker period small pit structures traditionally called “kivas” by southwestern archaeologists should be interpreted as domestic structures—an approach also adopted by Lipe (1989). (The DAP had interpreted each such suite as occupied by an aggregate of multiple households, with each living room representing a separate household.) Lightfoot’s alternative model was eventually adopted by the VEP as well (e.g., Kohler and Higgins 2016) and formed the basis for VEP population reconstructions (e.g., Ortman et al. 2007).

The nearly complete excavation of Duckfoot and its precise dating allowed Varien to develop studies that examined how artifacts accumulate at residential sites (Varien 1999a, 1999b; Varien and Mills 1987; Varien and Potter 1997), inspired in part by Kohler’s (1978) early work on accumulations and analysis of artifact accumulations at the DAP (Kohler and Blinman 1987). Using Duckfoot data, Varien developed an annual accumulation rate for cooking pottery at residential sites in the central Mesa Verde region (Varien 1999b, 73–80). He combined this accumulation rate with estimates of the total discard of cooking pottery at residential sites, obtained through probability sampling, refining approaches Kohler developed on the DAP (Kohler and Gross 1984; Varien 1999a). Varien used the annual accumulation rate and the estimates of total cooking pottery discard to calculate how long households occupied their residential sites, documenting how occupation span changed over time in the central Mesa Verde region (Varien 1999b; Varien and Ortman 2007). He then used the occupation span estimates to discuss how length of occupation affected architectural change (Varien 1999b) and site structure and organization of activities (Varien 2012) at residential sites in the region.

The Sand Canyon Archaeological Project

In 1983, Crow Canyon staff mapped Sand Canyon Pueblo (SCP), a large Pueblo III period village at the head of Sand Canyon (see figure 3.1), launching a twelve-year excavation project there the following year. The Sand Canyon Archaeological Project used survey and excavations at selected sites to characterize the social and environmental history of the 200 km2 Sand Canyon locality (SCL). A three-year survey program began in 1985, supervised by Carla Van West during the first two years and Michael Adler in the final year (Adler 1992). This block survey covered 6,400 acres (26 km2) surrounding the large Pueblo III period Sand Canyon and Goodman Point Pueblos and identified 429 archaeological sites with 696 components. Additional block surveys were subsequently conducted in the southern portion of SCL (Adler and Metcalf 1991; Gleichman and Gleichman 1992; Ortman and Varien 2007). This work provided a locality-level social and demographic context for the intensive excavation-based studies of late Pueblo II and Pueblo III period occupation in the SCL, similar to the role of survey on the DAP (Schlanger 1987). This research provided a basis for defining communities in the SCL (Adler 1994, 2002; Adler and Varien 1994).

Almost incredibly, the excavations at SCP provided the first in-depth look at canyon-head villages since the much-less-detailed work by Sylvanus Morley (1908). Fieldwork included the complete excavation of seven kiva suites (a kiva and its associated rooms), intensive testing of the great kiva and D-shaped bi-wall structure, and limited testing in other contexts. The short occupation, affirmed by many tree-ring dates, surprised many archaeologists. Among the many important publications on this site are those evaluating its role as a planned community center (Bradley 1993; Ortman and Bradley 2002) and considering its abundant public architecture (Ortman and Bradley 2002) and how feasting related to this architecture (Potter and Ortman 2004). Others weigh the relationship between Chaco Canyon and Sand Canyon Pueblo (Bradley 1996; Kuckelman 2008) and reconstruct the violence surrounding the depopulation of the site and region (Kuckelman 2010; Kuckelman et al. 2002).

