Ancestral Desert Puebloans Survived Drought By Melting Ice

[EnolaGaia]

This is the most counter-intuitive archaeological report I can remember. It appears that ancestral Puebloan people in the desert American Southwest obtained water during drought periods by melting ice stored in subterranean lava tubes. Ice!? In the desert!? ... Apparently so ...

Ancient people may have survived desert droughts by melting ice in lava tubes

During a parched summer almost 2,000 years ago, people living in what is now western New Mexico crawled into the cold, dark belly of a volcanically formed cave to melt the frozen water at its heart. The ice preserved in these naturally cool formations might have helped Ancestral Puebloans in the region persevere through five such drought events over the course of 800 years, a new study suggests.

New analysis of charcoal particles from around A.D. 150 provides the earliest dated evidence that Ancestral Puebloans used fire to melt ice trapped deep in lava tubes when liquid water was scarce, researchers reported November 18 in Scientific Reports.The findings are evidence that these ancient people went to remarkable lengths to survive in an often hostile environment. ...

Ancestral Puebloans, forerunners of today’s Pueblo peoples and the builders of Mesa Verde’s famous cliff dwellings, survived in the arid southwestern United States for over 10,000 years. A key to that survival was finding creative ways to extract water from an unforgiving environment. ...

In April 2017, a team led by paleoclimatologist Bogdan Onac of the University of South Florida in Tampa traveled to El Malpais National Monument in New Mexico to collect ice cores from the park’s frigid lava tubes in the hopes of extracting ancient climate data. Lava tubes are an empty space left behind by flowing lava, a relic of the area’s volcanically active past. Far removed from their fiery beginnings, the caves retain a constant temperature around 0° Celsius (32° Fahrenheit) that can preserve accumulating ice — and anything trapped inside the ice — for hundreds of years. ...

Onac and his team initially planned only to extract paleoclimate data from the ice, but they found much more when they reached Cave 29. The interior of the 171-meter-long lava tube was covered with charcoal deposits concentrated around what was once a roughly 1,000-square-meter block of ice.

The team recovered a 59-centimeter-long core sample from what remains of the ice block, and noticed five distinct black bands that broke up its length. The presence of charcoal suggested fire, and the presence of fire deep in an icy cavern suggested human activity. Even more exciting, the charcoal’s position in the ice acted as a time capsule that allowed the researchers to date the periods of human activity. ...

They melted the core down and radiocarbon-dated the charcoal pieces inside. Those dates — ranging from around A.D. 150 to A.D. 950 — corresponded to drought events recorded in tree rings in the surrounding area (SN: 6/1/20). The five charcoal bands’ chronological alignment with drought events suggests that hunters and travelers kept track of accessible water for survival and ceremonial practices over hundreds of years, the researchers say. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-pueblo-people-desert-droughts-melting-ice-lava-tubes

 

[kamalktk]

I've been to Mesa Verde. In case anyone is wondering about ice in the desert, desert doesnt necessarily mean hot, it means dry. Mesa Verde is at an elevation of some 2500 meters or so, there was snow on the ground when I visited....

/ it was definitely worth the visit, beware of altitude sickness though.

 

[Austin Popper]

Mesa Verde is a wonderful place. It's remote, quiet, stunning, and full of abandoned buildings that can be visited on foot. All the way at the end of the road is a set of ruins with some tourist amenities nearby, including a very well done museum. There are lodges there too, with some brilliantly designed cabins that offer privacy and amazing views. It's where I'd want to work if I were a Park Service employee.

The ruins there are not technically pueblos, If memory serves, but the whole Four Corners area is full of fascinating places with similar, though often very distinctive, architecture.

 

[ramonmercado]

More on the adaptability of the Puebloans.

It was the worst time to be alive, according to some scientists.

From 536 C.E. to 541 C.E., a series of volcanic eruptions in North and Central America sent tons of ash into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight, chilling the globe, and destroying crops worldwide. Societies everywhere struggled to survive. But for the Ancestral Pueblo people living in what today is the U.S. Southwest, this climate catastrophe planted the seeds for a more cohesive, technologically sophisticated society, a new study suggests.

“This story makes sense to me,” says Tim Kohler, an archaeologist at Washington State University, Pullman, who has studied climate impacts on the Pueblo people of different eras but was not involved in the new work. He says the disturbance and subsequent reorganization of the Ancestral Puebloans provide clues to what makes societies resilient in the face of dramatic climate change.

At the beginning of the sixth century, some Ancestral Puebloans—ancestors of modern Pueblo people who now live in the U.S. Southwest—grew maize, beans, and squash in small, mobile, kin-based groups across the Colorado Plateau. Other Ancestral Puebloans primarily hunted and foraged for their food, some using the bow and arrow, and others using an ancient spear-throwing technology called an atlatl.

By the turn of the next century, however, the Ancestral Puebloans had had a population boom. They were building large settlements with massive subterranean ceremonial buildings known as great kivas in Chaco Canyon in present-day northwestern New Mexico. The society had adopted large-scale farming, started to raise turkeys en masse, and began to make more durable, high-quality ceramics. Traditionally, researchers have argued this was a slow, gradual transition. But Reuven Sinensky, an anthropology graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, who led the new study, and his colleagues uncovered evidence of a much more rapid shift.

Over the course of his research, Sinensky had worked with contemporary Hopi farmers—descendants of the Ancestral Puebloans—and knew that they still employ a number of sophisticated traditional techniques to mitigate the impacts of bad weather, such as early frosts. His experiences led him to wonder how Ancestral Puebloan people might have handled a sudden, prolonged climate crisis.

In the new study, the team looked at 842 radiocarbon dates for the remnants of food sources such as corn cobs, beans, cactus fruits, tree fruits, and wild grains found at 279 sites across the Colorado Plateau. Some dates were previously published, whereas others were measured for the first time using material excavated by Sinensky. ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-one-society-rebounded-worst-year-be-alive