Modeling Crop Failure Potential in Late Pueblo III Mesa Verde Villages

Dry farming was common prehistorically and continues to be important for small-scale farming in many areas of the world today. Archaeologists have tried to understand the factors involved in crop productivity to get at population size and growth, as well as collapse. Water, particularly in arid environments, is the most important limiting factor. Archaeological models have focused on surface water availability and its impact on crop productivity at the scale of watersheds. Based on modern agrohydrological research, we are developing a model that will incorporate subsurface water movement and storage at sub-watershed scales to model crop failure that we will apply in the Mesa Verde region of the Southwest U.S. The three-dimensional approach will allow us to look at long term water availability over a growing season, while focusing on crop failure instead of crop productivity simplifies the model to provide the amount of land that would successfully produce crops.