Excavation also began at several late Pueblo II and Pueblo III period sites identified by the SCL survey to assess their relationship to Sand Canyon Pueblo. Edgar Huber excavated part of the Green Lizard site, a small residential site located on a bench in Sand Canyon in 1987 and 1988. Huber showed that its occupation overlapped with the initial period of Sand Canyon Pueblo’s rapid growth (Huber 1993; Huber and Lipe 1992). In 1988, under Varien’s direction, Crow Canyon began a four-year site-testing program that employed a stratified random sampling approach to provide statistically comparable assemblage data from thirteen sites in the SCL, including initial excavations at Castle Rock Pueblo (Varien 1999a). The Sand Canyon Archaeological Project Site Testing Program anchored Varien’s dissertation and subsequent book (Varien 1999b). The testing program demonstrated that small residential sites located on the mesa tops dated to the early Pueblo III period and suggested that their households moved to Sand Canyon Pueblo when its settlement began. Surface rooms at these mesa top sites continued to be used as field houses during the late Pueblo III period. In contrast, occupation at small residential sites in canyon settings dated to the late Pueblo III period and overlapped with the occupation of Sand Canyon Pueblo. Occupation-span estimates from these sites and the probabilistically sampled sites in the DAP were fundamental to building later VEP population estimates (e.g., Schwindt et al. 2016; Varien et al. 2007).

A major contribution of the DAP in the 1980s was to document the rise and subsequent collapse of large, late Pueblo I period villages. In some cases, evidence was found of episodes of violence at or near the end of village occupation (see Kuckelman, chapter 19 in this volume; Orcutt et al. 1990). Crow Canyon’s investigation of the Pueblo III period in the Sand Canyon locality also encountered evidence of violence, most dramatically at Castle Rock Pueblo (Kuckelman et al. 2002). These findings have pushed archaeologists to develop interpretive (Martin 2021) and explanatory (Kohler et al. 2014) accounts of violence in the northern Southwest.

Survey, testing, and excavation by the DAP and then by Crow Canyon in the SCL produced a clearer understanding of settlement pattern changes in the Pueblo I and in the late Pueblo II and III periods. Cycles of settlement aggregation and dispersion were recognized in both areas. In addition to investigating Pueblo III period residential aggregates such as Sand Canyon Pueblo, Crow Canyon archaeologists documented the predominance of dispersed settlement characterized by numerous small homesteads or hamlets in much of the Pueblo II–III period. They recognized that some sites were serving as focal points or “community centers” for such dispersed patterns, as indicated by their larger size (fifty or more total structures, nine or more pit structures, and public buildings such as great kivas or small Chaco-style great houses; see Adler and Hegmon chapter 16, Arakawa et al., chapter 15, Potter et al., chapter 13, Schleher et al., chapter 10, and Glowacki et al., chapter 12 in this volume).

In the 1980s Steve Lekson and some other “big picture” archaeologists argued that even though most of the small sites in an area had never been recorded, and many had been destroyed, most of the “big sites” were still present or had been recorded or described in the literature, or at least remained known locally. Thus, these could be used as indicators of the locations of both dispersed and aggregated communities. In 1990, Crow Canyon hosted a conference titled “Pueblo Cultures in Transition” in which the participants created lists and compiled maps of big sites and used them to synthesize the culture histories of a dozen areas that covered most of the US Southwest from AD 1150 to 1350. In the published conference proceedings (Adler 1996), the chapter on the Mesa Verde region (Varien et al. 1996) was one of the most detailed, thanks in part to the contributions of Crow Canyon archaeologists. (See Glowacki et al., chapter 12 in this volume, for a discussion of Crow Canyon community center research).

Also in 1990, building on her experience in the SCL survey, Van West completed a dissertation at WSU that developed a model of prehistoric agricultural productivity for a large area of southwestern Colorado (published as Van West 1994). Her model, as well as the “big site” database that Crow Canyon archaeologists continued to develop after the “Pueblo Cultures in Transition” conference, were essential starting points for the VEP.

