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In Ancient Piñon-Juniper Woodlands, editor Lisa Floyd gathers together noted scientists and historians to celebrate the varied and unique woodland region surrounding Mesa Verde National Park. One of the most widespread habitat types in the West, piñon-juniper woodlands have faced extensive eradication, grazing pressures, and the encroachment of human developments, and, consequently, only a few mature stands have reached their full growth potential. Mesa Verde Country, with its deep canyons and high ridgetops, is the magnificent home of many of these ancient stands.

Impressively broad in scope, Floyd's volume thoroughly explores Mesa Verde Country's important and historic ecosystem. Covering such diverse topics as geologic evolution, natural history, human history, bats, and fungi, to name but a few, this volume will appeal to scientists, resource managers, conservationists, and the lay reader with an interest in this most western of ecosystems. Technical Editors: David D. Hanna, William H. Romme and Marilyn Colyer

The Mesa Verde migrations in the thirteenth century were an integral part of a transformative period that forever changed the course of Pueblo history. For more than seven hundred years, Pueblo people lived in the Northern San Juan region of the U.S. Southwest. Yet by the end of the 1200s, tens of thousands of Pueblo people had left the region. Understanding how it happened and where they went are enduring questions central to Southwestern archaeology.

Much of the focus on this topic has been directed at understanding the role of climate change, drought, violence, and population pressure. The role of social factors, particularly religious change and sociopolitical organization, are less well understood. Bringing together multiple lines of evidence, including settlement patterns, pottery exchange networks, and changes in ceremonial and civic architecture, this book takes a historical perspective that naturally forefronts the social factors underlying the depopulation of Mesa Verde.

Author Donna M. Glowacki shows how “living and leaving” were experienced across the region and what role differing stressors and enablers had in causing emigration. The author’s analysis explains how different histories and contingencies—which were shaped by deeply rooted eastern and western identities, a broad-reaching Aztec-Chaco ideology, and the McElmo Intensification—converged, prompting everyone to leave the region. This book will be of interest to southwestern specialists and anyone interested in societal collapse, transformation, and resilience.

Originally published in 1988, Mesa Verde National Park: Shadows of the Centuries is an engaging and artfully illustrated history of an enigmatic assemblage of canyons and mesas tucked into the southwestern corner of Colorado. Duane A. Smith recounts the dramatic 1888 "discovery" of the cliff dwellings and other Anasazi ruins and the ensuing twenty-year campaign to preserve them. Smith also details the resulting creation of a national park in 1906 and assesses the impact of more recent developments - railroads and highways, air pollution, and the growing significance of tourism - on the park's financial and ecological vitality. This revised and completely redesigned edition includes more than 50 illustrations and will be enjoyed by readers interested in environmental, Western, and Colorado history.

Research on hunting and gathering peoples has given anthropologists a long-standing conceptual framework of sedentism and mobility based on seasonality and ecological constraints. This work challenges that position by arguing that mobility is a socially negotiated activity and that neither mobility nor sedentism can be understood outside of its social context. Drawing on research in the Mesa Verde region that focuses on communities and households, Mark Varien expands the social, spatial, and temporal scales of archaeological analysis to propose a new model for population movement. Rather than viewing sedentism and mobility as opposing concepts, he demonstrates that they were separate strategies that were simultaneously employed. Households moved relatively frequently--every one or two generations--but communities persisted in the same location for much longer. Varien shows that individuals and households negotiated their movements in a social landscape structured by these permanent communities. Varien's research clearly demonstrates the need to view agriculturalists from a perspective that differs from the hunter-gatherer model. This innovative study shows why current explanations for site abandonment cannot by themselves account for residential mobility and offers valuable insights into the archaeology of small-scale agriculture.