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Landuse and Landscape Dynamics along the Chevelon Creek Drainage, Arizona
with Michael Barton and Steven Schmich

This project is an examination of the long-term history of land use along the southwestern margin of the Colorado Plateau across the transition from foraging to early agricultural subsistence economies. Data from the Mogollon Rim Small Sites project, the Chevelon Archaeological Research Project, and Apache Sitgreaves National Forest are being used to develop and test alternative models for the changing socioecology of subsistence agriculture, including varying degrees of shifting agriculture, the intensity of anthropogenic landscape modification, and social responses to human and natural environmental change.

Peeples, Matthew A., C. Michael Barton and Steven Schmich
2006 Resilience Lost: Intersecting Landuse and Landscape Dynamics in the Prehistoric Southwestern U.S. Ecology and Society 11(2). [pdf]
 
       
 
 

The Prehistoric Agricultural Landuse Model (PALM)
with Tanjot Bhatia and Robert Cox

The project is an effort to create a simple, expandable, and configurable agent based model of agricultural land use and residential mobility in the Pueblo region of the prehistoric American Southwest. This model is being developed in part based on the Artificial Anasazi model presented by Gumerman, Epstein, Axtell, and others to examine the long-term history of land use and settlement in the Long House Valley of northern Arizona. The approach we have taken in the conceptualization of our model, however, is more general. We have developed a small number of simple variables relating to environmental variability, agricultural technology, and household decision making strategies through which various assumptions can be explored given different physical environments, resource distributions, and disturbance regimes.


Peeples, Matthew, Robert Cox, and Tanjot Bhatia
2006 The Prehistoric Agricultural Landuse Model (PALM): Exploring the links between decision making and change in complex socio-ecological systems. Computer Simulation presented at the Archaeological Sciences of the Americas Symposium, Tucson, Arizona. [link]

  
       
       
 
An Experimental Method for Estimating Jar Volume based on Body Sherds

The functional analysis of ceramic vessel forms is frequently used to assess the range of activities taking place at an archaeological site. One of the major goals of many such studies is to identify modes in the sizes of vessels used for various tasks. This is frequently done by estimating the orifice diameter of bowls and jars using rim diameter charts. For certain vessel forms, however, the volumes of vessels are not strongly correlated with orifice diameter. The purpose of this study is to assess alternative methods of estimating the volume of jars based on body sherds. The volumes of an experimental set of jars were measured and then the jars were broken. Two methods of volume estimation were then attempted; 1) using a curve template and 2) a digital distance indicator. Preliminary results suggest that modal sizes that correlate well with the actual volumes of the experimental vessels could be identified based on body sherds alone. This method is currently being applied to a larger sample of prehistoric vessels from the Zuni region.