The Village Ecodynamics Project

While Lipe, Varien, Lightfoot, and others were building the program at Crow Canyon through the mid-1980s and 1990s, Kohler was getting to know the archaeology of the northern Rio Grande at Bandelier National Monument. This led to work with researchers at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) on simulating aspects of Pueblo settlement and subsistence using agent-based modeling software then under development at SFI. These models built on Van West’s (1994) estimates for potential maize productivity for every year from AD 900 to AD 1300 for every 4 ha within a 1,816 km2 area in the heart of the central Mesa Verde region.

Van West’s work made it possible to demonstrate that the villages in this area tended to build up during periods, and in places, of high agricultural production, and tended to decline or disperse when production turned unfavorable, as predicted by a model of household economic self-interest (Kohler and Van West 1996). Partly on the strength of these results, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the collaboration between WSU, Crow Canyon, and scientists at Wayne State University and the Colorado School of Mines in 2002 that is called VEP I (for Village Ecodynamics Project, Phase 1).

The VEP had roots in both Crow Canyon research and in earlier DAP work. Both VEP I and the follow-on VEP II drew on Crow Canyon’s in-depth knowledge of its research area and on DAP paleoenvironmental and paleoclimatic research (e.g., Petersen 1982) and simulation approaches (e.g., Orcutt 1987).

After twenty years of research in southwestern Colorado, Crow Canyon had amassed a vast amount of primary information about the human history and the past environment of southwestern Colorado, organized in research databases derived from its surveys, excavations, and problem-oriented studies. In addition to the survey databases developed by the DAP and the early Crow Canyon work, there was also a very large amount of survey data generated as a result of federal agency compliance with the mandates of Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. Development of oil, gas, and carbon dioxide resources in southwestern Colorado, as well as construction of an extensive canal and ditch network to deliver water from McPhee Reservoir to farms in a large portion of southwestern Colorado, all required survey and in some cases excavation.

The VEP would draw extensively from these surveys via the cooperation of the Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation in Denver to provide standardized archaeological data from tens of thousands of site forms from hundreds of individual cultural resource management surveys, ranging from coverage of areas of less than an acre to many hundreds of acres. Scott Ortman and colleagues (2007) developed a method to make systematic use of these data to synthesize a great deal of existing knowledge about the archaeology of the central Mesa Verde region (Varien et al. 2007) (figure 3.1). Under the field direction of Donna Glowacki, the VEP also conducted new mapping and characterization of surface ceramics at several more poorly known community centers (Glowacki et al., chapter 12 in this volume; Glowacki and Ortman 2012).

VEP I studies were focused on paleodemography, on understanding why villages (or community centers) periodically formed and dissolved in this area, and on discovering what we could learn by juxtaposing the behavior of the agent-based model (ABM; Kohler and Varien 2012) with what we knew about the empirical data. The ABM (“Village”) was a unique feature of VEP research and proved useful in several ways. For example, we could make a comparison between the degree of aggregation (population concentration) expected by the model—in which it primarily results from resource concentration and to a smaller extent from exchange among households—and compare that with what we reconstructed empirically for the VEP I area. This comparison revealed that variability in violence (Cole 2012) and number of households through time helped explain the differences between the degree of aggregation in the Village ABM, and that actually seen in the VEP I area (Kohler 2012). The conclusion, at that point, was that villages do form when and where resources are concentrated but dissolve as resources become less concentrated and population decreases; these conditions are accompanied by lower violence.

In 2008 the NSF funded an expansion of the study area to encompass most of the central Mesa Verde region in southwestern Colorado, and another region in the northern Rio Grande, collectively referred to as Village Ecodynamics Project, Phase 2 (VEP II) (figure 3.1). The VEP II retained all the interests and approaches of VEP I but added a larger view of the Southwest and more focus on how social groups (and not just their constituent households) interacted. Products of this more expansive view included a refinement of earlier work on the Neolithic (or Agricultural) Demographic Transition in the US Southwest (Kohler and Reese 2014) and development of a new method for estimating whether any specific portion of the upland Southwest had enough warmth and precipitation to have supported maize dryland farming in any year beginning in AD 1 (Bocinsky and Kohler 2014). Kyle Bocinsky’s new approach allowed estimates of maize paleoproductivity to expand far beyond the area first studied by Van West while retaining the spatial and temporal precision achieved by Van West. The ABM also expanded in several directions under the leadership of Ziad Kobti, a VEP II co-principal investigator at the University of Windsor, for example, by developing methods for modeling social and economic specialization (Cockburn et al. 2013) and for modeling the emergence of corporate groups competing for prime agricultural land, through violence if necessary (Crabtree et al. 2017).

One of the problems tackled in both phases of the VEP was the famous depopulation of the northern Southwest in the late AD 1200s (see also Adler and Hegmon, chapter 16, Bellorado and Windes, chapter 18, Ermigiotti et al., chapter 4, Glowacki et al., chapter 12, and Kuckelman, chapter 19 in this volume). In VEP I, Varien and colleagues (2007) introduced a revised estimate for spatialized maize productivity that lowered Van West’s estimates considerably by introducing several corrections, including disallowing any production above 7,900 ft. and reducing production above 7,054. ft. in years that were colder than average. Even with these revisions, it seemed unlikely that shortfalls in maize were common in the thirteenth century AD, unless conflict dramatically limited access to fields. Most contributors to an Amerind conference volume growing out of a symposium in the 2007 Society for American Archaeology meetings (Kohler et al. 2010) downplayed the importance of deteriorating climates in causing the depopulation. Varien (2010), for example, pointed out that the process of depopulation likely began not long after AD 1225—an interpretation proposed earlier by Andrew Duff and Richard Wilshusen (2000)—and continued until AD 1285, spanning years of both high and low production. Moreover, it seemed a stretch to use cold and drought to explain why locations along the San Juan River (normally both warm and wet) were depopulated simultaneously with the cool highlands of Mesa Verde National Park. Kohler (2010), though, noted that the VEP productivity reconstructions were trained on conditions from 1931 to 1960 and that many years in the thirteenth century AD (as well as some earlier) were colder than any years in the training dataset, raising the possibility that the VEP reconstructions for the thirteenth century were too high (see also Wright 2010).

Pueblo Farming Project

Examining such issues was one goal of the Pueblo Farming Project (PFP). The PFP was codeveloped by Crow Canyon and the Hopi Tribe, and partly supported in its early years by the VEP (see Ermigiotti et al., chapter 4 in this volume). Results from these experimental gardens so far demonstrate that the VEP production estimates are on average similar to those obtained in the experimental fields but that variation in yields due to annual changes in precipitation and temperature resulted in much greater variation in yields in the experimental plots than in the VEP model estimates (Bocinsky and Varien 2017). Ermigiotti and colleagues (chapter 4 in this volume) point out that one of the plots added recently (the Mike Coffey Garden, a plot near Dove Creek, Colorado, that at 7,300 ft. is almost 1,200 ft. higher than the plots on the Crow Canyon campus) has been exceptionally productive, even in very dry years when other PFP plots produced little or failed completely. This result suggests that some production could have been obtained on this landscape even in very dry years, so long as they were not too cold.

At this point it seems reasonable to say that reduced production of maize during portions of the period between AD 600 and 1300 was probably extremely important to social dynamics. Whether complete or near failure of maize production was a key factor in the depopulation of the mid to late AD 1200s, though, is not resolved. Such failure would likely have required conjunctures of cold and dry conditions that at present are very unusual. The eruption of the Samalas Volcano in Java in AD 1257—one of the largest eruptions during the Holocene—likely contributed to cold conditions noted in tree-ring records from the San Francisco Peaks from AD 1258 to 1272 and, perhaps, to the final depopulation of northern Southwest shortly thereafter (Salzer 2000; Windes and Van West 2021).

Although NSF funding terminated in 2014, publications partly funded or inspired by VEP II have continued to appear, making additional contributions to understanding the final depopulation of the northern Southwest (Kohler et al. 2020; Schwindt et al. 2016); making sense of large-scale patterning in tree-cutting for construction in the upland Southwest (Bocinsky et al. 2016); tracing the dynamics of community size and placement on the Mesa Verde cuesta (Reese et al. 2019); and disentangling the overlapping timing of violence, climate variability, and wealth inequality in the northern Southwest (Ellyson et al. 2019; Kohler et al. 2020). In sum, as the second phase of the VEP looked beyond the central Mesa Verde region, it also considered more aspects of the social experience of living in the northern Southwest prior to the arrival of the Spanish than did VEP I, while continuing to seek characterizations of elusive social processes in ways that allow quantification (e.g., Scheffer et al. 2021).

Conclusions

Knowledge making in archaeology is highly cumulative. It is connected to the way archaeologists produce knowledge, which requires “scaffolding” to build elaborate edifices in which (figuratively speaking) support for one part helps support the rest (Chapman and Wylie 2016). Excavation is slow, expensive, and usually unglamorous, but only problem-oriented excavation can provide hard data on chronology, subsistence, and technology that—in conjunction with supports from tree-ring and other forms of dating and other archaeometric inputs—form the foundation for much of what we know in archaeology.

Excavation and survey are not just cumulative but are also necessarily place based. Although we began this chapter with the DAP, it too built on much prior research in the northern Southwest. As we have seen, the DAP jumpstarted Crow Canyon by providing an infusion of personnel, research experience, directions of inquiry, and a wealth of local excavation data. The VEP complemented the empirical work of Crow Canyon by encouraging wider spatial perspectives and more use of computation. These in turn have helped to develop a more comparative perspective on the research that Crow Canyon continues to pursue.

One of the reasons for the success of the VEP is that it was also a Crow Canyon project, energized by additional outside funding and personnel with overlapping, but slightly different, sets of skills and interests. Given archaeology’s fundamental nature as a hybrid discipline, with strong connections to both the natural and social sciences including history (Preston 2013), we should perhaps continue to look for hybrid entities such as the Crow Canyon / VEP combination to generate research advances. Crow Canyon’s new Research Institute seeks to fill this role.

Established in 2014, the Research Institute was modeled, in part, on VEP projects in which Crow Canyon’s researchers team with interdisciplinary networks of scholars—archaeologists, economists, geographers, sociologists, educators, and Indigenous culture specialists, among others—whose collaborative approach to research is especially suited to addressing big questions with large and complex datasets. Projects conducted under the aegis of the Research Institute address a wide variety of interrelated issues relevant not only to archaeologists but also to educators, policy makers, advocacy groups, and Indigenous peoples. These include human-environment relationships, economic systems, social complexity, Indigenous archaeology, and cultural and scientific literacy.

The potential exists for archaeology—long regarded as simply the study of antiquity—to provide fresh perspectives on some of the most intransigent and controversial issues of our time. One way to do this is to consider prehistory and modernity as two portions of a single historical continuum that is considered in such a way as to allow equivalent measurements to be made, and appropriately contextualized, in both arenas. Crow Canyon and VEP alumni have been prominent exponents of such studies (e.g., Kohler and Rockman 2020; Ortman 2019), and examples can be found in applications of settlement scaling theory (Ortman and Lobo 2020), evaluation of wealth inequality through time (Kohler et al. 2017), and demonstrations that the experiment in global climate change on which we have embarked will likely take humanity well outside of the temperature niche to which we have been accustomed for at least 6,000 years (Xu et al. 2020). To us these seem a fitting vindication of Struever’s foundational aspirations for what archaeology can achieve.

Acknowledgments. We thank our many colleagues over the four decades recounted here for their energy, intellectual contributions—far too numerous to mention—and companionship. We are particularly grateful to Richard Wilshusen for the very helpful suggestions on this chapter that only he, as an insider to so many of the events related here, could make.

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